Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:47:33 · Benedict Evans, Lenny Rachitsky
And Google has this wonderful marketing slogan coming soon to our most powerful devices, meaning it will work on those Androids. So again, distribution questions. [00:47:42] S1: Interesting. Google I/O next week, so we'll see what they launched. [00:47:45] S0: Oh no, they launched the Android and it just shows how modules it- [00:47:50] S1: As it today? [00:47:51] S0: Well, no, they launched it last week, which it just illustrates how much we start paying attention to Android and iPhone. Google did had a whole big thing last week. They're replacing Chromebooks with Google Books, and they've got a new Android intelligence powered by Gemini that will roll out to the five people who bought a Pixel phone. You don't work for Google. [00:48:11] S1: Yeah. I want to go in a slightly different direction. Something that I'm curious if you're following is just the anti-AI sentiment that feels like is growing. It feels like if you've seen these surveys, AI is less popular than ICE, people are trying to stop data centers from being built. I think Eric Schmidt just did a commencement speech and people were booing him every time he mentioned AI. Just like, "What do you think is going on? Where do you think this goes over time?"
00:48:38 · Benedict Evans
[00:48:38] S0: It's interesting. And it's a big sort of fuzzy mass of different stuff, I think. There is tangible, like my electricity bill went up, which applies actually in a very small number of places, objectively, but it did, and this is a question. The water thing is weird because it's just completely fake. And I should explain what I mean here. Data centers use water for cooling. It's mostly closed loop, but the number of data centers relative to the total amount of water use in the USA is tiny. I actually went and dug into this that the Livermore lab did a study at the end of 2024 where they estimated US data center water consumption. And it came out at about 0.017% of US water consumption. Now, obviously if you live in a small town and you've got one well and they capped the well and gave all the water to the data center, then you're really pissed off. But that's a planning problem. That's not a data center problem. In generality, yes, this is data centers of what, like 5% of US energy, and might grow at 1% a year for the next five years, one percentage point a year, but the water stuff is just nonsense. And then you get into more tangible like, well, what is happening with this? Is it taking jobs away? Where you can watch a bunch of three-hour podcasts of economists talking to each other and the main answer is we really don't know yet. There's a bunch of charts that kind of say yes and a bunch of charts that kind of say no. And clearly there's a slowdown in employment of 18 to 24 year olds, but that seems to be the same for people who do and don't have degrees, and the same for people in fields that look exposed to AI and feels that they look exposed to AI. So there's a lot of econometric argument about this. And I mean, there's a broader point here, in fact, which is a different point here, that we have very little data on what's going on in AI, from anyone. The model labs don't tell us anything. They don't give us any meaningful usage information. They give us these weird studies of people, how many people use this for this and that. They don't give us a daily active use number. We do not have a daily active user number for us for ChatGPT. It's crazy. And all the data comes from academic economists trying to back stuff out of BLS surveys.
00:50:46 · Benedict Evans
Or consultancies and marketing agencies like spending a whole bunch of money to survey 20,000 people and saying, "What are you doing with this stuff?" We don't have good data on what's going on and how many people are really using this, but to the employment question, hence there's a lot of people looking through all the stuff that the US census collects and trying to work out, "Well, where can we see this? Can we see productivity? What could we see?" And the answer right now I think is there's no clear consensus that we're seeing an impact on jobs, but of course, politically that doesn't matter. If you're a student and you can't get a job, and that clearly is an issue, whether it's because of AI or whether it's because of Trump and tariffs is a different question. Then you get niche things like people who draw book covers for young adult romance novels are very upset that now you can get a picture of a naked woman on back of a dragon flying through a volcano without paying them. I'm sorry, I'm being deliberately unkind, but there's a little... And particularly novelists, people who write eBooks, there's a huge culture war over whether it's okay to use AI. There's this whole sort of AI slop question, and obviously you show the number that like 30, 40% of your podcasts are generated by AI. There's a big fuzzy massive questions. Some of this, I think it's a little bit like the backlash we had around social, but much more compressed. And like social, some of the backlash around social was true, and some of it was sort of true, and some of it wasn't. Always like exemplified in the whole Facebook sells your data thing, which is just, A, not true, and B, the people who believe it are absolutely adamant that of course it's true, and you're obviously a lunatic for suggesting otherwise. It's like the line from Jonathan Swift that you can't reason somebody out of an idea that went reasonably to. So you get this kind of wide, it was a long answer question, but you've got this wide spread of ideas just as you kind of did with social. There's like 20 different things, some of which are really real, and some of which are really not real. And a lot of which are kind of a fuzzy mess in the middle. All of which means that meanwhile, you've got Trump saying he wants a new executive order on dangerous models, which I actually don't think is the thing that drives the backlash.
00:53:02 · Benedict Evans, Lenny Rachitsky
The worrying about myth or cyber, I don't feel like that's a main street America conversation, but that's the thing that got Trump interested in this stuff again. [00:53:12] S1: Let me go kind of in a tangential direction. Something that I like to ask folks that have kids that come on the podcast, especially people that are thinking so deeply about where things are going, knowing what you know about just where the world is heading, what AI is going to do to the future, how are you changing the way you raise your kids? Just what are you teaching them differently potentially that might help them in the future?
00:53:33 · Benedict Evans, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:53:33] S0: I don't know. I think there's a curve here in that if you've got kids who are going onto the job market in the next year or two, then everything is up in the air and no one knows how this is going to work. If you've got kids who are going onto the job market in like five years, then who knows? But staff will have settled down a lot by then in probably unpredictable ways. So, I could be a lot more worried if I had a 21-year-old. I don't, I've got a kid in his sort of early teens. Those questions vary. Then you've got a lot of the questions that were the same before ChatGPT around the collapse of gatekeepers, "Should you really believe what that influence on TikTok says?" "And where exactly you're getting your understanding of what's going on in Israel?" And all of those kinds of social media, internety, media consumption kinds of questions. I don't know. There are people who are super, super intentional about every minute of their child's life. I'm not. I kind of recall the George Carlin line that anyone who drives faster than you is a maniac and anyone who drives slower is an idiot, and that certainly applies to parenting. And everybody thinks they're somewhere in the middle, but I don't have a deeply systematic and widespread and coherent plan for, "This is what my child is going to be doing in three, six, 12, 18 months time." I'd settle for him not breaking his Chromebook again. [00:55:09] S1: I like that you're just general vibe is, "It's going to be okay, guys. It's going to be okay."
00:55:09 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[00:55:09] S1: I like that you're just general vibe is, "It's going to be okay, guys. It's going to be okay." [00:55:15] S0: Yeah. I don't know, maybe this is because I'm British and we haven't had political violence in 500 years, and I think maybe if I came from Iran, I'd have a different attitude to being calm about the future. I think there's a layer of like, yes, this will change a bunch of stuff and we'll need to worry about it, but that's kind of a constant, we've always had that. I remember in the whole wave of panic around social media, I dug up, so were a whole bunch of books in the late '70s about databases. There was a whole panic about databases. And again, half of it was true. If everybody's police records, and if all police records and all government records are online, then that's different. If you think about, for example, the deep fake needs issue, for example, there's like a dumb reaction to this, which is to say, "Haven't you heard of Photoshop?" Which is true, but a 15-year-old kid couldn't use Photoshop to make hardcore pornographic news of every girl in their high school and send them to the whole school in one afternoon. [00:56:29] S1: And tournament the video.