Show full transcript 0:26 Here's the big question, Molly. 0:27 Are there any LEGOs you should not give away? 0:29 In AI land, I think we've got to caveat this. 0:32 There are some Legos that shouldn't be given away. 0:35 There's just some work that shouldn't be outsourced. 0:37 Just a radical departure from your advice over the many years. 0:40 You, individually, are phenomenal at a set of things. 0:43 Don't outsource it to these weird robots that, you know, are effectively summer interns. 0:48 AI is taking a lot of our Legos, whether we like it or not, 0:51 and we're being encouraged to give our Legos to AI. 0:53 You had someone on who talked about, like, 0:55 the job used to be rowing and now it's steering. 0:57 And I was like, I feel like there's a lot of people out 1:00 in the world right now that are like, 1:02 I don't want to steer. 1:03 I've heard from a lot of engineers just like, 1:04 I really miss what it used to be. 1:06 Change sucks. 1:07 It also can be awesome, 1:08 but we don't have to be fluffy bunnies about this. 1:11 We can also just say, this is hard. 1:13 This is almost a discussion around what should AI do? 1:16 Where do you want AI to be involved 1:18 and where you not want it involved? 1:19 What would you do if you believed your job 1:21 was always going to exist? 1:23 It was just gonna look completely different 1:26 every six years. 1:29 Today my guest is Molly Graham. 1:31 This is Molly's second visit to the podcast and man, this is a powerful conversation. 1:37 The frame for this conversation is her classic give away your Legos career advice. 1:42 But in an AI world, Molly's advice for the last 13 years has been that your career 1:48 will be better off if you give away your projects and your teams and your responsibilities 1:53 abilities to other people as your company grows, versus trying to hold onto it, which 1:58 is what we naturally want to do. 2:00 Essentially to give away your Legos. 2:02 After 13 years of giving this advice and it unlocking so much wind for so many people 2:07 over the past decade, Molly's realized that it is no longer true. 2:12 When you are giving away your Legos to AI, it's a lot more nuanced and complicated 2:17 now. 2:18 And so in this conversation, we try to get to the bottom of this question. 2:22 What LEGOs should you still be giving away and what LEGOs should you keep? 2:27 If you're not familiar with Molly, she has spent 20 plus years helping organizations and 2:31 the humans inside them navigate growth and change. 2:34 She's helped leadership roles at Google and Facebook and Quip and the Chan Zuckerberg 2:38 Initiative. 2:39 These days, she hosts Ted's Work Life podcast, which she took over from Adam Grant. 2:44 She also runs an incredibly important leadership community called Glue Club and writes a 2:48 newsletter called Lessons. 2:49 episodes. 2:50 Now before we get into it, I noticed a lot of people don't finish our full episodes 2:55 and miss some of the best stuff. 2:57 So to help you, we've just created a new Lenny's Most Replayed Moments YouTube channel 3:02 that has exactly this, the most rewatched and shared segments from our long form 3:08 episodes. 3:09 You can now check it out and subscribe to the channel at Lenny'sPodcast.com 3:13 slash Most Replayed Moments, there's also a link in the description. 3:17 Finally, don't forget to check out LennysProductPast.com for a free year of the hottest and most 3:22 beautifully crafted AI and non-AI products in the world. 3:26 That's LennysProductPast.com. 3:28 With that, I bring you Molly Graham. 3:34 Molly, thank you so much for being here and welcome back to the podcast. 3:38 Thanks for having me, Lenny. 3:39 I'm excited to be back. 3:41 I'm even more excited to have you back. 3:43 Let me add a little context to this slightly unusual conversation we're going to have. 3:48 So, we've been chatting over the past couple months about your famous, infamous giveaway, 3:54 your LEGOs career advice. 3:56 And this question came up, and I know you're hearing this a lot from other people, this 4:00 idea of how this advice applies in today's very strange AI world, where AI is taking 4:07 a lot of our LEGOs, whether we like it or not. 4:10 And we're being encouraged to give our LEGOs to AI. 4:13 People are afraid about AI taking their LEGOs. 4:15 And so, the question is just how this advice now applies in the world of AI. 4:22 And I know this is kind of an ongoing thought process for you, but you actually have a lot 4:27 of really interesting insights and takes on how to think about this advice now in today's 4:31 very strange world. 4:32 And so we're going to have a conversation about it, see where it goes. 4:35 This episode is brought to you by our Season's Presenting Sponsor, WorkOS. 4:39 What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replet, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning 4:45 companies all have in common? 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And that's because they are the best. 5:14 Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise 5:17 customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to 5:21 becoming enterprise ready and unblocking road. It's essentially striped for 5:26 enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their 5:30 slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your 5:33 questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, 5:38 and a smooth developer experience. Go to workOS.com to make your app enterprise ready today. 5:44 I'd say as a first step, let's remind people what this advice is. I imagine most people have 5:50 heard it. A lot of people probably like, oh yeah, I kind of get the idea. So explain the kind 5:53 of the original idea of giving where your leg is. It actually started when I was at Google and 5:59 Facebook. And it started as a little talk that I would give 6:02 people that worked for me. And for context, like, Google was 6:07 pretty big when I joined. It was like 10,000 employees in 6:10 2007. But my department grew from 25 people to 125 people in 6:15 nine months. So that was my first experience with like 6:17 really rapid scale. And then I went to Facebook and Facebook 6:21 was relatively small when I joined it was 500 employees and 6:24 80 million users smaller than MySpace, which is always good 6:28 context to remember. And you know, while I was there, you know, 6:32 obviously a huge growth curve I left five years later, it was 6:35 5500 employees and over a billion users. So that experience 6:40 was nuts from a scaling perspective. And what I 6:44 witnessed at Google and then sort of really witnessed at 6:48 Facebook was how hard and scary that experience was for 6:54 people. I watched a lot of folks go from sort of like you build a thing, right? You show up 7:01 and you become the person that owns the blog or owns this part of the stack or built that product 7:07 and you sort of build like an identity around it. You're the this person, whatever that is. 7:12 And then the nature of scale is that everything around you changes. And so somebody shows up 7:18 and your manager shows up and says, hey, you need to, you know, hand that thing that 7:22 you've built your whole identity around to someone else 7:25 and you know, go on to doing something else. 7:27 And your first instinct is like, what? 7:29 You know, like, no, I don't want to give it away. 7:32 Like I'm good at this. 7:34 I know how to do this. 7:35 I also think it's fun 7:36 and what if it's the only fun thing to do? 7:40 And so you kind of witness people 7:42 like would have this tendency to hold on. 7:45 And so what I started to do with people on my team 7:47 was say, hey, this change is happening 7:50 And here's how you might feel, right? 7:52 That you might feel like all these feelings, 7:55 territorial and wanting to hold on. 7:57 And actually the most important thing to do 7:59 is to give things away, to evolve 8:03 as the company is evolving. 8:04 And my brain is a really weird place. 8:06 Like I grew up on the Muppets, so I just like spits out. 8:10 I always think there's just like a lot of tiny monsters 8:12 dancing around singing songs in my head, 8:13 but like that is why metaphors come out for me. 8:17 And so I always use this metaphor 8:18 of like just a bunch of kindergartners and like somebody dumps a pile of Legos in front of you 8:22 and at first it's fun, a little overwhelming, then you start building. And the giveaway or 8:28 Legos part is like that feeling when somebody else shows up and they try to take the tower out 8:33 of your hands. And the kindergartner response is like, get out of here. You know what I mean? 8:38 It's like shoving someone away. When actually like you get multiple people, it means, oh, 8:43 you can go build something new and fun. You can start from scratch and you can learn 8:46 something. But the natural human instinct in the face of change is to hold on to things and to resist 8:53 the change, right? To be territorial and all of those things. So anyway, I started giving this 9:01 talk to folks on my team to kind of help them understand that change and what was coming. And 9:06 then eventually I sent it out to my friends at first round who were building the first round 9:11 review at the time. And just to be clear, this is now 13 years ago. The talk I was like, 9:17 when I was at Facebook, it was over 20 years ago. And it, I sent it to first round and 9:26 we published it. And, you know, I would have said I was speaking to folks going through 9:32 a Facebook like experience, like I would have said, like, Hey, this is an article that 9:36 is for the stripes or the slacks or whoever was blowing up in 2013. 9:42 To normalize, hey, this is what it feels like, and this is what you have to do to grow as 9:47 fast as your company is growing. 9:49 But what happened when it was published is that I got emails from all over the world. 9:55 I got emails from people at companies like Safeway, and this woman, I still remember 10:01 this email wrote me and was like, this was so helpful to me, this like perfectly describes 10:06 what I've been going through on my team. And I got an email, again, I remember it very vividly 10:10 from a founder in Nigeria, who was like, my team went from two people to four people this year 10:15 and give away your Legos, like it's so valuable to me, like this is exactly what I've been 10:20 feeling. And my first reaction was like, I didn't write this for you, like this is not, 10:26 this was not meant for you. But my second one was, whoa, this is about something much bigger 10:33 than just what it feels like to be inside of rapid scale. And fundamentally, I think the 10:39 LEGO's message is about change, you know, and it's about the fact that when you go through change, 10:46 a lot of shit happens to you. You know what I mean? Like, it just is a very specific 10:51 experience, and I think that's why it ended up being so universal. 10:56 And it is crazy. 10:57 Like, I still get emails about it, multiple emails a month about it to this day. 11:04 So it's lasted in a way that, again, like, I just thought I was sending out a note to 11:08 the folks that are going through crazy, rapid change. 11:12 I was at a first round event, I don't know, you or someone, they were talking about 11:15 all the different posts people have written. 11:16 And I think it's one of the, maybe the first or second most popular posts on the 11:20 first round review. 11:22 It's up there and it's traveled in ways that I don't think any of us imagined it would. 11:27 Okay, so let's talk about what still holds true in this advice, in today's very strange 11:35 AI world. 11:35 What still holds true? 11:36 What's still correct about this advice based on what you're seeing? 11:39 One thing that's crazy about this article is I still get so many emails about it today. 11:43 I still get asked to give speeches at every fast growing company. 11:47 So, I think for anybody that's going through rapid scale, Legos is still really relevant. 11:53 But the interesting thing is like what started to happen, it's kind of like two years ago 11:59 is I got more inbound from managers and more inbound from leaders about Legos. 12:08 Just more people grappling with change inside their companies. 12:13 and I think that is the thing that really holds true today and actually has just become more 12:19 universal. You know, I used to really check before I went and did a speech at some company how fast 12:29 the company was growing. I would ask like kind of about revenue growth and about head count 12:35 growth because that just helps me contextualize like how I should speak to to employees. 12:39 And I still do that, but it's also become really clear that every single company in the 12:46 world is going through enormous change of varying shapes and kinds right now. 12:51 And that is the fundamental underlying message of Legos is how do you deal with change and 12:58 how do you be your best self in the face of change? 13:02 So I feel like the number one thing that is true today, as true as it was, you 13:08 you know, 10 or 15 years ago, is the change is really scary and hard. 13:13 And I always say, like, somebody once asked me to, like, summarize the Legos article in 13:16 one sentence. 13:17 They're like, Molly, this is too long, like, give me the cliff notes. 13:21 And I said two things. 13:24 Unfortunately, they didn't get one sentence, they got two. 13:27 The two sentences were, number one, your main job in the face of rapid growth 13:33 and change is to make yourself irrelevant because it is the only way that you can be prepared for 13:40 whatever is coming next. And the second piece of advice or a sort of second summary of it was, 13:46 don't worry, it's all going to be okay. I always feel like the Legos article and the speeches I give 13:51 are like a form of group therapy. They're like just a giant hug. Like, yes, it feels chaotic and 13:56 overwhelming and stressful, but there's all this opportunity on the other side. And I think 14:01 that the don't worry it's all gonna be okay is really something everybody needs to hear that like 14:06 changes scary and hard but it doesn't necessarily mean the world is ending. I think this the second 14:12 piece of that is that change comes with this incredible set of emotions like this wild roller 14:19 coaster that we don't talk about enough and I think that was a lot of why I first started 14:24 talking about Legos like at Facebook and on my teams was I just wanted to normalize for people 14:29 what it felt like that you might feel all these feelings and that that was what everyone around 14:34 you was feeling, right? That it didn't make you crazy and it didn't make you broken or something 14:39 like that. It also didn't mean anything was wrong. It actually meant that all the right things 14:42 were happening. And I think that is very real today, like when I travel around and I'm talking 14:48 to leaders, and I know you and I are going to talk about this, but a lot of what I'm 14:53 hearing is grief and all these different emotions. There's obviously like excitement and joy in this 15:00 moment of chaos and change with AI. But there is a lot of sadness. There's a lot of overwhelm that 15:07 all manifests, some of it manifests in burnout. But it's like, there is just a lot going on for 15:13 people right now. And you really can't lead right now without talking about that. And 15:18 without normalizing that. And I think that's like such a big part of the give away or Legos. 15:25 You know, today is just like helping people understand that these emotions are just part 15:33 of sort of your body and your identity reacting to change. The other two things I would say that 15:39 really do still feel true to me that I both talked about in the article and have talked about a 15:43 since is like one of the things I say to people that are inside of a really rapidly 15:49 growing company is the future will be defined by the people that learn not the people that know. 15:55 You know, I always say like what you can learn by tomorrow matters way more than what you know 16:00 today. And like never has a truer sentence been said than like about the age of AI. 16:05 Do you know what I mean? Like whatever we thought we knew six months ago like toss it 16:08 out the window, something new is true today. But what I used to say to people, 16:11 And I still say, I guess when I do these speeches is like, you go look at that graph of how fast 16:17 your company is growing, right? 16:18 You go look at like that curve, you know, and at Facebook, it was like, felt like we 16:22 were falling off of it. 16:23 That is the graph of how fast your company is growing, yes, but it is also the graph 16:28 of how fast your job is growing, right? 16:32 How fast every single thing around you is growing and changing, which means it's 16:36 also the graph of how fast you need to grow. 16:40 And I think that is such an important thing to understand 16:44 inside of a world of change, 16:46 which is that standing still, right? 16:49 It feels safe. 16:50 It feels like, hold on to what you know. 16:54 You know, cause that, that at least it's not, you know, 16:57 scary and unknown, but actually standing still 16:59 is like the least safe thing you can do. 17:03 It's basically you're guaranteed to fall behind. 17:07 And I saw this, this really at Facebook 17:09 because the first two years I was in HR and you could literally see the highest performer 17:17 one year if they didn't grow and change and if they didn't evolve their team fast enough, 17:22 they were underwater like less than a year later because it was a different company. 17:26 And I think this is happening with AI as well, which is that we do have these instincts 17:33 to hold on to what we know and to defend what we know and to fight for what we know 17:38 for a bunch of different reasons, many of them good, but the future is going to be defined 17:43 by the people that are willing to just take the stance of learning and to throw themselves 17:49 into this change, scary and unknown as it is. 17:53 And that message, again, remains true in this wild, wild world. 17:59 Before we get into just what they have, the advice is different, which when you 18:02 go back to your summary of the two kind of items that kind of summarize the idea, 18:06 One is become redundant and then two. What was the second sentence? The second one is basically don't worry. It's all gonna be 18:12 Don't worry. Yeah. Okay, so those don't feel 18:15 Necessarily correct anymore. So we're gonna get into that because I think that's as you said the core of people's concern 18:21 The that was like comforting and now it's like, well, are you sure? Yeah 18:26 This grief piece just to spend a little more time here 18:28 I've been I've been seeing this a lot in a lot of different professions 18:31 I've done these surveys that we might get into a little bit 18:34 it, but just engineering as a role has completely transformed in two years. 18:42 It's been like the same job forever, writing code, sitting there, writing code in various 18:46 forms of IDEs, no longer part of the job. 18:51 Now it's talking to your AI to write the code, whether you're there or not, that's 18:54 where it's all going. 18:55 It's going to be 100% write this thing, build this thing. 18:58 And I used to be an engineer and I moved into product and I was so missing that 19:04 flow state of being an engineer or just sitting there coding, building, and now that's gone, 19:10 you no longer sit there and just build a thing. You're just waiting for agents to run and then 19:14 checking you probably have a hundred different agents. It's just a very strange new job. And I've 19:18 heard from a lot of engineers just like, I really miss what it used to be. Yeah. Anything more 19:23 there about just, I don't know what you're hearing from folks about just like, man, this sucks. 19:27 No, it's exactly, it's such a perfect example of like the grief. 19:35 I was giving a speech like two weeks ago at, you know, pretty fast growing tech company 19:40 and this guy came up to me after and he'd been at the company for a couple of years 19:46 so it's gone through like a huge amount of change and he was talking to me about the 19:49 fact that he just wasn't enjoying his role as much anymore. 19:51 And my brain immediately went to, oh, right, 19:54 like you enjoyed it when it was smaller 19:57 and there was more creativity 19:57 and now there's more structure. 19:59 And so I was talking to him about that 20:00 and it took like a while. 20:02 And to some extent, like I wanna go talk to him again 20:04 because I feel like I missed it in the first conversation 20:06 where actually I think what he was talking about 20:09 was the grief that is very present for him now 20:14 and the fact that he's not sure 20:16 what is his current job? 20:18 Like what is this, the company has grown 20:20 and so he's in a more structured environment. And what is just the simple fact that engineering 20:24 has totally changed? And a lot of what he was talking about was how much he missed 20:30 being more hands-on, which is, you know, one way of saying it. But I think that that grief 20:37 is happening for a lot of people. I think engineering is like probably one of the most 20:41 visceral areas where people's jobs have genuinely transformed. 20:48 You had someone on last week who talked about, like, the job used to be rowing. 20:55 And now it's... 20:55 On Tara, yeah, from open AI. 20:57 She said, like, the job used to be rowing, and now it's like... 20:59 Steering. 21:00 Steering. 21:01 And I was like, I feel like there's a lot of people out in the world right now that 21:05 are like, I don't want to fucking steer. 21:07 Do you know what I mean? 21:07 I want to row. 21:08 Like, I like rowing. 21:10 And I think it can be hard to separate, I like rowing or I'm scared that rowing is the 21:16 only thing I'm ever gonna be good at or it's what I know and I don't know if I can be good 21:24 at steering. 21:25 And I think that's happening in a lot of disciplines, you know? 21:28 And so that grief, like first and foremost, like that grief is really real, you know? 21:33 I was talking to a product leader just the other day who was like, I don't know, man, 21:37 were all supposed to be these universal builders now, and she was like, I don't want to, it's 21:44 kind of lonely. She's like, I miss these parts of the collaboration that have been a little bit 21:50 stripped away because now I'm working with robots all the time. I just said to her, come 21:57 in, that sucks. Let's sit with it for a second. Change sucks. It also can be awesome, 22:04 But we don't have to be fluffy bunnies about this. We can also just say this is hard 22:09 There's so much power in just like saying the thing that you're feeling would I 22:14 Swear to God that that is a big chunk of what the Legos article did was just like this is hard and scary 22:21 And that's and and it's gonna be okay. You know 22:25 This loneliness piece is such a important 22:28 and hard to touch on. 22:30 I had Fiona Fung on the podcast who leads Claude Code, 22:35 the engineering team for Claude Code. 22:36 She's Boris Journey's boss, fun fact. 22:39 And she said this exact that they're like, 22:41 asked her just what's, 22:41 what's kind of the downside of this world? 22:43 And it's engineers are used to work 22:45 with a bunch of engineers, teams used to be, 22:46 you know, five engineers, 10 engineers. 22:48 And now it's fewer teams, fewer engineers per team. 22:51 And it's just like, you're talking to Adrens all day. 22:55 And so, it's another- 22:58 It's not the same and I think that's actually something that leaders of companies that are 23:03 actually like in charge of org structures and thinking about what the future of structure 23:09 of teams, you know, needs to look like you actually need to think about it because like, 23:13 yeah, maybe you can like strip out all the humans and you get all this productivity 23:19 and maybe you get efficiency, but you also get sad humans, do you know what I mean? 23:23 And like that doesn't lead to like the best work for anyone. 23:26 like I thought your survey data around the fact that small teams and smaller companies are so much 23:32 happier than people at the bigger companies was really interesting. Just because A, that like 23:38 very much resonates with what I see in all my conversations with leaders. But it also to me 23:44 is a reflection of like, I think we're seeing more at these bigger companies where people 23:50 are stripping out management layers and there's a lot more pressure on productivity and things 23:55 like that and there's less room for the human. You know, there's less room for the joy and 24:01 the excitement when all you're doing is focusing on optimizing cost and robot efficiency, you know. 24:07 Yeah, man, there's so much to talk about here. There's this really cool 24:10 framework at a mental model that Corey Doctro wrote about a while ago where he talks about the 24:16 centaur and the reverse centaur. You heard of this? No, but I love it already. 24:20 Okay, so I think, I don't know if you're gonna have to pronounce it, centaur? Does that sound right, centaur? 24:25 Yeah, that's right. 24:26 So centaur is a human body on top of an animal, like a horse. 24:30 Horse. 24:30 Sorry, a human head torso. 24:32 Not only clearly you do not read enough Greek mythology. 24:35 I just watched The Odyssey, I'm an expert on all things. 24:38 Your kid is gonna get older and you're gonna read the like lightning thief books and you'll get it. 24:42 Lightning thief, okay. 24:43 Yeah. 24:43 I'll look forward to it. 24:44 Okay, so the idea as a centaur is human head controlling an animal body, reverse centaur 24:50 is an animal head controlling a human body. 24:53 So the way he has kind of insight here is what we want is AI that we control. 24:58 We are in charge, it's doing our bidding, awesome centaur and it's a cool way to live. 25:03 What we need to avoid and fear is the reverse centaur where the AI is using us to do things 25:11 like DoorDash, people, and Uber people are in that world already, not the funnest life. 25:17 And it might expand to knowledge work. 25:21 And I think that's a lot of people's fears. 25:22 You're just this like thing that's just controlling agents and just like closing 25:26 gap of fears where humans still are very valuable, and AI's kind of telling you 25:30 where to build and what to do, and then it's doing the thing. 25:33 So I've been thinking a lot about that. 25:36 Yeah. 25:36 Yeah, I mean, I want to get to the fear side of this and the fear narrative as well, because 25:44 I think that's one of the things that is really different in this stage and this sort of phase. 25:52 Because it's really hard to tell people, like, lean in to change when they're like, but 25:57 wait, like, what's on the other side? 25:59 Like you're telling me to let go of my lego, as you're telling me to make myself irrelevant. 26:02 Like, fuck you. 26:03 you know what I mean? Like I don't believe there's a job on the other side. And I think that fear 26:10 narrative, like I am sure some of it is real, but some of it is really overblown. And it's, 26:19 and it's creating like a pretty toxic environment for people where it's so hard to lean into this 26:25 change with joy or excitement or any sense of opportunity, I would say like the narrative 26:32 right now is literally like, okay, we hired this new employee. This new employee is the smartest 26:39 employee that you have ever met. This employee is like 10 times smarter than you. And I want you 26:46 to pour every single thing that you know into this employee. And then they're going to take 26:52 your job in six months. Who the fuck wants to do that? Do you know what I mean? No one 26:56 wants to do that. That is not a good narrative for anyone. By the way, it's also not reality. 27:02 As of right now, there is not a lot of data, although you may have more than I do, that 27:07 says that AI is genuinely taking jobs away. I have a lot of beef to pick with all the 27:12 AI branded layoffs out there because they're bullshit. They're not about AI. They are 27:16 about badly run companies flapping an AI label and getting some share points from that versus 27:22 saying, whoops, we made, we hired too many people. And they're propagating this fear 27:27 narrative that is like all these jobs are, your job is going away, right? There is no 27:31 job on the other side. One of the best, so I took over this podcast, which you know, 27:36 called Work Life, and it's let me have all these really fun conversations with 27:40 people. And one of the best conversations I had was with this journalist named Mnush 27:47 Somarodi. And she has been a journalist for 30 years. You want to talk about an industry 27:51 that people have been predicting the death of for 30 years, right? Journalism. And Mnush 27:58 has done everything. Like she started the BBC and she was super early in audio and 28:05 she did this like crazy crypto audio podcast. And she's also like, she's the host of 28:09 Ted Radio Hour, so Manouche over 30 years, 28:11 has built a very successful career in an industry 28:15 that is being constantly disrupted. 28:18 And from talking to her, I basically walked away 28:22 with this really interesting question 28:23 that is totally different than what would you do 28:25 if you believed your job was gonna disappear? 28:28 It was, what would you do 28:30 if you believed your job was always going to exist? 28:33 It was just gonna look completely different every six years. 28:38 And I just kind of wish that was the conversation we were having about all the jobs in tech and 28:46 honestly all the jobs that are theoretically going to get taken by AI, which is like the 28:51 form is definitely going to change. 28:54 But until we have real evidence, what if we believe that they're not going away? 28:59 They're just going to reinvent themselves. 29:01 That is awesome advice. 29:02 And that's exactly what's been happening so far. 29:05 Yeah. 29:05 There's always this fear that okay, but now it'll be different in X years, but that is 29:09 actually exactly what's been happening. 29:11 Engineering exists. 29:12 Different job. 29:13 There's actually more demand than ever for engineers. 29:15 Exactly. 29:16 Your data said that, and I was like, thank you for publishing this data, honey. 29:21 Before we get into the advice, kind of how it's evolved, there's a couple things 29:25 I want to share which touch on things you mentioned about how people are feeling. 29:29 So I'll share these images on the screen as we talk about this of just people's 29:34 feelings right now, just to kind of come back to that point. 29:37 So we did the survey for two years now 29:40 in a row of how tech people are feeling 29:43 and how they're feeling about AI and all these things. 29:45 And so we have a trend now of over time 29:48 how things are changing. 29:49 And we look at burnout and optimism. 29:52 And in 2025, 44% of people said they feel burned out. 29:59 This year, 55% of people said they are burned out. 30:03 That's a huge jump, that's 10% increase in a year of people feeling burnt out. 30:10 And it makes sense, as you said, you're basically now expected to do more work, probably more 30:17 money. 30:18 And now it's just like, okay, cool, you got all these AI, why aren't you getting more 30:21 done? 30:21 Look at all these other teams moving so much faster. 30:23 We're screwed, we're going to go out of business, we're going to move fast. 30:25 So it makes sense. 30:26 I mean, I love that you do that survey because I also think I learn a ton from 30:30 from it every time you've published it. 30:32 And it's also just like a great reality check 30:34 about how people are feeling. 30:35 Cause literally what your survey says 30:36 is more than half the people are feeling burnt out, 30:40 which is like nuts. 30:42 And also, yeah, I believe it. 30:44 And I think, you know, I mean, burnout comes 30:46 from a lot of different places 30:47 and can mean a lot of different things to people. 30:49 But to me, what I read inside that data 30:51 was like number one, like emotions are tiring. 30:55 And there is a lot of exhaustion 30:57 trying to understand what's going on in a, 30:59 I mean, the rate of change right now is nuts, both in terms of obviously the technological change, 31:07 but I actually think the narrative change is also pretty exhausting for people like, 31:11 oh, this month, this is important. Oh, next month, there's a thrash inside of that that's 31:17 pretty tiring. I was emailing with a friend at OpenAI and she was like, 31:24 like, it's taken us literally six months to go from sort of this token maxing, like everybody, 31:32 like aggressive productivity, like use AI everywhere to a conversation that's like, 31:38 wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, like, is this actually making a difference because it's 31:41 very expensive, you know? 31:43 And she's like, six months. 31:44 That's all it took. 31:45 And so if you were sitting inside that, I mean, six months ago, they were like, 31:49 use AI all the time every day, everywhere. 31:51 And now, they're like, are you doing it well enough? 31:54 And Hilary Gridley said the same thing 31:56 where she was like, six months ago, everyone was like, 31:59 how do I get people to use AI? 32:00 And now they're like, how do I get people to use AI? 32:03 Stop using AI so badly. 32:05 And it's like that six month thrash, often much faster 32:11 than that, is tiring for people. 32:13 The grief is tiring, let alone that feeling 32:17 which you mentioned in your survey of, 32:19 like I'm gonna be expected to do more for the same amount of pay. 32:24 Like that's exhausting. 32:25 Like that, I think people feel taken advantage of, you know? 32:31 And like, what is in this for me? 32:34 Like, why is it fun for me? 32:36 What's the opportunity for me? 32:38 And I think particularly at bigger companies, 32:40 it feels almost adversarial sometimes, you know? 32:43 Where like, you know, I get why it's good 32:46 for our bottom line, 32:47 but remind me why that's good for me. 32:51 That actually touches on one of the biggest findings in this survey, 32:54 which is that, first of all, half of people that filled it out 32:58 are feeling the happiest they've ever felt. 33:01 This is an important point we need to make, 33:02 is not everybody's feeling this fear and sense that it's all doomed, 33:07 that actually a lot of like half of people 33:10 are feeling like they're having the best time of their life in their career 33:13 and they're so excited about all the things going on. 33:15 Like you may not feel that. 33:16 If you're not that, you may not believe that, but from what I can see around me, many people 33:21 are very excited, even though they're working harder than they've ever worked, they're also 33:25 the happiest they've ever been about their career. 33:28 Yeah. Well, and I think the context, if I remember, was like a lot of the happiness 33:32 tended to be concentrated in people that were in smaller teams or had more authority. 33:37 Like sort of, yeah. 33:39 Absolutely. And even more interestingly, the strongest correlation is people who said that 33:45 AI has amplified them. 33:47 They feel like they figured out how to use AI 33:49 to do more stuff that they're excited about. 33:53 And interestingly, designers were the least happy 33:55 from this work. 33:56 And that's actually what I hear from designers 33:58 is everyone's moving faster. 34:00 Design can't move that fast. 34:02 You have to get feedback from people. 34:04 You have to go through the alignment. 34:07 You need to think, like sit there and think. 34:10 You can't just agent, iterate, come on up. 34:12 Well, I also think isn't there probably, well, I don't know if you're hearing this from 34:16 the designers, but there's also a like everyone's a designer now. 34:18 Yeah, that's also a big part of it. 34:20 When I worked in education, it's like one of those industries that's really hard to 34:25 work in because everyone was a student once, so everyone thinks they know things. 34:30 And I feel like now designers have that where it's like, oh yeah, I just made this 34:34 in Gemini or I just made this in Claude. 34:37 Here you go. 34:38 Here's my design. 34:39 And by the way, I think that this is true of, you know, a lot of industries, which is like and and whole products where it's like the gap between I 34:47 Made this and what is actually great, right? 34:49 The gap between like I created this prototype and a product that is like exceptional 34:53 It's really big the same is true obviously of design and design just got like way more accessible to the average person 35:00 At least okay design got really really accessible 35:03 You know which can be exhausting when people are telling you how to do your job all the time 35:07 Yeah. 35:08 I have this tweet the other day that got a lot of traction along these lines, a growing 35:14 part of everyone's job is cleaning up the AI slop from other people trying to do your 35:17 job. 35:18 Okay. 35:18 So I have a lot of feelings about this, and it goes to this super intelligence thing 35:24 that we were talking about where it's like, you know, we're saying like, AI is like 35:28 the smartest employee you've ever hired in the entire world, and it's better than 35:34 you at everything. 35:35 And I think it causes people to approach it that way when actually most of our experience 35:42 with AI, I think a lot of people have had the experience with AI where it's like, that's 35:47 wrong. 35:48 I just asked you to do that. 35:50 This isn't good. 35:51 I always think AI needs the same coaching and training that a human does, right? 35:56 It needs context. 35:57 It needs onboarding. 35:58 It needs all of these things. 36:00 And it's kind of much more like an intern, like a bad intern often. 36:04 I call it a lazy intern. 36:08 And what happens, like to your point about AI Slop, is that folks are approaching it as 36:12 if it's like the great, you know, the best employee they've ever hired. 36:17 So they just like copy, paste, send, right? 36:20 And I'm like, you would never do that if you thought about it as an intern. 36:23 You would never take the presentation that an intern handed you and just like straightforward 36:27 it to your boss. 36:28 Like that is a little bit insane, right? 36:32 You would iterate on it. 36:34 you would edit it, you would ask make sure that it had all the context from the 57 conversations 36:38 that you've had with the summer intern before you ship that preso to your boss. AI is the same. 36:45 And I think part of what's going on with all the slop in the world is people have shipped 36:49 accountability. It's like, oh, AI said this was good enough, so I'm just going to copy, 36:54 paste, send. And that is never been how good work happens. I feel like we need a change 37:01 from like this super intelligent being that's better than all of us at our jobs to like, 37:05 no, it's just a fucking intern, man. And like, it needs the coaching and context and all of that 37:11 and many iterations that most interns do. And I think the other thing, you know, to your point 37:16 about accountability is, or to your point about sort of like, if you don't take accountability for 37:21 the quality of your work, that shifts to someone else, right? The person that receives 37:26 it has to deal with it. And that is just a drain on organizations. And I literally see CEOs, like 37:34 we talk about this all the time in Glue Club, CEOs shipping a strategy memo that was clearly 37:41 written by AI. That is you role modeling for your organization that it's fine to outsource 37:46 your thinking and it's fine to outsource your strategy. It's you role modeling that you don't 37:51 need accountability for the work that you send. 37:55 I feel like it goes down to this thing of this last six months, we've really been overvaluing 38:01 productivity, which is just like, you hear all these stories about companies counting 38:06 tokens and having token leaderboards. 38:08 It brings me back to the days when people were counting cars in a parking lot and slack 38:13 bubbles and lines of code, which we all know is a really bad way to manage people. 38:20 And it's, it's not, we've been focused on sort of like, how do you run as fast as you can on the treadmill, but like, not am I going anywhere? 38:29 You know, and which is to me the difference between like productivity and efficiency. 38:32 Like productivity is, can you generate, you know, more, which at this point I think we've proven we can all generate a bunch of shit that other people don't have to wade through to the point of your tweet. 38:42 But is that efficient? 38:43 Does that actually move the conversation forward? 38:45 And the answer lately has been, why no, it does not. 38:49 Yeah, in that report, I have this iceberg image 38:52 of just like, we're doing better on top of all the stuff. 38:56 But the output is worse, thinking judgment is coming down. 38:59 So there's a lot of things we're watching. 39:01 The good news, everyone's aware of this. 39:03 They're like, yeah, maybe this isn't the way 39:04 we should be working. 39:05 No, I thought there was this really interesting 39:07 engineering report that said, you know, 39:11 engineering, like for engineering it has genuinely made people more productive. But the amount 39:16 of lines of code that have had to be rewritten has gone up like 8x. So it's like this like 39:22 very clear symbol of productivity. Obviously, like also the security incidents have gone 39:27 up, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like, there's just this difference between productivity 39:31 and efficiency. And I think part of your burnout data is like, people are just getting swamped, 39:39 You know, and that's exhausting. 39:40 If what you're doing all day is waiting through. 39:44 Did the person on the other side of this actually think about it? 39:46 Did they actually care? 39:48 Did that's tiring? 39:49 That doesn't feel like a good use of your time. 39:51 It just feels a little bit infuriating, you know? 39:54 Yeah. 39:54 It comes back to the grief of like, oh man, I missed what I used to be doing. 39:58 Yeah, look at this weird new job I'm doing. 39:59 Yeah, totally. 40:01 Okay. 40:01 So let's come back to your advice. 40:02 We kind of went on a really important tangent, but let's summarize what's 40:07 It's still true about giving away your Legos and then we'll talk about what's no longer 40:11 true. 40:12 So I'll summarize briefly, I took some notes as you were talking. 40:15 So still true, change is scary, that's normal, I understand that it's part of human nature, 40:22 we don't like change. 40:24 Learning over knowing, still a very important thing to focus on, it's okay if you 40:28 don't know, but if you're focused on learning you'll be probably okay. 40:31 This idea of standing still at successful companies is actually falling behind. 40:35 The company is growing. 40:37 If you're not growing and taking on new challenges and giving away stuff, you're gonna fall behind. 40:42 Is there anything else core to kind of what's still? 40:45 Yeah, I think I would just add one, which is change is scary and hard. 40:50 And the best thing you can do is lean into it, right? 40:54 It is not what your instincts tell you to do, but it is actually the best thing you 40:58 can do in the face of change. 41:00 And that was the message of Legos, you know, basically like, you need to lean 41:05 into this comfort of change in order to grow, and I think it is still true today, 41:09 even if it is maybe even scarier than it's ever been. 41:12 This season's supporting sponsor is DX. 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Visit getdx.com 41:55 slash Lenny to get a demo of DX let's get DX comm slash Lenny okay so now what 42:03 is what is different the advice broadly is okay give away make yourself 42:07 redundant it's gonna be okay I know that's the one that's a lot of hard to 42:12 talk about today yeah make yourself irrelevant everybody it's gonna go 42:17 great yeah you know it's funny like when I when I first really take off and 42:25 I first took me a while to really understand what was going on. 42:28 In total honesty, I was a skeptic for a while where I was like, 42:30 we've been automating things for a while, what is this? 42:34 But eventually I got on board and all of a sudden I was like, 42:38 oh, you know that thing I used to do before I went to give a speech 42:40 at someone's company where I was like, how fast is your head count growing? 42:44 For me, that was like the only symbol I had of like, 42:47 are there people to give Legos to? 42:48 You know, if I'm going to get up on stage and be like, give away your Legos. 42:51 A lot of times people are like, wait a minute, we're not hiring anyone. 42:53 Like, who do I give it to? 42:54 video. 42:55 But now I was like, oh, okay, this message is even more relevant because everyone can 43:00 try to automate parts of their job and everyone can give Legos away. 43:05 And I will tell you, it has been an interesting journey realizing how different it is to give 43:13 things away to robots than it is to give them to a human. 43:17 And principally the point of Legos was you take this thing you've been working 43:23 on and you fully hand it to someone else. 43:27 One of my favorite questions that I get asked at companies when I do the Legos talk is, what 43:32 is the best way to give Legos away to someone else? 43:37 And I love it because I think basically people expect me to be like, so you should incredibly 43:42 carefully hand this Lego to this person and explain to them exactly why you put it 43:47 in the position you put it in, you know, like perfectly describe your tower, make 43:51 sure they have like an instruction manual that they won't fuck up. 43:54 And my answer is actually no. 43:55 The best way to give Legos away is to chuck them at their face and run in the other direction. 44:01 Because our tendency again is towards control. 44:04 Like our tendency is to be like, you will build this tower exactly how I built it 44:10 and you will not mess it up. 44:11 But actually like the point is no, you're giving it away. 44:13 You need to fully separate your mind. 44:15 You need to just hand it to them and trust that the future of whatever that tower 44:20 is belongs to them. And there is both obviously like a lot of fear and a whole bunch of stuff 44:25 that comes to that, but there's a huge amount of freedom, right? You take this brain space and you 44:29 ship it to them. Interestingly, like one of my biggest realizations was that delegating something 44:38 to a robot is not the same as giving it to a human because you cannot get rid of the oversight, 44:47 It's more like delegating something to someone on your team. 44:50 You still own it, and so we've given, yes, we've gotten more efficient because the robots 44:55 can do X, Y, and Z for us, but it's not the same as giving it away to a human because we 45:00 still own the oversight. 45:02 We still own the sort of final product, and that means the mental tax stays with you. 45:09 So yes, in some ways I can do more, but psychologically I still have all the burden 45:15 of all the stuff that all the robots are doing, you know? 45:20 And I think that does make it quite different 45:22 because it just means you don't have as much space 45:27 to then go on to the new things, right? 45:29 You're still, you've still got all the tax of, 45:32 the cost of oversight is not zero. 45:34 Do you know what I mean? 45:34 Again, I wonder if this is part of what's going on 45:37 with some of your burnout data is just like, 45:40 all of a sudden I'm overseeing all these robots 45:42 and maybe all these humans. 45:43 And like it's not, it's more. 45:47 And so anyway, I think that's one of the biggest differences 45:50 is just like, it isn't exactly the same. 45:55 It's like the difference between like transferring a Lego 45:57 to someone where you genuinely get rid of it 45:59 versus like delegating a Lego to someone. 46:02 It's so funny the way you described it 46:03 where you need to not be, 46:05 you need to disconnect from the responsibility 46:07 of this thing now. 46:08 And that's the opposite now 46:10 where somebody else is doing this, the AI, 46:13 But you're still responsible. Yeah, and so it's like having this Lego tower with this little robot coming through and okay 46:19 I'm gonna build I'm gonna work on this now, but you're you still have to represent this tower 46:24 Your boss and so I could a hundred percent see this metaphor. It's like you're clear 46:29 What if you're a manager? It's a familiar feeling right your team got twice as big and now you just have these weird little robots 46:35 That occasionally like fuck up the tower and you have to be like no no no no 46:38 No, that's not what I said, you know, which is like again managing an intern like you get it 46:42 But if you're not a manager like if you've never been a manager and I do think it's important to name that like like I said like 46:49 Managing robots those skills are very similar to managing human humans 46:53 They have less feelings, but you know, it's all the same skills of like oversight and you know giving them context and correcting their work and 47:01 Coaching and like all those skills are the same for managing a robot 47:05 As they are for managing a human and a lot of people don't like that shit like so many people 47:11 actively like chose not to become a manager, do you know what I mean? And so there is exhaustion 47:16 that comes with if you haven't, you know, if you don't enjoy delegating, if you haven't 47:22 worked on all these skills for many, many years, like, then suddenly you are in that 47:26 stance of management. But it also just, I mean, it just means literally everyone 47:30 in the world is a manager now, you know, and all you're doing when you're delegating 47:34 to robots is delegating just like you would to another human on your team. So, you 47:38 I always say the happiest the max people should be managing is like 10 to 12 employees like I've 47:43 managed bigger teams than that and it was not a good look and I don't think there's any data 47:48 that says that people can manage more than that now and if you count robots like I'm worried for 47:54 people's like psychology you know what I mean in terms of like the amount you have to hold in 48:00 your head. Yeah I build a lot of random stuff and I have all these different agents running 48:06 And on the one hand, it's so awesome and all these things get done and it's just like, oh wow, this thing go 48:11 I did all these things and then also I get pinged all day for all these guys. They're like, what about this? 48:16 Okay. Well, I'm stuck here. Oh, is this good? And I'm like, okay 48:19 I got to look through this all actually so I work with an actual human engineer also and I'm just like it makes you 48:25 appreciate a human awesome engineer that you could just give a rough idea to and they get run with it and do 48:31 an awesome job versus, nah, it sucks. 48:34 Okay, let's try again and then sit there for five minutes. 48:36 Wait. 48:37 So yeah. 48:37 It is the difference between managing junior employees 48:39 and managing senior employees. 48:41 Do you know what I mean? 48:42 Like AI right now, pre-junior employees. 48:44 It's not my favorite form of management. 48:46 I always say like, give me the high performers, 48:47 give me, I can turn them into these incredible rocket ships. 48:51 Like managing interns, managing like folks 48:54 that are brand new to workplaces, pretty tiring. 48:57 And I do think that is like what it feels like 48:59 managing AI. And it's so different, like I said, than like throwing a Lego at someone 49:03 and running the other direction, which you can do with your senior engineer, you know. 49:07 Such a good point. Okay, we'll get to like actual advice. Here's what you should probably 49:11 do. But before we get there, what else is different about the original advice around 49:16 giving it where it goes? The first one's so good, just like, you made it so obvious 49:20 why it is very different to give your leg as a way to have machine because you're 49:23 not actually giving away if they're just going to do the work and then you're 49:25 still responsible for it. And you have to oversee it. 49:27 Yeah. 49:28 And I think the second thing that's really different, and we sort of talked about a little 49:32 bit already, but like, my message was always like, you give things away because the only 49:38 way you can make space for new opportunity is by giving things away. 49:43 Do you know what I mean? 49:43 And like, that has two assumptions under it. 49:46 One that it's good to give things away. 49:48 And two that there's new opportunity on the other side. 49:51 And I think this, you know, what I talked about with the fear narrative is one of the 49:58 things that's driving me nuts in the world. 50:00 And we talk about it a lot in Glue Club is just this dominant narrative that like all 50:06 these jobs are going away because of AI and, you know, all these layoffs that are branded 50:11 as AI, like that is not going to support anybody being in a stance of like, yeah, 50:19 let's delegate everything to these robots. Let's give them every piece of our brain and our data 50:24 so that we can have all this new opportunity that's coming along. I think it is the hardest 50:31 conversation to have right now. And to your point about there's lots of people out there that are 50:36 really excited, there are. And I want that for everyone, because this is an incredible moment. 50:43 Like, you know, I've been in technology for almost 20 years, and I've seen a lot. 50:50 But like this is one of those moments. 50:52 This is, you know, the mobile phone on steroids where it's like all sorts of businesses are 50:56 going to be created. 50:57 I'm a believer that a lot of jobs are going to be created because of this technology, 51:02 but I think we've got to start having that conversation in order to get to the place 51:07 where everyone can be leaning in, right? 51:09 everyone can say, oh, it's great to automate all these tasks that I hate because it gives me more 51:13 time to do the things that I love, you know, which is like, I think to your point about the people 51:17 that feel amplified by it, it's like, oh, I don't have to do all this boring ass work. I can just 51:22 focus on the things that bring me joy, right? I can focus on the things that I'm great at. 51:27 That's what we want. But while there's this narrative out there that, you know, 51:32 media companies are propagating that says like, there's nothing for you on the other side. 51:37 Do you know what I mean? We've got universal basic income. Everyone needs to be supported 51:40 by the state because no one's going to have a job in 10 years. Who the fuck wants to give 51:46 Legos to robots if that's the narrative? No one. 51:50 I went to this thing called Food Camp. Have you heard of Food Camp? 51:54 I've heard of it. 51:55 Tim O'Reilly, who started O'Reilly Media and is an awesome smart guy. He came up 51:59 with Web 2.0 as a concept. He organizes these little intimate camps where he invites 52:04 people that he thinks are, you know, can contribute to this conversation to talk about all like 52:10 a topic. And this last one is around just like what happens with humans when AI does 52:15 more and more of our job. And it started with him talking to some, I think it was a lawyer 52:20 who's just like, okay, I'm hoarding this very specific knowledge I have about doing this 52:25 job so that AI cannot do it. It's like I need to protect it because otherwise I'm 52:31 going to be replaced. They don't need me anymore. And I feel like a lot of people are probably 52:35 feeling that a lot of specific niche professions, especially. 52:38 Yeah, absolutely. And I go back, first of all, yes, of course, like, how could you not be 52:43 feeling that way? I don't know. Maybe I'm an abundance person. And maybe I'll regret 52:49 saying this in six months or five years, but I'm like, every piece of data I have 52:55 from my entire life and, you know, some of these conversations I've had like the 53:00 one with Manouche, say, you got to lean in, you know what I mean, that protection and holding 53:07 on and gripping to what you know is not the way you thrive in change. It's not the people 53:14 that define the future. And, you know, again, the Manouche story would say, lawyers are 53:20 always going to exist. They are going to look completely different in every six years 53:25 or every three years or whatever. So what do you think the next version of a lawyer 53:30 looks like? Do you want to be part of designing that? Do you want to be part of creating that? 53:34 Do you want to be part of figuring that out? Or do you want to stay here and try to protect what 53:38 you know? And this is, I think, you know, that's to me, again, like, it's scary out there right 53:45 now. So I don't want to undervalue that. But I think you have to take that stance of, you 53:50 know, agency or we got to use a different word entrepreneurship, you know, like you got 53:54 to take that stance of, I want to be part of designing the future of my profession, 53:58 and not protecting the past. 54:02 I really, really love this framework 54:04 as like almost maybe that's a big part of the advice 54:07 from this conversation is this way of thinking 54:11 from Manush, which is like my job will be different, 54:13 but it'll continue to exist. 54:15 And the question is just what will it be? 54:17 And let me think about that, lead and like prepare 54:19 for that almost and not try to resist. 54:21 Cause like resisting is not going to work anyway. 54:24 Yeah. And if you listen to the Manush's story, 54:26 like it's such an entrepreneurial story. And I know that not everyone is great at that, 54:33 but it is very much the like, let me try this next. It's just like, but it comes, you know, 54:39 for her, it just, I think it was founded in this belief of like, this profession is evolving 54:43 and changing and I want to be part of defining the future of it, you know? And I, again, I 54:48 think that's, until the data genuinely tells us otherwise, like I would say that is the 54:54 stance I would take particularly in tech, what would you do if you believed there were 54:59 going to be more and different interesting engineering jobs in five years? 55:06 How would you behave if you believed there was opportunity on the other side of letting 55:10 go? 55:11 Well, let's see if there's more to that thread because that's really helpful, which 55:15 is, okay, this is going to go great. 55:17 My product managers will thrive, there will be more need for product managers because 55:21 There's a lot of listeners here, PMs, engineers, founders. 55:26 So what do you think people should 55:28 be trying to do in that world where there will be more? 55:31 Is it like, pay attention to how you're amplified? 55:35 Is it look at people who are doing great and do what they're 55:37 doing? 55:37 What do you think people could be doing 55:39 to succeed in that future? 55:41 It's funny. 55:42 We had a conversation. 55:43 We run these. 55:44 My team and I run these top talent cohorts at companies. 55:47 And a lot of what we do is get leaders talking 55:50 into each other and helping each other and this woman who is ahead of design brought this 55:56 problem where she was like, they won't let me ship code. 55:59 She was like, I did it. 56:00 I basically built the thing and I was like, just let me get it to production. 56:06 She was like, talking to engineering was like a brick wall where they were like, no, 56:09 you can't ship code. 56:10 You're a designer. 56:11 I'm an engineer. 56:12 I own what goes to production and there are good reasons for not letting things 56:17 go willy-nilly to production, particularly if you work in the financial space, which they did. 56:22 I get it. But I think so much of the stance is we got to break down some of these walls 56:29 between what was a designer, what was an engineer, what was a PM. This is obviously 56:36 a lot of what's happening, but how do we really shed what we knew, which again is hard. It's 56:47 Imagine, okay, what does it look like? 56:49 This is why I think the startup land is so happy, 56:52 is because they're not fighting against the way things were. 56:55 They're inventing the way things could be. 56:58 And how can you make more space for that inside of a company? 57:02 To me is the number one thing I talk about when I go, 57:05 which is like, if you're not leaning 57:08 into the creativity conversation 57:10 versus the fear conversation, 57:12 like you are leading folks who are just terrified, right? 57:16 Like how do you get people to into a stance of like I'm excited and I'm I want to try things 57:24 and I want to like tentatively let this design or ship code to production you know. 57:30 So to me like I think how can you imagine a world with less walls. 57:35 How can you get rid of some of those walls that have felt so important you know for the way 57:40 we've done things for the last 15, 20, 25 years, I think that is a conversation that 57:47 a lot of folks should be having. 57:48 Just along those lines, just to be clear, is the idea here, okay, I've been a designer 57:52 my whole life, is the advice there, okay, like maybe I'll be something else in the 57:56 next few years, that's not just designer. 57:59 Well, I feel like a lot of your conversations are pointing, I mean, like, I think Adam 58:04 Misery was on here who I worked with many years ago and was a designer and he's 58:08 saying, like, hey, we're, you know, the idea that, like, you're a designer and therefore 58:12 you only do these things, that's obviously changing, right? 58:15 Now you can prototype. 58:16 You can have a much more robust and deep conversations. 58:18 To some extent, you know, you can ship code. 58:20 Like, Alayna Varna was talking about being a marketer and shipping code to production. 58:24 So to me, they're just like, were these very defined roles and a way that things 58:30 worked? 58:31 And we got to shed a bunch of that because things are possible now that weren't possible 58:35 before. 58:36 And that, you know, like when you listen to minutiae's story, so, so much of what she's 58:41 talking about is like the only form of journalism used to be like sitting in a newsroom employed 58:46 by, you know, some giant news corporation. 58:50 Like you think about journalism today, like everybody's journal like sub stack. 58:54 And part of what she talked about is like the crazy thing is your relationship to the 58:58 business model. 58:59 Like again, it used to be a paycheck. 59:01 And now it's like every journalist is an entrepreneur. 59:04 I just can't imagine a lot of those transformations in tech, 59:09 but you have to be willing to break down all the walls 59:12 and start asking the questions of, like, fundamentally, 59:14 what is journalism? 59:15 Fundamentally, what is design? 59:17 Like, fundamentally, what is product management? 59:19 Which, by the way, is a question that we all 59:21 should have been asking for many, many years, 59:22 because it looks really different at different companies, 59:25 you know? 59:25 And I feel like that should be true of every single person, 59:28 which is, like, what is the value of all these different roles 59:31 When you strip away a lot of the stuff that we've built up and then what might it look like? 59:36 You know in five or ten years. Here's the big question Molly that I think a lot of people are wondering 59:41 Are there any Legos you should not give away that you should resist? 59:46 giving away which is a radical departure from your 59:49 Advice for the many years totally. I know as we were preparing for this 59:53 I was realizing that's like the biggest 59:56 difference like when people again to the questions I get asked a lot like both 60:02 online and when I give speeches and stuff like one of them is have you ever 60:05 regretted giving a Lego away like do you ever is there something you shouldn't 60:10 give away and in the in the context of sort of like the rapid-scale company 60:15 where opportunity is flying at you and getting dumped on your head my answer is 60:18 no give them the fuck away like you you cannot often imagine what is coming 60:23 next like you can't always design the future and it's not always clear 60:26 sometimes you are genuinely giving away the known and stepping into the unknown, 60:31 but it has basically always been a good idea in every example. I've seen both personal experience 60:36 and everyone I've worked with and coached over many, many years. In AI land, I think we got a caveat 60:42 this. I think there are some Legos that shouldn't be given away, that the robots both don't 60:53 deserve and like that we should hold on to and I think that is like one of the things that's starting to show up in this conversation around AI slop is like 61:02 There's just some work that shouldn't be outsourced like my fervent hope for AI is that it lets us do less of the things 61:08 We shouldn't have been doing in the first place and more of the things that you know 61:13 humans are best in the world at right like 61:16 Anybody that's written in a way mo 61:19 has this experience of like, whoa, this is crazy. 61:22 Humans shouldn't be driving. 61:24 Like driving is fundamentally just like code and systems 61:27 and we're really bad at being automated. 61:31 Like we don't stop at the red lights. 61:32 You know what I mean? 61:33 So I think like what are the things 61:36 that we're uniquely suited to do? 61:39 Those are the things we should hold on to. 61:40 And some of that is inside this slop conversation 61:43 which is things that require judgment, right? 61:47 Again, to the CEOs that are asking AI for a strategy and then copying and pasting it 61:52 and sending it to their company, no. 61:55 That is fundamentally something that a human brain, that you as a CEO of your company need 62:01 to own. 62:02 I think things that require trust that are fundamental to relationships. 62:09 We should not be outsourcing these things to robots because, well, for any number 62:15 of reasons. I think things where you don't even, if you don't know the definition of good, 62:21 how can you give it to your summer intern? If you don't understand what quality is, you 62:29 can't outsource that yet. Those are just examples for me. I bet you have some too, 62:33 but to me that is one of the biggest things I've been thinking about lately is, as of 62:40 Today, I think there's some stuff we just shouldn't give away, you know, and breaking news. 62:45 That's like, what a departure from, from this, how many years ago did you write this, 13 years? 62:51 Yeah, 13. 62:52 Wow. 62:53 That's, that's something. 62:55 That's a sign of the change we're living through, that now there's some of the issues. 62:59 Hold on to some of them. 63:00 Yeah. 63:01 So interesting. 63:02 There's a few thoughts I had here while you were talking. 63:04 Like if this is almost a discussion around what should AI do? 63:08 Where do you want AI to be involved and where you not want it involved? 63:12 One framework I've loved is this idea of you want AI kind of in the middle of stuff. 63:18 You want to be at the top like coming up just like, here's kind of where we want to go 63:22 and here's the idea, here's the what I'm thinking. 63:25 And then AI does a bunch of stuff and then you review it, iterate until it's done. 63:29 Sandwich. 63:30 The sandwich, Lenny. 63:33 The human sandwich. 63:35 Yeah dude. 63:36 Oh man. 63:36 Okay, we're getting there. We're getting a metaphor the other is something Tara 63:41 I just thought of as you were talking so Tara shared this really good perspective that 63:46 Humans are gonna net are gonna be necessary to 63:50 To help guide us towards the world. We want to have a product. We want to build 63:56 Versus the most optimal AI 63:59 Version, I think as a long-term Airbnb person 64:03 Nope, nothing personal. The booking.com if you've seen a very different experience than Airbnb booking.com their whole philosophy 64:11 Let's optimize the shit out of every second of interaction. So it's just all these upsells and pressure and stress 64:17 Just like oh my god, only one spot left you five seconds left 64:20 Just book a hundred times hundred people book it. It's just like it's it's so stressful 64:24 But so effective you go there you're like, oh 64:27 You're like, I didn't even know I was booking it, but I booked it 64:30 Exactly. 64:30 I'm going to Japan. 64:32 One spot left. 64:34 But it's so good. 64:35 It's like self-active at getting you to book, Booking.com Appropriate, and it worked. 64:40 And it's doing great as a business, so good idea, good stuff, guys. 64:45 Airbnb has always been, we don't want to become that. 64:48 We want it to feel really nice, to have a great experience, feel good. 64:53 So I think that's a big part of the answer as you were talking, made me realize 64:56 as humans are there to guide towards the world we want. 65:01 Yeah, and to some extent where you're talking about 65:02 is taste, you know, that like, 65:05 there is a big difference between something that's okay 65:09 and something that's phenomenal, you know? 65:11 I think it's even beyond taste, just a, 65:12 I think it's like a vision. 65:14 It's like, what is your vision of where this should be? 65:15 Cause you could say, you know, people at Booking.com, 65:17 they have taste for a specific type, 65:19 you know, it's like a different kind of taste. 65:22 Yeah. 65:22 But it's like, yeah, what do you want? 65:24 What do you want? 65:24 What do you want the world to look like? 65:26 I like that. 65:27 I'm into that. 65:29 Yeah. 65:29 I also just think we got to accept that at least for the moment. 65:33 This is a bunch of interns. 65:35 This is a bunch of junior employees, and if you're outsourcing your vision or the future 65:40 of the world to a bunch of summer interns, we have problems. 65:47 The human brain is powerful at a lot of things. 65:49 We are powerful at a lot of things. 65:51 You individually are phenomenal at a set of things, like, do not outsource that. 65:57 Like, you can enable it, you can amplify it to use your data, but don't outsource it 66:02 to these weird robots that, you know, are effectively summer interns. 66:06 The trick is, as it gets better, can you hold on to things you want? 66:11 You know, there's like, parts of our job we love, like, engineers used to like, 66:15 you know, like a lot of engineers used to love to sit there and kind of write 66:19 code, I think. And I wonder if you can hold out and just like, no, I love this. I'm not 66:24 going to let AI take this on. Yeah. I have two reactions to that because 66:27 I've been thinking about it a bunch since I had that conversation with that engineer. 66:32 The first is, will there be a sort of whip lash back? You see this in art. You see this 66:40 in a lot of things. Actually, you see a lot of different parts of tech where the trend 66:44 is like all AI, everything AI, will there be like the handmade, like somebody who's talking 66:50 to me about like AI is going to make all this art and but does it does not increase the value of 66:54 like true human-made art, you know, that you know it was made by a human that you know it was 66:58 crafted by hands. Like I have that same question. I'm not an engineer, so I'm not trying to 67:03 say this, but like will something show back up where the value of human written code or 67:10 something like that suddenly gets valuable again or trendy. So I'm curious about that 67:17 because I've seen those whiplashes enough times in life that it's hard sometimes to know what's 67:24 a trend and what's permanent, particularly in this state. But I guess the other thing that 67:31 I think about a little bit is like, yes, you loved that. And yes, you were extraordinary 67:36 at it and that is amazing and we should grieve it. 67:41 We should grieve that maybe that's going away 67:43 and you know, there's this guy, Chip Connolly, 67:45 what am I saying? 67:46 You know him well. 67:48 Who I, yeah, he's coming on work life soon 67:51 and I loved the conversation with him. 67:53 He was talking about like midlife 67:55 but he was saying like sometimes 67:56 you need to throw a funeral for things. 67:58 Do you know what I mean? 67:58 And I was like, yeah man, 68:00 sometimes you need to, 68:00 the funeral is there for a reason. 68:03 So, like, let's take a minute and mourn what was, but then let's ask what could be, like, 68:09 what could you love that way again? 68:11 What could you be extraordinary at that way again in this new world if the robots are doing 68:16 X, Y, and Z? 68:17 And I think both things can be true. 68:19 Like, you can be really sad about what you've lost, and there can be opportunity in what's 68:25 coming. 68:27 But we've got to be able, we've got to make space for both, you know? 68:30 And I think sometimes we're not allowing the grief because we're just like just get excited about the future people 68:36 Such a powerful way of thinking about it. Just accepting it is going to change 68:42 Just like grieving it 68:44 That was nice. That was a nice world. I had I miss it. Maybe I didn't appreciate it as much as I should have totally 68:52 but then not fighting the change that is coming and 68:55 And I love this idea of just like coming back to the original idea of the Legos concept is being comfortable with 69:02 your job changing and 69:05 Knowing it'll almost surely be okay and growth comes from trying letting go and and that kind of stuff 69:14 Another thought I had as I'm thinking about this something. I've been noticing 69:17 So, you know this whole like hacking this like open AI model trying to hack into hugging face and the swarm of thousand agents 69:23 just coordinating without anyone knowing, just like, we will solve this very impossible 69:27 problem by finding. 69:29 Interns. 69:30 Very. 69:31 Very. 69:32 Motivated interns. 69:33 Yeah, exactly. 69:34 I love how motivated this AI is to solve the problem. 69:37 Yeah. 69:37 I'm going to ... The good news is I'm feeling, there's always this question of, talked 69:43 about this in the last podcast, this idea of are we going to be in a slow takeoff 69:46 or a fast takeoff? 69:47 Are we going to get to an AI that just accelerates to this extremely super intelligent 69:52 and then we are in big trouble because we can't control it. 69:55 Or are we going to be in the slow takeoff or are we going to watch it develop and we catch it as it's doing that stuff like we did with this hacking incident? 70:03 It feels to me like we're definitely in the slow takeoff moment. 70:06 It feels like every of these like, oh shit. 70:09 We're just like, okay, look, we got it. 70:10 We see it. We're evolving. We're learning. 70:12 Obviously, there's always this fear. 70:14 Okay, but until it hits this self reinforcement loop that trains itself 70:20 and then it becomes super intelligent for sure maybe it'll happen feeling right now it's not 70:25 on track to do that and so that feels nice to feel like okay it's not gonna your job is not 70:31 gonna go away tomorrow we have time to adapt and learn and see how all this goes and it's not as 70:38 crazy as people thought it might be. Well and I think that is really important to name you know 70:44 because there was maybe more like three or four months ago or six months ago than there is now 70:51 but but there is this feeling of being left behind you know and there was a really strong 70:55 narrative out there that was like you're too late you're already too late you know what I mean like 71:00 if you're not automating every single part of your life and managing 26 agents and I don't even 71:05 know you know like that you're behind and every single conversation I have with every leader 71:13 or every manager at, you know, all of the big labs, 71:16 every company is like, we are early. 71:19 This is like whatever sports ball game you want to be in, 71:23 like this is inning one, period one, like yard one. 71:29 We're early. 71:30 And the future is ours to shape, you know, it's yours. 71:34 Like you can, my friend Max Mullen said 71:38 like the distance from beginner to expert is really short. 71:42 And I think that goes again to the fear narrative where I'm just like, we need to be encouraging 71:47 people to be part of shaping the future, not just making them terrified of it. 71:51 And I feel like that is on all of us, you know, to some extent, but it is a slow takeoff 72:00 and it isn't like the future is next day, next month, like it's gonna take years to 72:07 really understand what this new tool, this new technology, all 72:12 these fun interns can actually do and also what they're best 72:16 at. I think that is a really powerful message because it helps 72:21 people feel like, oh, okay, like, I am part of this, not like 72:25 sort of holding on for dear life while being dragged, you 72:28 know, by a plane that's taking off at 100 miles an hour. 72:30 I completely agree. In my last podcast conversation, I don't 72:33 know when we'll come out when is about this fear of the 72:35 a permanent underclass that if you don't catch up, 72:38 if you're not on top of this, 72:39 that you're gonna be left behind. 72:41 I think there is definitely a part of that 72:42 in the sense of many companies are doing extremely well 72:45 and people that have joined those companies 72:46 are gonna be very successful. 72:48 And some companies aren't. 72:49 And there's this whole other discussion 72:51 around the socioeconomic divide growing significantly 72:56 in the world and just what that causes 72:58 in a world where there are many wealthy people, 73:00 many more than there have ever existed. 73:02 That's its own thing. 73:03 We don't need to get onto that. 73:04 Well, I hope you do many episodes on that someday Lenny like I think it's 73:09 But I it is another area where I'm like, I'm not sure we know what's real yet 73:13 You know, I think it's obviously like one of the most important conversations 73:16 But like what is real and like what is the future actually gonna look like to me like the stories out in the world? 73:23 They're not really yet. Like we don't know 73:26 It's true, and I think that's important to name. Oh, man. That's a so that's a big big topic 73:32 The interesting part you mentioned that I wanted to follow the thread on is this idea of you're not behind. 73:37 What really helped me see this is Ian Silber, head of design at OpenAI. 73:42 He was on the podcast recently and he made this really good point. 73:45 He's like, this is the best time in history to be a designer. 73:47 If you just came in fresh as a new grad into design and just become really, 73:53 you just start with all these tools that designers have now. 73:55 Now you can accelerate so quickly and learn to do design faster than anyone's ever learned 74:01 to do design. 74:02 And I feel that with like Rockbot recently came out, there's all these like skills people 74:06 have built over time with like Codex and Clock Code, like I'm such a pro with all these 74:10 tools. 74:11 And now it's just the tools are getting so much smarter. 74:13 You don't need a lot of the scaffolding that people have built over time. 74:17 Like if someone were to start fresh today and try Rockbot or even in Codex, like 74:23 Like you don't need to have spent years being on top of all of the news and all of the updates 74:29 to it. 74:30 You could just dive right in and build as much as people that have been on it for a long 74:35 time can build. 74:36 I feel like the actual main skill to build, something I've been thinking about, I tweeted 74:40 this but I feel like I didn't get enough attraction because I think it's very important. 74:44 I feel like the biggest skill to build right now is when you're about to do something 74:49 Anything to ask yourself, can AI help me with this thing? 74:53 Because once you get good at that, and I've been getting, it's like, I think about the 74:57 stimulus and response kind of thing of meditation, like you create more space between stimulus 75:02 and response if you learn to be aware of what's going on inside. 75:05 I feel like you need to insert, can AI help me with this? 75:08 Which sounds like dirty and like what the hell, why would you want to add. 75:11 But I feel like that's a really new skill, because then you can start, as these tools 75:17 get better, you can start to leverage them in all these different ways that I think is what separates 75:21 a lot of people right now. No, totally. And I, you know, it goes to that point about the walls. 75:27 Like I think those of us that have been around a long time and there's a way that things were 75:32 done, right? There's a way that product was built. There's like all these ways, right? Those 75:37 are walls. They're walls, they're old. And like part of what we need to do, and I think part 75:43 of what you're saying is you're actually a little bit as an at an advantage if you don't 75:48 know those walls exist. 75:50 If you approach the world as if engineers didn't have a different role from X or Y or 75:55 Z or this is the way things are done, there is an advantage to being able to say, what 76:02 if? 76:02 What if I just did it? 76:05 And to just try and to your point to always think, hey, what's the best use 76:10 of my time and then what, you know, could an agent or a robot do for me. 76:15 And I think that's like partially the point about the learners, right? 76:17 Like if you're able to shed the sort of things you think you know and lean into like the 76:24 possibility and the first principles thinking, which I know you have a great article about 76:28 too, like that, that I think is going to define the future. 76:31 Those are going to be the people that are going to shape what this thing looks 76:35 like. 76:37 Yeah. There's also a thread here around ambition that's coming up a lot on the podcast. 76:41 Kind of connected. Yeah. This idea that now that it's so easy to do whatever you want, just describe it and it's built. 76:49 The thing that we need to, in addition to asking ourselves, can I help me with this thing is, what's kind of the, like how do I be more ambitious with this idea? 76:58 Because the tools can now just do so much and they're just like waiting for you to tell me something more ambitious than that. 77:03 I'm like, that's all you got for me. 77:05 And we're not, human nature doesn't, 77:07 like we're not used to end product teams and business 77:10 just like thinking about the most ambitious version 77:11 of a thing, we're thinking about the MVP 77:13 and what's the quickest way to get this out? 77:15 And now it feels like the push is how do we think big? 77:19 What's like the hardest thing we can ask this ad to do? 77:21 Cause it may actually just achieve it out of one ask. 77:25 Yeah. And I'd also nudge on the idea that like, 77:28 yeah, you can just like type something into existence. 77:32 But one of the other questions you need to ask yourself is like, is it good? 77:36 This is like the slop and the accountability thing, which is like, and if ambition is wrapped 77:43 up in like, how do I build something phenomenal that's going to endure? 77:48 Like that I'm interested in, if it's just like, how do I make more shit and put it 77:52 out in the world? 77:52 Like one of my questions, this is really frontier Lenny is like, what is the AI slop 77:58 version of startups? 77:59 Like, are we about to see a shit ton of companies just shipping stuff out into the world that's 78:05 going to last for like six or 12 months and then just disappear or get irrelevant? 78:10 Definitely. 78:11 So, okay, great. 78:13 That doesn't sound fun. 78:14 Like, how can you be the pioneer of the enduring thing, the thing that's going to still be 78:19 around in five years, you know, that's going to matter. 78:21 That's going to be great. 78:23 Not just exist. 78:24 And again, it goes to the difference between just like productivity, right? 78:28 Like I built a thing and what is good? Like what is actually worth it? What's worth other people's time? 78:33 Yeah, I think that's a big differentiating opportunity right now instead of just shipping the thing fast 78:38 It's what's like a very good version of this thing and and people see that they're like, oh wow, this is different 78:44 Yeah, exactly. I think that this goes to the point of like 78:47 What will matter when it comes to human touch, you know, and I I think a lot of that is gonna come down to like 78:54 the question of like what is good and what is worth it and what endures. 78:58 Is there anything that we haven't touched on that we should before we try to summarize maybe some 79:03 key lessons from this free freewheeling conversation? 79:08 Well the one thing I just wanted to say is like I was thinking yesterday because of 79:14 the conversation I was having is like what what do I want every manager or leader out there to 79:19 know. Because I think the world of the IC is honestly a little more clear. You are more productive 79:30 and you have all this power and agency around building and the world that feels very hard to 79:36 me right now is the world of the managers and the leaders because so much is changing so fast. 79:44 It's a little bit hard to know what to tell people. It's a little bit hard to know what 79:47 what your team should look like, what matters, 79:48 what doesn't matter, you know, all that. 79:50 And so I guess like I wanted to say a couple of things 79:55 to the managers and leaders out there 79:57 if you'll give me the sec. 79:58 Like the first is like understand that you're a role model, 80:01 you know, and that what you do and how you behave 80:04 is essentially showing your team what good looks like. 80:08 And that means that how you use AI trickles down, 80:11 but also how you sit in this moment, 80:13 like how you show up. 80:16 And for me, what I want a little more space for in the world 80:21 is to be able to acknowledge what this change feels like. 80:25 I hope there's more managers out there 80:28 because of this conversation, talking about grief 80:30 and talking about the emotions that come with change 80:33 and talking about how hard this is for people. 80:37 I think that acknowledging what this rate of change 80:40 does to people's brains and psychology is like, 80:43 it just honestly even acknowledging it makes it easier for people. Like I said, I swear to God, 80:48 that's most of what The Legos article did is just tell people, hey, that thing that you're feeling, 80:54 other people have felt it before you and it hasn't meant that everything is going to hell in a hand 80:58 basket. You know, it's meant, oh, you're going through a lot of change really, really fast. 81:02 And it's scary and hard. So the more that like leaders can be talking about that, I think 81:07 like the more sane everyone's going to feel and less alone, you know, knowing that like 81:13 someone at XYZ company is feeling the same way as you makes a difference. 81:19 And I guess the last thing I just say is like, I think everyone owns this to some extent, 81:27 but managers and leaders more so like, we need to hold on to the definition of like 81:32 accountability and what good means. 81:34 Like, I think that's part of the role modeling. 81:38 Like, what is right to give away to AI 81:41 and what do we still as humans and people 81:44 and workers need to own? 81:47 Like, we're gonna have to role model that 81:49 and we're gonna have to create standards for that. 81:51 So that goes to your own behavior, 81:53 but it also goes to how you lead 81:54 and how you talk about it. 81:56 Like, I Clay put out like this beautiful AI writing policy 82:00 a couple weeks ago, I think it was, and it's so badass because it's literally just talking 82:07 about being accountable for what you ship out in the world and being accountable for 82:11 what good is regardless of how you made it. 82:14 And for today, to me, that feeling of treating AI as a junior intern and realizing that it's 82:24 fundamentally just a tool to get work done, but what matters is the work is still done 82:28 mostly by the humans and the human brains, and we got to take care of the humans and we got to help 82:33 them figure out how to navigate this wild, wild West that we are in. I'm really glad you added that. 82:40 It connects to another really interesting insight from the survey, which is that 82:44 the one thing that you can actually change to increase people's happiness right now at work 82:49 is their manager. That's the strongest lever for happiness at work. You can actually do 82:55 something about it. All this other AI stuff, you can't do a ton about, that's one. Most 83:01 people's managers are not good according to the survey also. 83:05 None of this is surprising. 83:07 Taking care of the managers is kind of just a reminder that you have a lot of leverage 83:11 there. 83:11 Yeah, which by the way, there are trends inside of bigger companies to get rid of 83:15 management, like to get rid of whole management layers. I think it is a huge mistake. 83:19 Like, I think it is going to end up biting people in the ass long term because I see 83:26 no signs right now that management matters less. 83:28 If anything, to your point, I think it matters more. 83:33 And again, I get the efficiency and the cost savings and all that, but I think like at 83:38 what costs, what costs that you can't predict. 83:40 So it really resonates that management is almost more important because it makes people 83:45 feel seen. 83:46 What a great manager does is make people feel seen and supported and help them figure out 83:50 whatever mess they're in. 83:52 It's going to be so interesting to see if there's a backlash towards that. 83:55 People have had great managers. 83:57 They're rarely going to be like, I wish I had no manager. 84:01 It's like people with bad managers, which is a lot of people, I don't need this person, 84:04 but they're so useless. 84:05 Yeah, they're in my way. 84:06 They are a wall. 84:07 No, totally. 84:08 I mean, I always say you only get a couple of good managers in your life and when 84:11 you find one, hold on to it for dear life because you're only going to get 84:15 like too. 84:16 Oh man, scary. 84:18 I've never heard that advice before. 84:21 Anything else that you wanted to share or touch on? 84:26 Come on, I feel like we, I mean, we'll be fascinating, we'll reflect on this in six months 84:30 and see what- 84:31 That's what I was thinking. 84:32 We're in the middle of it right now, it's like, Elizabeth Stone had a really good way 84:36 of framing it. 84:36 We're in the storming phase, and then there's the norming phase. 84:40 I know. 84:41 I have no idea what that actually means, but it sounds right. 84:43 It's storming, norming, and yeah. 84:45 Well, they're storming, norming, and then they're performing. 84:47 But the other thing that nobody tells you 84:49 about that framework is that you can go backwards. 84:51 Like, you often go through cycles. 84:53 This is like a, it's a model on team development. 84:57 And you go through storming, and then you go through norming, 84:59 and then you go from performing. 85:00 But you can slip from performing into storming, 85:03 and I feel like we're gonna see a lot of that. 85:05 Mm-hmm, oh boy. 85:07 Yeah. 85:08 It's like very cool to be living through this history. 85:12 Right? 85:12 It's like easy to take for granted just how this is like it's like we're living through 85:17 You know, it's funny you say that because that's actually something else I always talk about when I do these lego speeches 85:24 Is like being inside of a rapidly growing company feels like being inside of a tornado. Do you know what I mean? It's like it is so 85:33 Absorbing and I don't know shit's just lying at you at all times and everything's changing all the time 85:38 And it is so easy in that state to lose the forest for the trees. 85:42 Like you can get really bogged down or stuck in like obsessing about this person 85:49 or this thing or feeling undervalued. 85:52 And a lot of what I say to folks in those speeches is like, you got to zoom out. 85:56 You got to think about what is the story that I want to tell on the other side of this. 86:01 Like I want to, you know, it's less about your title or all these things 86:04 than it is about I was here and I helped build this. 86:07 I talk about it as like a giant Legos sculpture. So it's like, you're like, let's pretend it's a tiger. 86:12 You're gonna leave here with this incredible story, right? You built the feed and then you 86:17 like were part of building the face and then you rebuilt the butt three times and then you 86:21 realized it like wasn't just a tiger, it was like a whole zoo. Like that is what it feels like 86:25 to be inside of these rapidly changing companies. And I wonder, you know, as you were saying 86:32 that what I was thinking about is, gosh, imagine the stories we're going to be telling 86:35 in five or 10 years like I was there when here's what I thought it that was right here's what I 86:39 thought that was wrong I was the first person to say this oh man I was so wrong about that 86:44 like you are living through history um that you will be telling stories about uh to whatever you 86:50 know generation of new grads shows up in 10 years um what do you want your story you're part 86:56 of that story to be you know how are you going to tell that story I think there is something 87:00 about zooming out and realizing like it is hard and there is a lot of change going on but there is 87:06 a crazy fun story that we're all going to be telling on the other side of this. We just don't 87:11 know what it is yet. Hopefully not just talking to our AGI. Yeah. Tell me more. Tell me more Molly. 87:17 Totally. That's so fascinating. Yeah exactly. You're so smart. Oh man. Okay what if we do just 87:25 like some bullet points like takeaways for folks just like here's a few kind of key things to 87:29 Keep in mind, coming from this, 87:32 giving where your leg goes framework, 87:35 see where your mind goes, 87:35 and then maybe I'll add a few for my notes. 87:37 Okay. 87:39 To me, like, most important is, 87:42 change is scary and hard, 87:44 but that doesn't mean it's bad. 87:45 That means you have to embrace the emotions 87:48 that come with it, 87:49 but you also have to lean into it, 87:51 and you should let go. 87:53 Like, yes, it's scary, 87:55 and yes, it feels like, 87:57 there may not be anything waiting on the other side, 87:59 But what's the alternative to hold on to this thing that might be slowly dying like that's not safe either 88:05 So leaning into change 88:07 Feels like to me the most important thing for folks to take away 88:13 I think as part of that I would just say like 88:16 grief is 88:17 Part of this and sometimes grief needs a funeral or do what you got to do 88:22 You know to like be sad let your teams be sad 88:24 But the people around you make space for that because like they're change with change 88:30 comes shedding things that you loved and that sucks. 88:36 I think like one of the other things 88:39 that feels like it really came out, 88:40 Lenny is like, there is opportunity here 88:43 and we gotta like start ignoring or muting 88:46 or whatever some of this fear narrative 88:51 because right now the data isn't saying 88:53 like there are no jobs for you. 88:54 The data is saying like, 88:56 actually there's gonna be a lot of opportunity 88:58 created by this, particularly if you're willing to lean into reinvention, right? 89:03 Not what was the form of your job two years ago, but what might it be in five years? 89:11 What else? 89:12 I guess like breaking down walls is the other thing I was thinking, but what came to your list? 89:16 Well, there's the manouche kind of perspective of imagine your job isn't going to go away. 89:20 Imagine your job will continue, but be different. 89:22 Yeah, exactly. 89:23 Exactly. 89:24 I love, it was a real mind change for me when she said that because I was like, whoa, yeah. 89:32 What is engineering going to look like in five years? 89:35 Right. 89:35 It's not going to go away. 89:36 It's going to be some different. 89:37 Maybe there'll be more of it. 89:39 Like journalism. 89:39 There's more journalists out there, for better or for worse. 89:43 Yeah. 89:43 And so far, there's more cams, more engineers. 89:48 So far, that's going well. 89:49 Well, another kind of takeaway is just be deliberate about what you do, what you give to AI. 89:54 And there's a few ways to think about it. 89:56 One is just like, what is AI going to do a terrible job at? 89:58 Don't do that. 89:59 What is it you love that you don't want it to take for you? 90:02 How do you avoid brain rot and just overlaying in AI? 90:05 It's like, there's a few things there, just like AI is not going to, don't give everything 90:09 to AI. 90:10 Yeah. 90:10 And I think also for a lot of us acknowledging that AI is not this super intelligent being, 90:16 It's like it is much more like an intern and that means like literally think about it as an intern 90:22 Like what would you give to an intern and what would you never give them? I think that's the core of it 90:27 Yeah, and I feel like well, I feel like we said this but like 90:31 There just may be some things we should never give away and that is genuinely different like 90:37 Give away your Legos, but like be discerning about what you should keep and what should be human and what humans are here for 90:44 Or I think that's part of the conversation for the next however many years is, what are 90:50 humans uniquely good at? 90:52 And what I think about there just very concretely in my mind is be the person that guides what 90:57 you're doing to a place, to the vision you have of the world you want. 91:01 Not just the simplest thing, not the thing that AI is pointing to, just what do you 91:05 actually want? 91:06 And that's our job for a while. 91:08 Yeah. 91:09 and like at the individual level, 91:11 how can this new tool, this fun, intelligent intern 91:14 that you've hired, like let you do more of what you love. 91:17 You know, let you bring more joy into the world. 91:19 Let you lean into the things that you love doing. 91:22 How can it amplify you instead of feeling 91:25 like all you're doing is losing things to it? 91:27 What a moment in time we're in Molly right now. 91:29 I know. 91:30 Trying to figure all this out. 91:31 We're gonna re-watch this in a year or two 91:34 and make fun of ourselves. 91:35 Oh, we're gonna be, we nailed it. 91:36 We got everything right. 91:38 Perfect. 91:39 Visionaries. 91:41 Oh, man. 91:42 Well, with that, Molly, is there anything else, anything you want to plug? 91:45 Anything you want to point people to or anything you want to tell people 91:47 about that you're up to that might be interesting, useful to them? 91:50 I'll say two things. 91:51 Like, first, like, I get a lot of wisdom, but also a lot of support for 91:57 this kind of conversation from the community and Glue Club. 92:00 And I think if you're a leader listening to this and feeling like 92:05 lonely and a little bit unsupported like that is find a community whether it's 92:11 Glue Club or another one where you can talk about this because I do think like 92:14 leaning on each other to learn like what's real and what's not and what's 92:17 valuable and what's not like so much of what we're doing in Glue Club is being 92:20 like if anybody else seeing this like and that that is really valuable like 92:24 you can do it in in Lenny land as well like but just get out there and 92:28 talk about what's real and what's not don't just be staying a sad lonely 92:32 whole. But the second thing I wanted to say, Lenny, is thank you for making space for this. I think 92:36 it's important, like, there's so much space right now for the, like, what should I do and what, 92:42 you know, what skills should I get and what course should I take and, you know, what tool 92:46 should I try next? Who's hot today? But, like, we aren't talking enough about the human side of 92:51 this and what it feels like to be going through this for everyone. And so I'm grateful that 92:56 you reached out and we talked about making space to talk about this, because I think 93:00 Hopefully people will leave feeling a little more like sane and like, oh, everybody else is feeling a little crazy right now, too 93:07 And there's lots of people out there grieving and like that's okay. Like that's normal. So thank you Lenny 93:13 Thank you Molly. I 93:16 Think of these I've been con a term for these sorts of episodes. I call them Trojan horse episodes 93:21 Where people come for like all this tactical concrete. I need to how do I use AI in this way? 93:26 How do I become better PM and then I get because there's these like 93:30 You get there be important episodes that slip right in. Yeah, exactly 93:34 You're like, okay. I didn't know I needed that but that was a very helpful. Yeah, so 93:38 Welcome to the Trojan horse. We're smuggling in I love it very timely with the odyssey these days. Yeah, dude 93:45 All right, Molly. Well, thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me Lenny. Bye everyone. Bye everybody 93:51 Thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts 93:56 Spotify or your favorite podcast app 93:59 Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other 94:03 listeners find the podcast. 94:05 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at LenniesPodcast.com. 94:11 See you in the next episode.
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