Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:32:42 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:32:42] S1: First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? [01:32:46] S0: I've been mostly reading the classics lately. Book of the New Sun is a great fiction book, which I really recommend. I think that's what it's called. I haven't read it in a little while. I love Mrs. Dalloway. Actually, I think it's a very interesting book about transitions, and it was a post-war book by Virginia Woolf. So I really love it and I think it's really wonderful. I think Herodotus Histories is pretty incredible. He's wrong a lot, but he's also, it's the first history book and in many cases he's going and finding firsthand or secondhand accounts of what happens. It's a way to look into the world at a completely different era than it is now. So these are some books that I like, and I'll double check the title of the first one and email you, but I think that's what it's called. [01:33:36] S1: Okay. And we'll link to the correct one in the show notes. Favorite recent movie or TV show that you have really enjoyed? [01:33:43] S0: I'm really into Euphoria right now. I think the new Euphoria, I'm interested in the characters and figuring that out, what's going to happen there. [01:33:56] S1: That show's so stressful whenever I watch. [01:33:59] S0: It's a melodrama. I think you have to think about it as a soap opera and then it's fun. If you think about it too literally or practically-
01:33:59 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:33:59] S0: It's a melodrama. I think you have to think about it as a soap opera and then it's fun. If you think about it too literally or practically- [01:34:05] S1: Okay. That's helpful. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? Could be hardware, could be an app, could be a piece of clothing, could be a gadget. [01:34:14] S0: I really like Vollebak, the clothes. They make really interesting clothes. They're essentially basing their new clothes on material science. So they take new material science and make them into clothes. It's just a fun brand to follow. [01:34:26] S1: Vollebak. [01:34:27] S0: V-O-L-L-E-B- A-K. [01:34:31] S1: Vollebak. Very cool. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life? [01:34:38] S0: Have you seen that branch where there's all these branches and then you're here and then there's all these branches from this point? [01:34:43] S1: [inaudible 01:34:43], yeah. [01:34:45] S0: Yeah. You know who it's from. I didn't know who it was from. I think about it a lot because it's very hard not to get stuck in the future or the past and stay kind of here. I have trouble with that, but that is a great reminder that you get to pick every day. You get to decide every day what you want to do. And sometimes things don't go the way that you want and sometimes you regret what you did or sometimes you're proud of what you did, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is what's right in front of you.
01:34:45 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:34:45] S0: Yeah. You know who it's from. I didn't know who it was from. I think about it a lot because it's very hard not to get stuck in the future or the past and stay kind of here. I have trouble with that, but that is a great reminder that you get to pick every day. You get to decide every day what you want to do. And sometimes things don't go the way that you want and sometimes you regret what you did or sometimes you're proud of what you did, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is what's right in front of you. [01:35:11] S1: We'll either show that image on the screen as you say that or we'll link to it in the show notes. It's so powerful. Final question. Somebody that knows you well shared this really interesting tidbit about you, that you hired a PhD to tutor you on the staples of ancient Greece and Rome and just get really nerdy about this stuff. What's going on there? What drives you to go so deep on these sorts of things?
01:35:34 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:35:34] S0: This is like very [inaudible 01:35:35] territory, but I found this list that the poet Joseph Brodsky wrote, which is a list of things you should have read in order to have an intelligent conversation in English. And it is like an affected list. It's intense. It's like the Old Testament, Gilgamesh, and then all the way down through. But what I found is it's a pretty good distillation of what we used to call the Western canon and that actually I learned a lot in my public school education and in college, but I never really learned from what you would consider the Western canon. And so this is kind of in addition to that, there's some more, newer books on the list. I find it just fascinating to have something to work off of. And what I found is as I got into specifically the tragedies, the Greek tragedies, I just didn't have enough context to learn what I wanted to learn, and just reading them, I didn't have enough uptake. So I found an incredible postdoc who was willing to tutor me and I just get to ask him all these questions. He's an encyclopedia. He knows everything. I could ask him what was happening in Turkey at the time of this Greek, this tragedy that we're reading and what was happening in Athens and what this tragedian might be responding to. And he can answer the question. It's really fun to have the ability to have that sounding board. [01:37:01] S1: So cool. It's so cool you did that. Even though AI can do a lot of this, sometimes a human is much more interesting to talk to and feels better.
01:37:01 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:37:01] S1: So cool. It's so cool you did that. Even though AI can do a lot of this, sometimes a human is much more interesting to talk to and feels better. [01:37:10] S0: Yeah. I find reading and communicating with AI is very helpful on the basics, but then understanding what was happening culturally and what the significance of the work is, it isn't adequate. [01:37:21] S1: It's because we're not 20 something. We're used to humans. [01:37:25] S0: [inaudible 01:37:25] wrong. [01:37:26] S1: I don't think it's wrong, but we didn't grow up this way. And I imagine college students, they would just not, "Why would I do that? I have Claude here." [01:37:34] S0: Yeah. [01:37:34] S1: So cool. I love that. Well, this was incredible. You're amazing. Where can folks find you online if they want to find you, if they want to reach out, I don't know, try to hire you? And then final question, how can listeners be useful to you?
01:37:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:37:34] S1: So cool. I love that. Well, this was incredible. You're amazing. Where can folks find you online if they want to find you, if they want to reach out, I don't know, try to hire you? And then final question, how can listeners be useful to you? [01:37:47] S0: So I have a website, which is just my name .com. I'm also on LinkedIn. People can help me, I think helping imagine the future. This is not a single player game. This is a multiplayer game. Figuring out what future we want, what we want it to look like, what we want the human aspect to be in that future and what we think we want to hold for ourselves, how we want to augment ourselves. So right now we're in this dystopian niche where everything's just ... It feels like the future is horrible. And the way to not have that is to actually design our own future together, figure out what we want our future to look like. Paint a picture in fiction, in literature, in conversation, and then build that. And I think that that's possible. [01:38:34] S1: I love that. That's actually a message that's come up on a couple of recent podcast episodes. It's a really good reminder. Caitlin, thank you so much for being here. [01:38:44] S0: This was really fun, Lenny. Thanks for having me.