Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:24:18 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
We get to word play in all these different spaces: health, medicine, drugs, robotics, chips, these kinds of things. So that's just what's wonderful to us, and we get to just be kids in the candy store and work with all these incredible, smart entrepreneurs and everything. So that's one thing I do. The other thing I do is I'm a designer at residence at MIT. So I just finished up my first year there with the MIT Media Lab in architecture and design, and help to give lectures and work with students, amazing, amazing, smart students with the great technology, but help them with the customer journey. Try to make sure that they see this stuff early on in their career, not after 10 years, and then they finally understand, oh, wait a second, what am I really building? Who is it for? Not just what is it am I building, but why am I building it, and for who? And so, trying to get that into some of the later undergraduate and graduate students so we can watch them change the world more quickly. [01:25:23] S1: Incredible. I love just all the levels of ways you are helping people. There's the investing, there's this book, there's MIT, there's these conversations. [01:25:32] S0: It's fun. It's just so much fun. [01:25:35] S1: I love how much fun you're having. Is there anything else you wanted to share that we didn't cover?
01:25:39 · Tony Fadell
[01:25:39] S0: We should really just talk about ethics and morals and your point of view on that. And as a product manager, as a product designer, you need to really consider these things. I understand we have lots of big questions about AI and is it going to be a disaster for the next generation and for societies and all the other stuff? But I think that you really need to be well grounded and have real principles when you're designing something, and don't let those things go astray, just like you wouldn't go astray with a bad user interface or something like that. Make sure you're not trying to addict your users. And if anybody is, there's always other jobs, and there's always other better companies, and don't chase the money for tearing apart what it is the fabric of this society that we built. Obviously, there's going to be innovation, and there's going to be change, but when you're really doing it, and you can see that you're doing it, and you're trying to get people hooked, or you're like, "Oh, I give more dopamine or what have you." That's when you have to start really looking at things. And a lot of times, people are young, and they think, "Oh, that's great. That's what I want." But when you start to have kids, and you start to have families, and you start to see the... And you're not just about you; you're not trying to just get out of your family when you were growing up. I'm an individual, and I want what I want. You really need to start thinking systemically about the benefit that you're bringing to this society as a whole, not just to the business that you're in and trying to bring in whatever revenue you're trying to do because at the end of the day, users will feel that and then I think and will reward that as we see with Apple with privacy and people say, "Oh, they're behind because they're so private and there's this." But it's a double-edged sword. I remember when we had a very pointed discussion when the iTunes music store and when it was turning into video was being specified and what we were thinking about it, and everyone's like, "Oh, this is going to be great. We're going to do movies. We're going to do TV shows. That's going to all be great. We're going to make a lot of money with this in the studios. Everybody's behind it." And then somebody goes, "Yeah, and we should have porn, of course." Steve was like, "What?
01:28:09 · Tony Fadell
Is that the kind of world you want your kids to grow up in? And Apple is related with that and Apple's about... Is that what we want to do?" And it was very clear, it was shut down, and we need leaders like that. We need leaders who are very clear as opposed to "I'm going to make a huge service for everyone." And they're all sex chatbots for everyone. I just think when you start normalizing those things, and you start telling other generations that's a value and you start... And I understand that everyone has their own what's right and what's wrong. And here I am, the old guy, again, I think we can go a little too far. I'm for individual rights and for everyone to be a thing, but when major companies are doing this in the guise of certain kinds of behaviors they're trying to achieve, when we're selling... We're turning personal connection into a product with AI chatbots and making them really devolve social interaction to the point where I'm going to have a perfect interaction with this thing because the world is so messy, it's like we're losing humanity with that, and we're just for gain. So I wish that the other product designers out there really take it to heart. I'm not saying you got to be Lily White and being in a church every weekend and Bible banging. I'm not saying that; I'm not MAGA. I'm not any of that stuff, just saying, hey, think about it.
01:29:37 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:29:37] S1: A lot of people look at the iPhone as this thing now that everyone's hooked on. It's so good. We're just like, it's too good. And there's all this data showing all the impact it has on people and things like that. Just how do you think about that and the impact the iPhone has had on people?
01:29:53 · Tony Fadell
[01:29:53] S0: Well, the first thing is the iPhone wasn't set out to be that. There's unintended consequences, and the unintended consequence was social media happened, and social media, Apple's not a social media company, but it does distribute the apps or make available those apps. And so the way I think about it is we have lots of junk food, and we have an obese nation or obese world because of all the junk food, and it takes us to regulate our consumption to do that and get healthy tools. And there's nutritional elements on the back of things. If you want to make a better decision, you can, and I hope AI and these assistants will help people be able to get better control of those kinds of things where our lizard brain is being stimulated in a way that consume more, consume more of physical food. And now the same thing's happening in digital food, but we have digital food that doesn't have the nutrition labels, doesn't have the warnings, doesn't have the regulation that it needs to have, just like we do with our physical food because, oh, you can't let innovation, whatever, be slowed down. I'm not saying again, being a nanny and all the other stuff, but we got to have some balance, and it's just swung too far. And I still think that the platform companies like Google and Apple could be doing a lot more around digital consumption tools and information to help people make better decisions for themselves, for their families, and what have you, because you could go to the... iPhone's just a refrigerator, and you can put in junk food or you can put in good food. And even if you put in good food, you could go to the good food every five seconds. You have a refrigerator in your kitchen. You can put good food or bad food. You could open it all the time and keep consuming. So we need to learn habits. We need to teach habits. We need to put in regulations. We need information. We need tools to help us monitor and manage that stuff, and they need to be supplied. And just like we have rules around who can buy something when they're 21 or under 21. We need all those kinds of things, and it needs to happen because why? Sure, you could have a short-term gaining of customers, but if you make your customers unhealthy, you're not going to have customers.
01:32:18 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:32:18] S1: Let me just say for folks that haven't read your book, I just want to communicate how great it is. There's very few books that are both tactically useful that give you, like, here's how to do a thing and also just inspire you to build and make great things. And Build does that in such a great way. I think everyone knows about it. I don't know if everyone's read it. So highly encourage you to read it. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to maybe learn about the stuff you're up to now, and how can listeners be useful to you?