Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:08:43 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:08:43] S1: It feels like there's a lot we can learn from Pixar and animation studios that have thought about this a long time. [01:08:49] S0: Yeah. I actually think Pixar, Disney are probably the world's best at doing this type of design work even though they haven't done as much in physical in volume. If you look at what they do and how they show emotion, intent, approachability, engagement with their characters, they're really world-class. [01:09:16] S1: I don't know about you, but I'm so excited to have a robot at home doing things. These videos that they're starting to put out where they're doing your... They can do dishes, at least the prototypes, they can fold laundry, they can do... It's like, yes, please come do this for me. How do you feel about robots in your house? [01:09:32] S0: So I'm into it. My partner, not so much. So I'm very lucky to have a partner who's got a high bar, which means was like never going to take Waymo, took one Waymo, and now, never wants to take anything else. So definitely willing to update her position, but it has to be pretty good. So she's in love with the Matic. It's amazing, but the bar is pretty high. So I think in order to have a home robot, it's going to have to be pretty incredible for her to be willing to have it in our home. But I take that as a challenge.
01:09:32 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:09:32] S0: So I'm into it. My partner, not so much. So I'm very lucky to have a partner who's got a high bar, which means was like never going to take Waymo, took one Waymo, and now, never wants to take anything else. So definitely willing to update her position, but it has to be pretty good. So she's in love with the Matic. It's amazing, but the bar is pretty high. So I think in order to have a home robot, it's going to have to be pretty incredible for her to be willing to have it in our home. But I take that as a challenge. [01:10:04] S1: My wife is exactly the same way. She's like, "I don't want this thing in our house with Matic. Oh, wow, this is so cute." A recent example, a self-driving Tesla. She used to be so like, "No, don't do that." It was not that great originally, and now, she's like, "I don't want to drive any other car. This just feels like absurd to drive your car. I don't want to do that anymore." It's crazy how quickly that changes.
01:10:04 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:10:04] S1: My wife is exactly the same way. She's like, "I don't want this thing in our house with Matic. Oh, wow, this is so cute." A recent example, a self-driving Tesla. She used to be so like, "No, don't do that." It was not that great originally, and now, she's like, "I don't want to drive any other car. This just feels like absurd to drive your car. I don't want to do that anymore." It's crazy how quickly that changes. [01:10:27] S0: So there's a big difference in my mind. This is a big categorical difference. There's a big difference between a car that is safer that drives itself versus a car that a human drives because you have an existence proof of the human driving car and you have the data. When you talk about homes, what is the delta? You have now a thing that you didn't have before doing things. So if it's bad at it, what are you relating it to? And if it's unsafe in any way, what are you relating that to? It's a much harder equation in my mind to get to a lot of people than a car where you can say, "Hey, Waymo save lives." You're going to have a fraction of the deaths using a Waymo, whether you're a passenger or you're not. When you already see people in San Francisco adapting how they respond around a Waymo versus any other car, so you're seeing behavioral changes that are based on trust, which is really cool. When you're talking about a new product that hasn't existed yet and is not essentially replacing something, that's a harder sell and you have to have a different story.
01:10:27 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:10:27] S0: So there's a big difference in my mind. This is a big categorical difference. There's a big difference between a car that is safer that drives itself versus a car that a human drives because you have an existence proof of the human driving car and you have the data. When you talk about homes, what is the delta? You have now a thing that you didn't have before doing things. So if it's bad at it, what are you relating it to? And if it's unsafe in any way, what are you relating that to? It's a much harder equation in my mind to get to a lot of people than a car where you can say, "Hey, Waymo save lives." You're going to have a fraction of the deaths using a Waymo, whether you're a passenger or you're not. When you already see people in San Francisco adapting how they respond around a Waymo versus any other car, so you're seeing behavioral changes that are based on trust, which is really cool. When you're talking about a new product that hasn't existed yet and is not essentially replacing something, that's a harder sell and you have to have a different story. [01:11:26] S1: Something that someone needs to figure out with the Tesla self-driving is often, you're at a stop and you make eye contact and then, "Go ahead. Go ahead," or someone's about to cross and you're like, "Okay, go ahead." But the Tesla just does its own thing, and so it makes you look like an asshole a bunch of times like, "Oh, I'm not driving this and in control."
01:11:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:11:26] S1: Something that someone needs to figure out with the Tesla self-driving is often, you're at a stop and you make eye contact and then, "Go ahead. Go ahead," or someone's about to cross and you're like, "Okay, go ahead." But the Tesla just does its own thing, and so it makes you look like an asshole a bunch of times like, "Oh, I'm not driving this and in control." [01:11:45] S0: Yeah. I had that happen once. You almost want a little two arms in the front to be gesturing or you go or something. It's amazing how much we actually rely on this human connection to decide even who's going to go in an intersection. [01:11:59] S1: Yeah. Okay. So zooming out a little bit, just what's cool about people like you is you're thinking and building things that will exist in the future. You're kind of living in the future and designing it, and you are one of the few people who has a glimpse into where things are going. So I'm curious just to ask, say in five years, what is the vision you have of what is different about our day-to-day robots, devices? Just what does it look like just roughly?
01:12:27 · Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:12:27] S0: So in this job, we have this wild thing where we have to try to live in the future, and we have to try to live in the future far enough away that we can design something not only for two years from now or three years from now, but also something that will ladder up to what we want six years from now because in my field, it's a lot easier to make something and iterate on it and iterate towards a final goal than to do a one-shot thing perfectly. So not only do you have to have a sense of what the first thing needs to be like and look like, you have to have a sense of what the third thing ideally or the platonic ideal of the thing will eventually look like. So you do have to think about the future and live in the future. I have this weird thing where I love to think about the future, but I'm also a skeptic, and you really want me to be a skeptic because if I think everything's going to be fine, the hardware's not going to work. You really want me to be like, "This isn't going to work and this isn't going to work and this isn't going to work," and just be worried about all these things going wrong. So this is kind of an interesting disagreement inside of me of what I want the future to look like and what I think it's going to look like and what it's actually going to look like. I'm trying to guess. And so, it seems pretty clear to me that AI is going to have a foundational change in how we work and what we do over the next couple of years, especially. You're already seeing it. Obviously, anybody who codes is not coding by hand very much anymore. Any knowledge work, this is going to hit next, I think, and progressively affect our economy and our work, but it seems like the physical world is less likely to change as quickly outside of drones, self-driving cars. You're going to see more and more robots, but I'm not somebody who thinks that in five years, you're going to have 20 million robots. I don't think that it's going to be that fast. I think we have a lot of really deep work on supply chain when you do supply chain reliability, raw material access, and then we need to figure out how to make factories again in this country for high tech. So that's a lot of work, but in the interim, you're going to start seeing a lot of weird things on the street. You might see robots on the street. Have you seen any delivery robots in your world, Lenny, before?