Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:10:23 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[01:10:23] S1: I went to a standup comedy show of Pete Holmes, I don't know if you know him. And he made this joke that we want AI to clean the poop off the street and do all these hard things that nobody wants to do, but instead it's like, "Oh, let me help you write. Let me help you create imagery." It's like this bohemian. It's like, "No, I don't want to do all these ugly things. I want to be creative, make art." [01:10:44] S0: Yeah. Well, I mean, there's variations of all of this. It's like I don't want the AI to do the stuff I do for fun. I want it to do the boring stuff that I don't do for fun. And finding that mesh. I mean, joking apart, this is going to come back to my chatbot point, that the chatbot is a blank screen in a jagged edge. And what am I supposed to do and what will work? And that's a big problem. And the solution to that problem is to wrap it in use cases. Part of it is also like AI just disappears. So most of what I write now I dictate. I dictate as a voicemail, and that's automatically transcribed. Is that still AI or is that just voice recognition? There's probably an LLM in there. Okay. So maybe that's AI. Well, okay. So what? At a certain point, it's just automation. [01:11:29] S1: What do you use for that, for voice transcription? [01:11:31] S0: So, I actually find that Apple Notes, the app or the one built into the iPhone works fine. I mean, I'm conscious of the people want others, but I mean, I dictate it. There it is. It worked. So, I'm happy with that.
01:11:31 · Benedict Evans, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:11:31] S0: So, I actually find that Apple Notes, the app or the one built into the iPhone works fine. I mean, I'm conscious of the people want others, but I mean, I dictate it. There it is. It worked. So, I'm happy with that. [01:11:42] S1: All right. Final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. Is there anything else that you wanted to share? Anything else you want to leave listeners with? [01:11:49] S0: No, I think I've monologued plenty, and I've gone through a bunch of stuff in the deck. Go read the deck, and sign up to my newsletter, and then you will get in many more mags of brilliant Benedict Evans' wisdom, some of which may even be useful. Someone unsubscribed for my newsletter and they said, "You didn't give me any actionable stock ideas." And I'm like, "Well, on one level, that's completely true. On the other level, maybe not." [01:12:17] S1: Well, with that, Benedict, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? [01:12:22] S0: Sure. [01:12:23] S1: First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
01:12:29 · Benedict Evans
[01:12:29] S0: It's a tough one for me, because I just read an enormous amount of books and then I can't remember which ones I've read. I sometimes often joke that there's a classic British comedy from the late 19th century called Three Men in a Boat, which is like my I Ching. We're having trouble hanging a picture. Well, there's a section about that. We're having trouble doing this. Oh, well, there's a story about that, all of which are hilarious. So Three Men in a Boat is my I Ching. There's a book by, I think William Cronon, about the Economic History of Chicago, which is fascinating and actually very relevant to technology, because it's talking basically about standardization and packetization, and logistics, and channel conflict, and network dynamics, and network neutrality. So, when the meat packers of Chicago reach the point that it's cheaper to ship a cow from New York to Chicago, kill it, pack it, and then ship it back to New York than to kill it in New York, and the pricing of refrigerator cars, and it's exactly like reading about broadband. It's all the same kind of... So those kinds of business issues, which is fascinating. What else have I read? I don't know. Read books, read different books, generally read books for grownups. Please read something other than Lord of the Rings, if you're going to name another company. I saw this one and what was the latest Peter Thiel company. I was like, "Read another book." Everything is named after a character from this one book. There's more than one book in the world. There is more than one book than all about science fiction. Read about different things, read about things you don't know about.
01:13:53 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[01:13:53] S1: Kind of along those lines, you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? [01:13:57] S0: I don't know. I've dropped so badly off the current media treadmill, and I just spend most of my time watching classics, which are always the ones that you're supposed to have seen and that all seem intimidating. And then you watch them and you're like, "Oh, that was actually really good." I watched The Seventh Seal recently, which is one of those Woody Allen, terrifying boring movies, and it was brilliant. It was really interesting, and it's like it's only like an hour. So, go watch one of those movies that you are supposed to have seen, or hadn't seen. [01:14:26] S1: Favorite recent product that you recently discovered that I really love. Could be a gadget, could be an app. [01:14:33] S0: I was speaking at a partner meeting for a company earlier this week. Monday, no, last week, and met the founder of the company who has a very famous... The CEO of the company has a famous name and admired his shoes, and didn't say anything, but then went in Google half an hour later. "Yeah, okay, I'll buy a pair of this." [01:14:51] S1: Do you want to share the brand or you want to keep it secret? Okay, we'll keep it secret.
01:14:51 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[01:14:51] S1: Do you want to share the brand or you want to keep it secret? Okay, we'll keep it secret. [01:14:56] S0: I don't know. I think one comes in waves of new products, and you get into waves of new things. And when's the last time there was a cool app, iPhone apps, all that white space went. I mean, it's partly a function of product ships, a platform chips. All the white space went for cool new apps, and now we haven't quite got... Actually, this is to the earlier point, we don't have breakout a consumer AI apps yet, but I think because of marginal cost more than anything else, you can't make it free and get 50 million users and then have a revenue bottle. But we don't have those breakout things yet. [01:15:29] S1: For consumer. [01:15:30] S0: For consumer, no. I keep getting these ads for voice recorders. Somebody's selling a business card size hardware voice recorder. But I didn't get it. I've got the voice recorder on my phone. [01:15:43] S1: Yeah. All kinds of cool stuff coming. Okay. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to often in work or in life? [01:15:51] S0: I suppose both mentioned earlier, apparently, I mostly say it depends. [01:15:57] S1: That's going to be the title. [01:16:00] S0: It'll probably be okay. [01:16:01] S1: Yeah. Okay. That's the vibe I get. I like that. I like that. It's probably going to be okay. Not for sure. Okay. Final question. I saw someone that you'll own a lot of old phones. Is that true?
01:16:01 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[01:16:01] S1: Yeah. Okay. That's the vibe I get. I like that. I like that. It's probably going to be okay. Not for sure. Okay. Final question. I saw someone that you'll own a lot of old phones. Is that true? [01:16:13] S0: It is, yes. I mean, I was a telecoms analyst and mobile analyst and I kept all my phones up to a point. Now they're kind of uninteresting. But as you may remember, before the iPhone, particularly outside the USA, there was this huge creativity and expansion in what phones looked like, because everyone was basically innovating around a little teeny, tiny gray square. So everyone was trying to differentiate from everything else, before it kind of resulted. It's kind of like cars, actually. It's like cars before street, before wind tunnels, cars all look different. And everyone's trying to innovate around, because you've got the same four wheels, and the same engine, and everyone's trying to differentiate based on the shape. And then everything converges on one shape, and it's kind of the same with phones. Everything converged on one shape. Before that, there was all this innovation. So yeah, I have a whole bunch of PDAs, and smartphones, and things like that. [01:16:59] S1: How many phones are we talking about? [01:17:02] S0: I don't know, like 20 or 30. [01:17:03] S1: Okay. Okay. It's not so crazy. What's the oldest one? What's the oldest one you got?