Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:19:35 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dan Shipper
[01:19:35] S0: That is one of the most amazing things about AI right now is no matter how much money you have or a little money you have, you have access to the most advanced AI model. It's not free, so you need some money and you can get it immediately when it comes out. Maybe the only people that have an advantage are the people working at OpenAI or Anthropic, but otherwise it's just available. [01:19:59] S1: I know. I was at their event with you, their Code with Claude event with you last week or a couple weeks ago and they're all using mythos and I'm like, "God, damn it." It's so annoying, but I think that's totally true. If IBM had invented AI, you can bet it would not be like this, and it would be a bajillion dollars and only the top companies could use it and they would be using it in the weirdest, most uninteresting ways. It's really important that AI was built in America and in the Silicon Valley culture that's like, "We want to make intelligence too cheap to meter." That's not the default stance. And it means that everyone has this broadly accessible tool that they can use and I think that's amazing. [01:20:51] S0: That's such a good point. And interestingly, it's also created the most fastest growing companies in history, the biggest companies in history. [01:20:57] S1: That's true. Those Silicon Valley guys, they're smart.
01:20:57 · Dan Shipper, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:20:57] S1: That's true. Those Silicon Valley guys, they're smart. [01:21:02] S0: If I zoom out on the conversation, it's really interesting. There's kind of these two sides to the coin. One is not a lot is actually, so much is not changing. SaaS continues, jobs not disappearing. We're still emailing each other. We're still working on Slack. A lot of the work not changed. On the other hand, every role transformed, engineers don't write code, PMs don't write PRDs, design and design. It's so interesting how much has changed, how much has not changed. I don't know. It's interesting that people think it's going to be this whole new world, but in many ways it's, okay, it'll continue the way it is with a lot of stuff around the edges.
01:21:38 · Dan Shipper
[01:21:38] S1: That's how I feel. I'm simultaneously so excited and it feels like everything has changed, and I'm so bullish on it and the progress that we're making, all that kind of stuff. And, yeah, I feel like there are these things where they're going to be pretty similar to how they are and that's probably good. And I think generally our intuitions about the future, the model that I have of what our intuitions are about the future is the intuitions that people had in the Middle Ages about what happened at the end of the horizon. It's like, are there dragons? Does it drop off into nothingness or whatever? A lot of people have a lot of deep intuition that there's something terrible going to happen over the horizon and also that some people are like, "There's something incredible. It's going to change everything. We're all going to be happy. It's a utopia." And what happens is you get there and you're like, there's some really cool things, there's some not cool things and it's just another horizon. And I think that's the way to think about the future. And until you get to that place where you're starting to see it, and I think we get to see it because we get to see it internally all the time. It's important not to let your mind get away from you and being like, "This is going to happen and this is going to happen and whatever." Because you're going to tell a story that sounds so real in the moment, but later on you're like, "Actually it's much more complex than that." And somewhere it's sort of a both, everything's changed and nothing has. And once you get there, I think you're sort of starting to see like, "Oh, yeah, this is a real thing."
01:23:11 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dan Shipper
[01:23:11] S0: Part of it is the AI companies are very good at scaring us about what might happen in the future. And I think that's actually shifting. I think they've realized maybe we should not freak everybody out about the dangers. [01:23:21] S1: That PR strategy just does not make any sense to me. I do think that it's genuine, but it's so ineffective, and I think it's also wrong. [01:23:32] S0: How about we end with maybe just a few things listeners should do to be successful over the next year with the way the world is moving. [01:23:42] S1: Ride the models. I would try all of your workflows in Codex or Cowork and see how that works. And if your company doesn't let you do it on your own time, I would try out some of these agent products like OpenClaw or Hermes or for less technical people, there's like Victor, we have OnePlus ones. I would get comfortable with both of those ways of working and try to have fun. I think there's too much of I'm doing this because I have FOMO, I might lose my job or I might miss out on this big thing or whatever. And the best way to actually figure out interesting, useful things to do with AI is to do something enjoyable. [01:24:32] S0: Nikhil Singal was on the podcast and the way he described it is you got to find your moment of joy with AI once you find like, "Wow, I can't believe AI did this for me. This is awesome. We're going to keep building stuff." [01:24:42] S1: Yeah, I agree.
01:24:42 · Dan Shipper, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:24:42] S1: Yeah, I agree. [01:24:43] S0: So if you haven't seen that yet, then it's just like, try, fine, try solving it. The thing I hear a lot is just find a problem in your life or work and see if AI can do it. Go to Lovable, go to apply code, go to Replit, just try to build the thing and often it's like, holy shit, this is so cool." Dan, is there anything else that we haven't covered? We've gone deep on so much. Is there anything else you wanted to share? Anything else you want to predict or just say before we get to a very exciting lightning round? [01:25:09] S1: I think we covered it. We did a lot. This is awesome, and I'm very excited to see how well or poorly I do in a year, and I hope that you hold me to it. [01:25:19] S0: We're going to have AI score us. How about that? [01:25:21] S1: Great. [01:25:22] S0: Look at the world like a dance prediction. See where it goes. Well, with that, Dan Shipper, we've reached a very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? [01:25:30] S1: I'm ready. [01:25:31] S0: What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
01:25:36 · Dan Shipper
[01:25:36] S1: Obviously Annie Dillard. Everyone at every has to read The Writing Life. When you join, you get a copy and you have to read it. You only have to read the last chapter though. I think the last chapter is incredible, and it is at the intersection of writing and technology and the future and its relationship to the future and to time. It's everything about every wrapped up into a very tight chapter. It's so good. And I think Annie Dillard just generally is fantastic. What else do I recommend? I'll just tell you a couple things that I've read that I've really liked recently, and whenever I like something, I always just tell everyone about it. So I have recommended these a lot. I've been reading... One of the things I learned, which I didn't know is Churchill is a really good writer and he has a whole history of World War II that he wrote and it's like a combination history and memoir. And I think that's so cool because he was there, he did it. And there's something about what we do at everywhere. I feel some sort of kinship with that of like we're building stuff, we're writing stuff and it's very rare to find people that also do that. And so Churchill History of World War II is fantastic. I just finished the first volume. I'm on the second volume. The Nazis just invaded France. It's very captivating stuff. So that's one. I've been on a little bit of a quantum physics kick recently. AI is actually very good for quantum physics if you get into it. And there's this book called The Rigor of Angels that I just finished, which is, it's a history of ideas that relates Heisenberg, who has his uncertainty principle. Borges, who's an Argentinian fiction writer, wrote a bunch of great short stories. They're actually starting to get a lot of play now because they're very AI related. And Cantor and very cool, super mind-blowing. Lots of interesting overlaps with AI stuff and, yeah, highly recommend.