Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:56:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[00:56:29] S1: And tournament the video. [00:56:30] S0: Exactly. Even more. Yeah, even more. And now they can. So, that is different. It's kind of like the challenge of social. The thing people would say in the '90s is it's great. You can read the only gay kid in your village, and you can find other gay people, and you can find your tribe. And guess what? It turned out you could also be the only Nazi in your village, or the only pedophile in your village, or somebody wanted to look at child porn. Yeah, now you can find the other people who like looking at child porn and they'll tell you it's great. So oops, we connected everybody. And unfortunately, that meant we connected all the bad people, and all of our own worst instincts, and every problem in society. And so that will happen again with AI. Deep fake news are like the obvious thing we can see now. There will be a whole bunch more of this stuff. But there's also, and something a kind of technical audience should know about, do you know about the post office scandal in the UK? [00:57:17] S1: Nope.
00:57:17 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[00:57:17] S1: Nope. [00:57:17] S0: Okay. So sidebar here. So in the UK, post offices are mostly franchises run by small business people. So they're run by pharmacies classically, very often Indian, Indian immigrants, second generation Indian people. And the post office 15 years ago rolled out a new point to sell computer system. So they have a separate counter in the back that's a post office. And so the post office rolled out this new computer system built by them by Fujitsu that had a bunch of bugs in it that showed shortfalls in cash. And the post office looks at this and says, "Aha, we knew these people were stealing from us." Hundreds of people get prison, bunch of suicides, bunch of bankruptcies, people lose their homes. Meanwhile, people from the post office and people from Fujitsu are going to court and swearing there's no bugs in the system and nobody else has had this problem. This is 1970s technology. That's really the point, that every wave of technology comes with ways that you can ruin people's lives either deliberately or by accident. The whole thing of Chinese mass surveillance is deliberate. Maybe people should go to prison, maybe not, but we have this with every technology. We have a bunch of ways that you can ruin people's lives, and you have to be conscious of that and also kind of not panic about it. [00:58:28] S1: So maybe following that the right and coming back to the kids thing and the jobs thing, is there a job you are steering your kid away from? And is there a job you kind of think you want to steer them towards?
00:58:28 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[00:58:28] S1: So maybe following that the right and coming back to the kids thing and the jobs thing, is there a job you are steering your kid away from? And is there a job you kind of think you want to steer them towards? [00:58:39] S0: I don't know about that. It's probably a little bit early yet. He's not quite at the like, "I want to be a fireman stage," but... [00:58:47] S1: That might be a great job. [00:58:49] S0: Yeah. And certainly if I look at my career, I started as an equity analyst, and then I went and worked in an industry, and then I was a consultant. The days when you kind of knew what your career was going to be over, there were sickly some people were like, you want to be an architect, you want to be a software engineer, you want to be X or Y. I don't know. I think the only kind of thinking I have here is that you slowly work out, there's a bunch of skills that you have, and there's a bunch of jobs that makes you good at, and then there's a bunch of stuff that people will pay you for. And you want to get at least two of those, and preferably all three. [00:59:22] S1: Okay. So zooming out a little bit, let me ask you a Meta question. What's a question about AI that you think nobody's asking yet, or not enough people are asking that we should be asking ourselves?
00:59:34 · Benedict Evans
[00:59:34] S0: Sure. I mean, we talked about value capture. Obviously this is a whole, everyone is asking like, I'm not sure how many people are asking whether model labs have pricing power. I think a lot of people are just presuming that the situation today will continue, or that of course they will. So I think that's maybe a question that not enough people ask. I think the question I pose towards the end of my presentation, which we talked about earlier, is like, what's the task and what's job? Or what is just the thing that becomes a button or make SKU versus what are people actually hiring you for? Is that kind of a useful way of thinking about this? And clearly there are going to be some jobs where no, that is just a task, and that job gets automated away. But there's a bunch where that kind of isn't the question. The way I actually pulled that together at the end of the deck was a chart of a global recorded music revenue, which as you may know is kind of a U-shaped curve more or less. And so it's dropped by about half from 2000 to 2015 or so, and since then has come back to about 75% of the peak, adjusted for inflation. And the way that I look at this is to say, and that's driven by streaming. And I kind of looked at this and said, well, the first half of this chart is saying, what happens if I don't have to pay $15 to get a CD to get that track? And the second half of the chart is saying, what happens if $15 a month gets you all the music that there is? So it's kind of a completely different sort of question. And that's a way that you could look at Google, or the way you could look at Airbnb or all these kinds of companies. Is it to begin with you do the old thing but more whether you need technology, you do the old thing, but more of it on the new place. So you put Flickable mobile, you print out Googles, and then you make new things that are only possible with a new thing. And then maybe you go a bit further and you kind of completely redefine the question and you make something that isn't that at all. Spotify is not an online music store. It's something else. And right now, those questions, you only even know what the question is after it's been asked and you've built a billion dollar thing that lots of people use because obviously Spotify look crazy, and people look crazy, and Airbnb look crazy.