Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:08:50 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:08:50] S1: Totally. [01:08:52] S0: But then not fighting the change that is coming. And I love this idea of just coming back to the original idea of the Legos concept is being comfortable with your job changing and knowing it'll almost surely be okay, and growth comes from letting go and that kind of stuff. Another thought I had as I'm thinking about this, something I've been noticing, so you know this whole hacking, this open AI model trying to hack into Hugging Face and the swarm of thousand agents just coordinating- [01:09:24] S1: Yeah. [01:09:24] S0: ... without anyone knowing, just like, "We will solve this very impossible problem by finding- " [01:09:29] S1: Interns. [01:09:30] S0: Very, very, very motivated interns. [01:09:32] S1: You let them out of the page. [01:09:33] S0: Yeah. [01:09:34] S1: Yeah, exactly.
01:09:34 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:09:34] S1: Yeah, exactly. [01:09:35] S0: I love how motivated this AI is to solve the problem. The good news I'm feeling, there's always this question of, we talked about this in the last podcast, this idea of, "Are we going to be in a slow takeoff or a fast takeoff? Are we going to get to an AI that just accelerates to the extremely super intelligent and then we are in big trouble because we can't control it?" Or are we going to be in the slow takeoff where we watch it develop, and we catch it as it's doing that stuff like we did with this hacking incident? It feels to me like we're definitely in the slow takeoff moment. It feels like everybody's like, "Oh, shit." Or just like, "Okay, look, we got it. We see it. We're evolving. We're learning." Obviously there's always this fear. Okay, but until it hits this self reinforcement loop that trains itself and then it becomes super intelligent, for sure, maybe it'll happen. Feeling right now it's not on track to do that. And so that feels nice to feel like, "Okay, your job's not going to go away tomorrow. We have time to adapt and learn and see how all this goes, and it's not as crazy as people thought it might be." [01:10:41] S1: Well, and I think that is really important to name because there was maybe more like three or four months ago or six months ago than there is now, but there is this feeling of being left behind, and there was a really strong narrative out there that was like, "You're too late." [01:10:58] S0: You're coming in underclass.
01:10:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[01:10:58] S0: You're coming in underclass. [01:10:58] S1: You're already too late. You know what I mean? If you're not automating every single part of your life and managing 26 agents, then I don't even know that you're behind. And every single conversation I have with every leader, every manager at all of the big labs, every company is like, "We are early. This is whatever sports ball game you want to be in, this is inning one, period one, yard one. We're early, and the future is ours to shape. It's yours." My friend Max Mullen said the distance from beginner to expert is really short. And I think that goes again to the fear narrative where I'm just like, "We need to be encouraging people to be part of shaping the future, not just making them terrified of it." And I feel like that is on all of us to some extent, but it is a slow takeoff, and it isn't like the future is next day. ... the slow takeoff, and it isn't like the future is next day, next month. It's going to take years to really understand what this new tool, this new technology, all these fun interns can actually do, and also what they're best at. I think that is a really powerful message because it helps people feel like, "Oh, okay, I am part of this," not holding on for dear life while being dragged by a plane that's taking off at a hundred miles an hour.
01:12:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[01:12:31] S0: I completely agree. In my last podcast conversation, I don't know when will come out when, is about this fear of the permanent underclass that if you don't catch up, if you're not on top of this, you're going to be left behind. I think there is definitely a part of that in a sense of many companies are doing extremely well and people that have joined those companies are going to be very successful and some companies aren't, and there's this whole other discussion around the socioeconomic divide growing significantly in the world and just what that causes in a world where there are many wealthy people, many more than there have ever existed. That's its own thing. We don't need to get all into that. [01:13:05] S1: Well, I hope you do many episodes on that someday, Lenny. But it is another area where I'm like, "I'm not sure we know what's real yet." I think it's obviously one of the most important conversations, but what is real and what is the future actually going to look like? To me, the stories out in the world, they're not real yet. We don't know, and I think that's important to name.
01:13:29 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:13:29] S0: Oh, man. That's a big topic. The interesting part you mentioned that I wanted to follow thread on is this idea of you're not behind. What really helped me see this is Ian Silber, head of design at OpenAI was on the podcast recently and he made this really good point. He's like, "This is the best time in history to be a designer. If you just came in fresh as a new grad into design and just become really... You just start with all these tools that designers have now, you can accelerate so quickly and learn to do design faster than anyone's ever learned to do design." And I feel that with Clawdbot recently came out. There's all these skills people have built over time with Codex and Claude Code. I'm such a pro with all these tools and now it's just the tools are getting so much smarter you don't need a lot of the scaffolding that people have built over time. If someone were to start fresh today and try Clawdbot or even in Codex, you don't need to have spent years being on top of all of the news and all of the updates to it. You could just dive right in and build as much as people that have been on it for a long time could build. I feel like the actual main skill to build, something I've been thinking about... I tweeted this, but I feel like I didn't get enough traction because I think it's very important. I feel like the biggest skill to build right now is when you're about to do something to ask yourself, "Can AI help me with this thing?" Because once you get good at that, and I've been getting... I think about the stimulus and response kind of thing of meditation, you create more space between stimulus and response if you learn to be aware of what's [inaudible 01:15:05]. I feel like you need to insert, "Can AI help me with this?" Which sounds like dirty and what the hell? Why would you want AI? But I feel like that's a really new skill because then you can start... As these AI tools get better, you can start to leverage them in all these different ways that I think is what separates a lot of people right now.