The grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through the tech industry right now | Molly Graham

00:00So, we've been chatting about your famous giveaway, your Legos career advice, this idea of how this advice applies in today's very strange AI world.

00:09The narrative right now is literally like, okay, we hired this new employee, this new employee is the smartest employee that you have ever met. I want you to pour every single thing that you know into this employee, and then they're going to take your job in six months. Who the [inaudible 00:00:25] wants to do that?

00:26Here's the big question, Molly. Are there any Legos you should not give away?

00:30In AI land, I think we got to caveat this. There are some Legos that shouldn't be given away. There's just some work that shouldn't be outsourced.

00:37Just a radical departure from your advice over the many years.

00:40You individually are phenomenal at a set of things, don't outsource it to these weird robots that are effectively summer interns.

00:48AI is taking a lot of our Legos, whether we like it or not, and we're being encouraged to give away our Legos to AI.

00:53You had someone on who talked about the job used to be rowing and now it's steering, and I was like, I feel like there's a lot of people out in the world right now that are like, I don't want to steer.

01:03I've heard from a lot of engineers just like, I really miss what it used to be.

01:06Change sucks. It also can be awesome, but we don't have to be fluffy bunnies about this, we can also just say this is hard.

01:13This is almost a discussion around what should AI do? Where do you want AI to be involved and where do you not want it involved?

01:19What would you do if you believed your job was always going to exist, it was just going to look completely different every six years?

01:29Today my guest is Molly Graham. This is Molly's second visit to the podcast, and man, this is a powerful conversation. The frame for this conversation is her classic, "Give away your legos" career advice. But in an AI world, Molly's advice for the last 13 years has been that your career will be better off if you give away your projects and your teams and your responsibilities to other people as your company grows, versus trying to hold onto it, which is what we naturally want to do. Essentially to give away your Legos. After 13 years of giving this advice and it unlocking so much win for so many people over the past decade, Molly's realized that it is no longer true when you are giving away your Legos to AI. It's a lot more nuanced and complicated now. And so, in this conversation, we try to get to the bottom of this question, what Legos should you still be giving away and what Legos should you keep? (00:02:27): If you're not familiar with Molly, she has spent 20 plus years helping organizations and the humans inside them navigate growth and change. She's held leadership roles at Google, and Facebook, and Quip, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. These days, she hosts Ted's Work Life podcast, which she took over from Adam Grant. She also runs an incredibly important leadership community called Glue Club, and writes a newsletter called Lessons. Now, before we get into it, I noticed a lot of people don't finish our full episodes and miss some of the best stuff. So, to help you, we've just created a new Lenny's Most Replayed Moments YouTube channel that has exactly this, the most re-watched and shared segments from our long form episodes. (00:03:09): You can now check it out and subscribe to the channel at lennyspodcast.com/mostreplayedmoments. There's also a link in the description. Finally, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI and non-AI products in the world. That's lennysproductpass.com. With that, I bring you Molly Graham. Molly, thank you so much for being here and welcome back to the podcast.

03:38Thanks for having me, Lenny. I'm excited to be back.

03:41I'm even more excited to have you back. Let me add a little context to this slightly unusual conversation we're going to have. So, we've been chatting over the past couple months about your famous, infamous give away your Legos career advice, and this question came up, and I know you're hearing this a lot from other people, this idea of how this advice applies in today's very strange AI world, where AI is taking a lot of our Legos, whether we like it or not. And we're being encouraged to give our Legos to AI, people are afraid about AI taking their Legos. And so, the question is just how this advice now applies in a world of AI. And I know this is kind of an ongoing thought process for you, but you actually have a lot of really interesting insights and takes on how to think about this advice now in today's very strange world. And so, we're going to have a conversation about it, see where it goes. (00:04:35): This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS, and that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. (00:05:25): It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. I'd say as a first step, let's remind people what this advice is. I imagine most people have heard it, a lot of people are probably like, "Oh yeah, I kind of get the idea." So, explain the original idea of giving away your Legos.

05:57It actually started when I was at Google and Facebook, and it started as a little talk that I would give people that worked for me. And for context, Google was pretty big when I joined, it was like 10,000 employees in 2007, but my department grew from 25 people to 125 people in nine months. So, that was my first experience with really rapid scale. And then I went to Facebook, and Facebook was relatively small when I joined, it was 500 employees, and 80 million users... Smaller than MySpace, which is always good context to remember. And while I was there, obviously a huge growth curve. I left five years later, it was 5,500 employees and over a billion users. So, that experience was nuts from a scaling perspective, and what I witnessed at Google and then really witnessed at Facebook was how hard and scary that experience was for people. (00:06:56): I watched a lot of folks go from you build a thing... You show up and you become the person that owns the blog, or owns this part of the stack, or built that product, and you sort of build an identity around it. You're the this person, whatever that is. And then the nature of scale is that everything around you changes. And so somebody shows up and your manager shows up and says, "Hey, you need to hand that thing that you built your whole identity around to someone else and go on to doing something else." And your first instinct is like, what? No, I don't want to give it away. I'm good at this, I know how to do this. I also think it's fun, and what if it's the only fun thing to do? And so, you kind of witness people would have this tendency to hold on. (00:07:45): And so, what I started to do with people on my team was say, "Hey, this change is happening and here's how you might feel." That you might feel like all these feelings, territorial and wanting to hold on, and actually the most important thing to do is to give things away. To evolve as the company is evolving. And my brain is a really weird place. I grew up on The Muppets, so I just spits out... I always think there's just a lot of tiny monsters dancing around singing songs in my head, but that is why metaphors come out for me. And so, I always use this metaphor of just a bunch of kindergartners and somebody dumps a pile of Legos in front of you, and at first it's fun, a little overwhelming, then you start building. And the give away your Legos part is that feeling when somebody else shows up, and they try to take the tower out of your hands. (00:08:35): And the kindergartner response is like, "Get out of here." You know what I mean? It's like, shoving someone away, when actually you get multiple people, it means, oh, you can go build something new and fun. You can start from scratch and you can learn something. But the natural human instinct in the face of change is to hold onto things and to resist the change, to be territorial and all of those things. So, anyway, I started giving this talk to folks on my team to help them understand that change and what was coming, and then eventually I sent it out to my friends at First Round, who were building the First Round Review at the time... And just to be clear, this is now 13 years ago. The talk when I was at Facebook, it was over 20 years ago. And I sent it to First Round, and we published it. (00:09:27): And I would've said I was speaking to folks going through a Facebook-like experience, I would've said, hey, this is an article that is for the Stripes or the Slacks or whoever was blowing up in 2013, to normalize, hey, this is what it feels like and this is what you have to do to grow as fast as your company is growing. But what happened when it was published is that I got emails from all over the world. I got emails from people at companies like Safeway, and this woman, I still remember this email, wrote me and was like, "This was so helpful to me. This perfectly describes what I've been going through on my team." And I got an email, again, I remember it very vividly from a founder in Nigeria, who was like, "My team went from two people to four people this year, and give away your Legos is so valuable to me. This is exactly what I've been feeling." (00:10:21): And my first reaction was like, "I didn't write this for you, this was not meant for you." But my second one was, "Whoa, this is about something much bigger than just what it feels like to be inside of rapid scale." And fundamentally, I think the Legos message is about change, and it's about the fact that when you go through change, a lot of happens to you. You know what I mean? It just is a very specific experience, and I think that's why it ended up being so universal. And it is crazy, I still get emails about it, multiple emails a month about it to this day. So, it's lasted in a way that, again, I just thought I was sending out a note to the folks that are going through crazy rapid change.

11:12I was at a first round event, I don't know, a year ago or something, and they were talking about all the different posts people have written, and I think it's one of the, maybe the first or second most popular post on the First Round Review

11:22It's up there and it's traveled in ways that I don't think any of us imagined it would.

11:28Okay. So, let's talk about what still holds true in this advice in this today's very strange AI world. What still holds true? What's still correct about this advice based on what you're seeing?

11:40One thing that's crazy about this article is I still get so many emails about it today. I still get asked to give speeches at every fast-growing company. So, I think for anybody that's going through rapid scale, Legos is still really relevant. But the interesting thing is what started to happen probably two years ago is I got more inbound from managers, and more inbound from leaders about Legos, just more people grappling with change inside their companies. And I think that is the thing that really holds true today and actually has just become more universal. I used to really check before I went and did a speech at some company, how fast the company was growing, I would ask about revenue growth and about headcount growth... Because that just helps me contextualize how I should speak to employees. And I still do that, but it's also become really clear that every single company in the world is going through enormous change of varying shapes and kinds right now. (00:12:50): And that is the fundamental underlying message of Legos, is how do you deal with change and how do you be your best self in the face of change? So, I feel like the number one thing that is true today, as true as it was 10 or 15 years ago, is the change is really scary and hard. And I always say, somebody once asked me to summarize the Legos article in one sentence, they're like, "Molly, this is too long, give me the cliff notes," and I said two things. Unfortunately, they didn't get one sentence, they got two. The two sentences were, number one, your main job in the face of rapid growth and change is to make yourself irrelevant because it is the only way that you can be prepared for whatever is coming next. And the second piece of advice, or sort of second summary of it was, don't worry, it's all going to be okay. (00:13:49): I always feel like the Legos article and the speeches I give are like a form of group therapy. They're like just a giant hug. Yes, it feels chaotic and overwhelming and stressful, but there's all this opportunity on the other side. And I think that the don't worry, it's all going to be okay is really something everybody needs to hear, that change is scary and hard, but it doesn't necessarily mean the world is ending. I think the second piece of that is that change comes with this incredible set of emotions, like this wild roller coaster that we don't talk about enough. And I think that was a lot of why I first started talking about Legos at Facebook and on my teams was I just wanted to normalize for people what it felt like. That you might feel all these feelings and that that was what everyone around you was feeling, that it didn't make you crazy and it didn't make you broken or something like that. (00:14:39): It also didn't mean anything was wrong, it actually meant that all the right things were happening. And I think that is very real today. When I travel around and I'm talking to leaders, and I know you and I are going to talk about this, but a lot of what I'm hearing is grief and all these different emotions. There's obviously excitement and joy in this moment of chaos and change with AI, but there is a lot of sadness. There's a lot of overwhelm that all manifests, some of it manifests in burnout. But it's like there is just a lot going on for people right now, and you really can't lead right now without talking about that and without normalizing that. And I think that's such a big part of the give away your Legos today is just helping people understand that these emotions are just part of your body and your identity reacting to change. (00:15:37): The other two things I would say that really do still feel true to me, that I both talk about in the article and have talked about a lot since is one of the things I say to people that are inside of a really rapidly growing company is the future will be defined by the people that learn, not the people that know. I always say, what you can learn by tomorrow matters way more than what you know today. And never has a truer sentence been said than about the age of AI. Do you know what I mean? Whatever we though we knew six months ago, toss it out the window, something new is true today. But what I used to say to people, and I still say, I guess when I do these speeches is you go look at that graph of how fast your company is growing. (00:16:18): You go look at that curve... And at Facebook it felt like we were falling off of it. That is the graph of how fast your company is growing, yes, but it is also the graph of how fast your job is growing, how fast every single thing around you is growing and changing, which means it's also the graph of how fast you need to grow. And I think that is such an important thing to understand inside of a world of change, which is that standing still, it feels safe, it feels like to hold onto what you know, because at least it's not scary and unknown. But actually standing still is the least safe thing you can do. It's basically you're guaranteed to fall behind. And I saw this viscerally at Facebook because the first two years I was in HR, and you could literally see the highest performer one year, if they didn't grow and change and if they didn't involve their team fast enough, they were underwater less than a year later because it was a different company. (00:17:26): And I think this is happening with AI as well, which is that we do have these instincts to hold on to what we know, and to defend what we know, and to fight for what we know for a bunch of different reasons, many of them good, but the future is going to be defined by the people that are willing to just take the stance of learning and to throw themselves into this change, scary and unknown as it is. And that message again remains true in this wild, wild world.

17:59Before we get into just how the advice is different, which when you go back to your summary of the two kind of items that summarize the idea, one is become redundant and then two, what was the second sentence?

18:11The second one is basically don't worry, it's all going to be okay.

18:12Don't worry. Yeah. Okay. So, those don't feel necessarily correct anymore. So, we're going to get into that because I think that's, as you said, the core of people's concern. That was comforting, and now it's like, well, are you sure? This grief piece, just to spend a little more time here, I've been seeing this a lot in a lot of different professions, I've done these surveys that we might get into a little bit, but just engineering as a role has completely transformed in two years. It's been like the same job forever, writing code, sitting there writing code in various forms of IDEs, no longer part of the job. Now it's talking to your AI to write the code. Whether you're there or not, that's where it's all going. It's going to be 100% write this thing, build this thing. And I used to be an engineer, and I moved into product, and I was so missing that flow state of being an engineer, just sitting there coding, building, and now that's gone. (00:19:10): You no longer sit there and just build a thing, you're just waiting for agents to run and then checking, you probably have 100 different agents, it's just a very strange new job. And I've heard from a lot of engineers just like, "I really miss what it used to be." Anything more there about just, I don't know, what you're hearing from folks about just like, man, this sucks?

19:27No, it's exactly... It's such a perfect example of the grief. I was giving a speech two weeks ago at a pretty fast-growing tech company, and this guy came up to me after and he'd been at the company for a couple of years, so it's gone through a huge amount of change. And he was talking to me about the fact that he just wasn't enjoying his role as much anymore. And my brain immediately went to, oh right, you enjoyed it when it was smaller, and there was more creativity, and now there's more structure. And so, I was talking to him about that. (00:20:01): And it took a while, and to some extent, I want to go talk to him again because I feel like I missed it in the first conversation. Where actually, I think what he was talking about was the grief that is very present for him now in the fact that he's not sure what is his current job, what is this... The company has grown and so he's in a more structured environment and what is just the simple fact that engineering has totally changed? And a lot of what he was talking about was how much he missed being more hands-on, which is one way of saying it. But I think that that grief is happening for a lot of people, I think engineering is probably one of the most visceral areas where people's jobs have genuinely transformed. You had someone on last week who talked about the job used to be rowing and now it's-

20:55Oh, Tara, yeah, from OpenAI.

20:57Yeah. She said the job used to be rowing and now it's like-

21:00Steering.

21:00Steering. And I was like, I feel like there's a lot of people out in the world right now that are like, I don't want to fucking steer. Do you know what I mean? I want to row. I like rowing. And I think it can be hard to separate, I like rowing or I'm scared that rowing is the only thing I'm ever going to be good at, or it's what I know, and I don't know if I can be good at steering. And I think that's happening in a lot of disciplines. And so, that grief, first and foremost, that grief is really real. I was talking to a product leader just the other day who was like, "I don't know, man, we're all supposed to be these universal builders now," and she was like, "It's kind of lonely." She's like, "I miss these parts of the collaboration that have been a little bit stripped away because now I'm working with robots all the time." (00:21:54): And I just said to her, "Yeah man, that sucks. Let's sit with it for a second. Change sucks." It also can be awesome, but we don't have to be fluffy bunnies about this, we can also just say this is hard.

22:10There's so much power in just saying the thing that you're feeling.

22:14I swear to God that that is a big chunk of what the Legos article did, was just like, this is hard and scary and it's going to be okay.

22:26This loneliness piece is such an important part to touch on. I had Fiona Fung on the podcast who leads Claude Code, the engineering team of Claude Code... She's Boris Cherny's boss, fun fact. And she said this exactly, that they're... I asked her just what's kind of the downside of this world? And it's engineers used to work with a bunch of engineers, teams used to be five engineers, 10 engineers, and now it's fewer teams, fewer engineers per team, and it's just like you're talking to agents all day. And so, it's another-

22:59It's not the same.

22:59It's not the same.

22:59No. It's not the same. And I think that's actually something that leaders of companies that are actually in charge of org structures and thinking about what the future of structure of teams needs to look like, you actually need to think about it. Because yeah, maybe you can strip out all the humans and you get all this productivity and maybe you get efficiency, but you also get sad humans. Do you know what I mean? And that doesn't lead to the best work for anyone. I thought your survey data around the fact that small teams and smaller companies are so much happier than people at the bigger companies was really interesting. (00:23:37): Just because, A, that very much resonates with what I see in all my conversations with leaders, but it also to me is a reflection of I think we're seeing more at these bigger companies, where people are stripping out management layers, and there's a lot more pressure on productivity and things like that, and there's less room for the human. There's less room for the joy and the excitement when all you're doing is focusing on...

24:00For the joy and the excitement when all you're doing is focusing on optimizing cost and robot efficiency.

24:07Yeah. Man, there's so much to talk about here. There's this really cool framework on a mental model that Corey Doctorow wrote about a while ago where he talks about the centaur and the reverse centaur. You heard of this?

24:20No, but I love it already.

24:23Okay. I don't know if I know how to pronounce it. centaur? Does that sound right? Centaur?

24:23Yeah, that's right.

24:26Okay. So centaur is a human body on top of an animal, like a horse. Sorry, a human head torso top of a human ...

24:32Clearly, you do not read enough Greek mythology.

24:35I just watched The Odyssey. I'm an expert in all things.

24:39Your kid is going to get older and you're going to read the Lightning Thief books and you'll get it.

24:42Lightning Thief. Okay.

24:43Yeah.

24:43I'll look forward to it. Okay. So the idea is a centaur is human head controlling an animal body. Reverse centaur is an animal head controlling a human body. His kind of insight here is what we want is AI that we control. We are in charge. It's doing our bidding. Awesome. Centaur, it's a cool way to live. What we need to avoid in fear is the reverse centaur where the AI is using us to do things. DoorDash people and Uber people are in that world already, not the funnest life. And it might expand to knowledge work. And I think that's a lot of people's fear is you're just this thing that's just controlling agents and just this closing gap of, "Here's where humans still are valuable," and then AI is telling you where to build and what to do and then it's doing the thing. So I've been thinking a lot about that.

25:36Yeah. I mean, I want to get to the fear side of this and the fear narrative as well because I think that's one of the things that is really different in this stage and this sort of phase because it's really hard to tell people lean into change when they're like, "But wait, what's on the other side? You're telling me to let go of my Legos. You're telling me to make myself irrelevant. Fuck you." You know what I mean? I don't believe there's a job on the other side. And I think that fear narrative, I am sure some of it is real, but some of it is really overblown and it's creating a pretty toxic environment for people where it's so hard to lean into this change with joy or excitement or any sense of opportunity. I would say the narrative right now is literally like, "Okay, we hired this new employee. This new employee is the smartest employee that you have ever met. This employee is 10 times smarter than you. And I want you to pour every single thing that you know into this employee and then they're going to take your job in six months." Who the fuck wants to do that? Do you know what I mean? No one wants to do that. That is not a good narrative for anyone. By the way, it's also not reality. As of right now, there is not a lot of data, although you may have more than I do, that says that AI is genuinely taking jobs away. And I have a lot of beef to pick with all the AI-branded layoffs out there because they're bullshit. They're not about AI. They are about badly run companies slapping an AI label and getting some share points from that versus saying, "Whoops, we hired too many people." And they're propagating this fear narrative that is like, " Your job is going away. There is no job on the other side." (00:27:33): So I took over this podcast, which you know, called WorkLife and it's let me have all these really fun conversations with people. And one of the best conversations I had was with this journalist named Manoush Zomorodi and she has been a journalist for 30 years. You want to talk about an industry that people have been predicting the death of for 30 years, right? Journalism. And Manoush has done everything. She started the BBC and she was super early in audio and she did this crazy crypto audio podcast and she's the host of TED Radio Hour. So Manoush over 30 years has built a very successful career in an industry that is being constantly disrupted. (00:28:18): And from talking to her, I basically walked away with this really interesting question that is totally different than, "What would you do if you believed your job was going to disappear?" It was, "What would you do if you believed your job was always going to exist? It was just going to look completely different every six years." And I just kind of wish that was the conversation we were having about all the jobs in tech and honestly all the jobs that are theoretically going to get taken by AI, which is the form is definitely going to change. But until we have real evidence, what if we believe that they're not going away, they're just going to reinvent themselves?

29:01That is awesome advice. And that's exactly what's been happening so far.

29:05Yeah.

29:06There's always this fear that, "Okay, but now it'll be different in X years," but that is actually exactly what's been happening. Engineering exists, different job. There's actually more demand than ever for engineers.

29:16Exactly. Your data said that and I was like, "Thank you for publishing this data, Lenny."

29:21Before we get into the advice, kind of how it's evolved, there's a couple things I want to share which touch on things you mentioned about how people are feeling. So I'll share these images on the screen as we talk about this of just people's feelings right now, just to come back to that point. So we did the survey for two years now in a row of how tech people are feeling and how they're feeling about AI and all these things. And so we have a trend now of over time how things are changing and we look at burnout and optimism. And in 2025, 44% of people said they feel burned out. This year, 55% of people said they are burned out. That's a huge jump. That's a 10% increase in a year of people feeling burnt out. And it makes sense. (00:30:12): As you said, you're basically now expected to do more work with not probably more money. And now it's just like, "Okay. Well, you got all these AI. Why aren't you getting more done? Look at all these other teams moving so much faster. We're screwed. We're going to go out of business. We got to move fast." So it makes sense.

30:27I mean, I love that you do that survey because I also think I learn a ton from it every time you've published it. And it's also just a great reality check about how people are feeling because literally what your survey says is more than half the people are feeling burnt out which is nuts. And also, yeah. I believe it. And I think burnout comes from a lot of different places and can mean a lot of different things to people, but to me, what I read inside that data was number one, emotions are tiring and there is a lot of exhaustion trying to understand what's going on in a ... I mean, the rate of change right now is nuts, both in terms of obviously the technological change, but I actually think the narrative change is also pretty exhausting for people. "Oh, this month, this is important. Oh, next month, this." There's a thrash inside of that that's pretty tiring. (00:31:21): I was emailing with a friend at OpenAI and she was like, "It's taken us literally six months to go from this token- maxing, everybody aggressive productivity, use AI everywhere," to a conversation that's like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Is this actually making a difference? Because it's very expensive." And she's like, "Six months. That's all it took." And so if you are sitting inside that, it means six months ago they were like, "Use AI all the time, every day, everywhere," and now they're like, "Are you doing it well enough?" And Hilary Gridley said the same thing where she was like six months ago everyone was like, "How do I get people to use AI?" And now they're like, "How do I get people to stop using AI so badly." (00:32:06): And it's like that six month thrash, often much faster than that, is tiring for people. The grief is tiring, let alone I think that feeling which you mentioned in your survey of, "I'm going to be expected to do more for the same amount of pay." That's exhausting. I think people feel taken advantage of and, "What is in this for me? Why is it fun for me? What's the opportunity for me?" And I think particularly at bigger companies, it feels almost adversarial sometimes where, "I get why it's good for our bottom line, but remind me why that's good for me."

32:51That actually touches on one of the biggest findings in this survey, which is that first of all, half of people that filled it out are feeling the happiest they've ever felt. This is an important point we need to make is ...

32:51Yeah. Totally.

33:02Not everybody's feeling is fear and sense that it's all doomed, that actually half of people are feeling like they're having the best time of their life and their career and they're so excited about all the things going on. You may not feel that. If you're not that, you may not believe that. But from what I can see around me, many people are very excited. Even though they're working harder than they've ever worked, they're also the happiest they've ever been about their career.

33:28Yeah. Well, and I think the context, if I remember, was a lot of the happiness tended to be concentrated in people that were in smaller teams or had more authority.

33:40Absolutely. And even more interestingly, the strongest correlation is people who said that AI has amplified them. They feel like they figured out how to use AI to do more stuff that they're excited about. And interestingly, designers were the least happy from this work and that's actually what I hear from designers is everyone's moving faster. Design can't move that fast. You have to get feedback from people. You have to go through the alignment. You need to sit there and think. You can't just age and iterate [inaudible 00:34:12].

34:12Well, I don't know if you're hearing this from the designers, but there's also everyone's a designer now.

34:18Yeah. That's also part of it.

34:21When I worked in education, it's one of those industries that's really hard to work in because everyone was a student once so everyone thinks they know things. And I feel like now designers have that where it's like, "Oh, yeah. I just made this in Gemini," or, "I just made this in Claude. Here you go. Here's my design." And by the way, I think this is true of a lot of industries and whole products where it's like the gap between, "I made this," and what is actually great. The gap between, "I created this prototype," and a product that is exceptional is really big. The same is true obviously of design. Design just got way more accessible to the average person, at least okay design got really, really accessible, which can be exhausting when people are telling you how to do your job all the time.

35:08Yeah. I had this tweet the other day that got a lot of traction along these lines. "A growing part of everyone's job is cleaning up the AI slop from other people trying to do your job."

35:18Okay, so I have a lot of feelings about this and it goes to this super intelligence thing that we were talking about where it's like what we're saying. AI is the smartest employee you've ever hired in the entire world and it's better than you at everything. And I think it causes people to approach it that way when actually most of our experience with AI, I think a lot of people have had the experience with AI where it's like, "That's wrong. I just asked you to do that. This isn't good." I always think AI needs the same coaching and training that a human does, right? It needs context. It needs onboarding. It needs all of these things. And it's kind of much more like an intern, a bad intern often. I call it a lazy intern. And what happens, to your point about AI slop, is that folks are approaching it as if it's great, the best employee they've ever hired, so they just copy, paste, send. Right? And I'm like you would never do that if you though about it as an intern. You would never take the presentation that an intern handed you and just straight forward it to your boss. That is a little bit insane, right? You would iterate on it. You would edit it. You would ask, make sure that it had all the context from the 57 conversations that you've had with the summer intern before you ship that prezo to your boss. AI is the same. (00:36:45): And I think part of what's going on with all the slop in the world is people have shipped accountability. It's like, "Oh. AI said this was good enough so I'm just going to copy, paste, send," and that is never been how good work happens. You know what I mean? So I feel like we need a change from this super intelligent being that's better than all of us at our jobs to, "No, it's just a fucking intern, man." And it needs the coaching and context and all of that and many iterations that most interns do. And I think the other thing, to your point, if you don't take accountability for the quality of your work, that shifts to someone else, right? The person that receives it has to deal with it and that is just a drain on organizations. (00:37:32): And I literally see CEOs, we talk about this all the time in Glue Club, shipping a strategy memo that was clearly written by AI. That is you role-modeling for your organization that it's fine to outsource your thinking and it's fine to outsource your strategy. It's you role-modeling that you don't need accountability for the work that you send. And I feel like it goes down to this thing of this last six months, we've really been overvaluing productivity, which is just you hear all these stories about companies counting tokens and having token leaderboards. It brings me back to the days when people were counting cars in a parking lot and Slack bubbles and lines of code, which we all know is a really bad way to manage people. And we've been focused on, "How do you run as fast as you can on the treadmill?" but not, "Am I going anywhere?" which is to me the difference between productivity and efficiency. (00:38:33): Productivity is can you generate more, which at this point I think we've proven we can all generate a bunch of shit that other people then have to wade through, to the point of your tweet. But is that efficient? Does that actually move the conversation forward? And the answer lately has been, "Why, no. It does not."

38:49Yeah. In that report, I have this iceberg image of just we're doing better on top of all the other stuff, but the output is worse, thinking judgment is coming down. So there's a lot of things we're watching. The good news is everyone's aware of this. They're like, "Yeah, maybe this isn't the way we should be working."

39:05No. I thought there was this really interesting engineering report that said for engineering, it has genuinely made people more productive, but the amount of lines of code that have had to be rewritten has gone up 8X. So it's like this very clear symbol of productivity. Obviously, also the security incidents have gone up, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like there's just this difference between productivity and efficiency and I think part of your burnout data is people are just getting swamped. And that's exhausting if what you're doing all day is wading through, "Did the person on the other side of this actually think about it? Did they actually care?" That's tiring. That doesn't feel like a good use of your time. It just feels a little bit infuriating.

39:54Yeah. It comes back to the grief of, "Oh, man. I missed what it used to be. Look at this weird new job I'm doing."

40:00Yeah, totally.

40:01Okay, so let's come back to your advice. We kind of went on a really important tangent, but let's summarize what's still true about giving away your Legos and then we'll talk about what's no longer true. So I'll summarize briefly. I took some notes as you were talking. So still true: Change is scary. That's normal. Understand that. It's part of human nature. We don't like change. Learning over knowing, still a very important thing to focus on. It's okay if you don't know, but if you're focused on learning, you'll be probably okay. This idea of standing still at successful companies is actually you're falling behind. Your company's growing. If you're not growing and taking on your challenges and giving away stuff, you're going to fall behind. Is there anything else core to kind of what's still ...

40:45Yeah, I think I would just add one, which is change is scary and hard and the best thing you can do is lean into it. Right? It is not what your instincts tell you to do, but it is actually the best thing you can do in the face of change. And that was the message of Legos. Basically you need to lean into this comfort of change in order to grow. And I think it is still true today, even if it is maybe even scarier than it's ever been.

41:12This season's supporting sponsor is DX. Now that everybody at your company is finally using AI, the question that engineering leaders face is no longer, "Are we using AI?" but, "Is it paying off?" With DX, you can measure and benchmark the impact of AI adoption across your full product life cycle. DX shows you where AI is helping developers and where it's creating new bottlenecks. You can also use it to evaluate AI vendors, monitor costs and licenses, and see exactly what's limiting your agents. That's why hundreds of enterprises, including Snowflake, Sony, and BNY use the DX platform to measure AI's impact on developer productivity. Visit getdx.com/lenny to get a demo of DX. That's getdx. com/lenny. (00:42:02): Okay. So now what is different? The advice broadly is, "Okay, make yourself redundant. It's going to be okay."

42:11I know. That's the one that's hard to talk about today. Yeah, make yourself irrelevant, everybody. It's going to go great. Yeah, it's funny. When AI first really took off, it took me a while to really understand what was going on. In total honesty, I was a skeptic for a while where I was like, "We've been automating things for a while. What is this?" But eventually, I got on board and all of a sudden I was like, "Oh." You know that thing I used to do before I went to give a speech at someone's company where I was like, "How fast is your headcount growing?" For me, that was the only symbol I had of, "Are there people to give Legos to?" If I'm going to get up on stage and be like, "Give away your Legos," a lot of times people are like, "Wait a minute. We're not hiring anyone." Who do I give it to? But now, I was like, "Oh, okay. This message is even more relevant because everyone can try to automate parts of their job and everyone can give Legos away." (00:43:05): And I will tell you, it has been an interesting journey realizing how different it is to give things away to robots than it is to give them to a human. And principally, the point of Legos was you take this thing you've been working on and you fully hand it to someone else. One of my favorite questions that I get asked at companies when I do the Legos talk is, "What is the best way to give Legos away to someone else?" And I love it because I think basically people expect me to be like, "So you should incredibly, carefully hand this Lego to this person and explain to them exactly why you put it in the position you put it in. Perfectly describe your tower. Make sure they have an instruction manual that they won't fuck up." (00:43:54): And my answer is actually, "No. The best way to give Legos away is to chuck them at their face and run in the other direction," because our tendency, again, is towards control. Our tendency is to be like, "You will build this tower exactly how I built it and you will not mess it up." But actually the point is, "No, you're giving it away. You need to fully separate your mind. You need to just hand it to them and trust that the future of whatever that tower is belongs to them." There is both obviously a lot of fear and a whole bunch of stuff that comes with that, but there's a huge amount of freedom. You take this brain space and you ship it to them. (00:44:33): Interestingly, one of my biggest realizations was that delegating something to a robot is not the same as giving it to a human because you cannot get rid of the oversight. Right? It's more like delegating something to someone on your team. You still own it. Yes, we've gotten more efficient because the robots can do X, Y, and Z for us, but it's not the same as giving it away to a human because we still own the oversight. We still own the sort of final product. And that means the mental tax stays with you. So yes, in some ways I can do more, but psychologically I still have all the burden of all the stuff that all the robots are doing. And I think that does make it quite different because it just means you don't have as much space to then go on to the new things. The cost of oversight is not zero. Do you know what I mean? Again, I wonder if this is part of what's going on with some of your burnout data is just, "All of a sudden I'm overseeing all these robots and maybe all these humans and it's more." So anyway, I think that's one of the biggest differences is just it isn't exactly the same. It's the difference between transferring a Lego to someone where you genuinely get rid of it versus delegating a Lego to someone.

46:02It's so funny the way you described it where you need to disconnect from the responsibility of this thing now. And it's the opposite now where somebody else is doing this, the AI, but you're still responsible.

46:15Yeah.

46:15And so it's like having this Lego tower with this little robot coming through and, "Okay, I'm going to work on this now," but you still have to represent this tower to your boss.

46:16Yeah.

46:26And so I could 100% see this metaphor. Make it clear why it sucks.

46:30If 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 that occasionally fuck up the tower and you have to be like, "No, no, no. No, no, no. That's not what I said," which is like, again, managing an intern. You get it. But if you're not a manager, if you've never been a manager ... And I do think it's important to name that, like I said, managing robots, those skills are very similar to managing humans. They have less feelings, but it's all the same skills of oversight and giving them context and correcting their work and coaching, and all those skills are the same for managing a robot as they are for managing a human. And a lot of people don't like that shit. So many people actively chose not to become a manager. Do you know what I mean? (00:47:15): And so there is exhaustion that comes with if you don't enjoy delegating, if you haven't worked on all these skills for many, many years, then suddenly you are in that stance of management. But it just means literally everyone in the world is a manager now and all you're doing when you're delegating to robots is delegating just like you would to another human on your team. So I always say the max people should be managing is 10 to 12 employees. I've managed bigger teams than that and it was not a good look. And I don't think there's any data that says that people can manage more than that now. And if you count robots, I'm worried for people's psychology, you know what I mean, in terms of the amount you have to hold in your head.

48:01Yeah, I build a lot of randoms ...

48:01... balance you have to hold in your head.

48:01Yeah. I build a lot of random stuff, and I have all these different agents running. And on the one hand, it's so awesome. And all these things get done, and it's just like, "Wow, look at this thing go. I did all these things." And then also I get pinged all day for all these guys. They're like, "What about this? Okay. Well, I'm stuck here. Oh, is this good?" And then I'm like, "Okay, I got to look through this all." Actually, so I work with an actual human engineer also, and it makes you appreciate a human awesome engineer that you could just give a rough idea to, and they could run with it and do an awesome job versus, "No, this sucks. Okay, let's try again and then sit there for five minutes and wait."

48:37It is the difference between managing junior employees and managing senior employees. Do you know what I mean?

48:41Yeah.

48:42AI right now, pretty junior employees. It's not my favorite form of management. I always say, "Give me the high performers, I can turn them into these incredible rocket ships." Managing interns, managing folks that are brand new to the workplace is pretty tiring. And I do think that is what it feels like managing AI. And it's so different, like I said, than throwing a Lego at someone and running the other direction, which you can do with your senior engineer.

49:07Such a good point. Okay. We'll get to actual advice. Here's what you should probably do. But before we get there, what else is different about the original advice around giving away Legos? The first one's so good. You made it so obvious why it is very different to give your Legos away to a machine because you're not actually giving away. They're just going to do the work, and then you're still responsible for it, and you have to oversee it.

49:28Yeah. And I think the second thing that's really different, and we talked about a little bit already, but my message was always you give things away because the only way you can make space for new opportunity is by giving things away. Do you know what I mean? And that has two assumptions under it. One, that it's good to give things away. And two, that there's new opportunity on the other side. And I think this, what I talked about with the fear narrative is one of the things that's driving me nuts in the world. And we talk about it a lot in Glue Club is just this dominant narrative that all these jobs are going away because of AI and all these layoffs that are branded as AI. That is not going to support anybody being in a stance of like, "Yeah, let's delegate everything to these robots. Let's give them every piece of our brain and our data so that we can have all this new opportunity that's coming along." (00:50:29): I think it is the hardest conversation to have right now. And to your point about there's lots of people out there that are really excited, there are. And I want that for everyone because this is an incredible moment. I've been in technology for almost 20 years and I've seen a lot, but this is one of those moments. This is the mobile phone on steroids where it's like all sorts of businesses are going to be created. I'm a believer that a lot of jobs are going to be created because of this technology, but I think we've got to start having that conversation in order to get to the place where everyone can be leaning in. Everyone can say, "Oh, it's great to automate all these tasks that I hate because it gives me more time to do the things that I love." Which is, I think to your point about the people that feel amplified by it's like, "Oh, I don't have to do all this boring ass work. I can just focus on the things that bring me joy. I can focus on the things that I'm great at." (00:51:27): That's what we want. But while there's this narrative out there that media companies are propagating that says there's nothing for you on the other side, do you know what I mean? We've got universal basic income. Everyone needs to be supported by the state because no one's going to have a job in 10 years. Who the fuck wants to give Legos to robots if that's the narrative? No one.

51:50I went to this thing called Foo Camp. Have you heard of Foo Camp by Tim O'Reilly?

51:50I've heard of it.

51:55Tim O'Reilly who started O'Reilly Media, awesome smart guy, he came up with web 2. 0 as a concept. He organizes these little intimate camps where he invites people that he thinks can contribute to this conversation to talk about a topic. And this last one is around just what happens with humans when AI does more and more of our job. And it started with him talking to some, I think it was a lawyer who's just like, "Okay, I'm hoarding this very specific knowledge I have about doing this job so that AI cannot do it. It's like I need to protect it because otherwise I'm going to be replaced. They don't need me anymore." And I feel like a lot of people are probably feeling that, a lot of specific niche professions especially.

52:38Yeah, absolutely. And I go back... First of all, yes, of course. How could you not be feeling that way? I don't know. Maybe I'm an abundance person, and maybe I'll regret saying this in six months or five years, but I'm like, "Every piece of data I have from my entire life and some of these conversations I've had like the one with Manoush say, 'You got to lean in.'" You know what I mean? That protection and holding on and gripping to what you know is not the way you thrive in change. It's not the people that define the future. And again, the Manoush story would say lawyers are always going to exist. They are going to look completely different every six years or every three years or whatever. So what do you think the next version of a lawyer looks like? Do you want to be part of designing that? (00:53:33): Do you want to be part of creating that? Do you want to be part of figuring that out or do you want to stay here and try to protect what you know? I think that's to me, again, it's scary out there right now, so I don't want to undervalue that, but I think you have to take that stance of agency or we got to use a different word, entrepreneurship. You got to take that stance of, "I want to be part of designing the future of my profession, not protecting the past."

54:02I really, really love this framework as almost maybe that's a big part of the advice from this conversation is this way of thinking for Manoush, which is, "My job will be different, but it'll continue to exist." And the question is just, "What will it be?" And let me think about that, prepare for that almost and not try to resist because resisting is not going to work anyway.

54:24Yeah. And if you listen to the Manoush's story, it's such an entrepreneurial story. And I know that not everyone is great at that, but it is very much the, "Let me try this next." For her, I think it was founded in this belief of this profession is evolving and changing, and I want to be part of defining the future of it. And again, I think until the data genuinely tells us otherwise, I would say that is the stance I would take particularly in tech. What would you do if you believe there were going to be more and different interesting engineering jobs in five years? How would you behave if you believed there was opportunity on the other side of letting go?

55:11Well, let's see if there's more to that thread because that's really helpful, which is, "Okay, this is going to go great. My product managers will thrive. There'll be more need for product managers because a lot of listeners here are PMs, engineers, founders." So what do you think people should be trying to do in that world where there will be more? Is it pay attention to how you're amplified? Is it look at people who are doing great and do what they're doing? What do you think people could be doing to succeed in that future?

55:42It's funny, we had a conversation. My team and I run these top talent cohorts at companies, and a lot of what we do is get leaders talking to each other and helping each other. And this woman who is a head of design brought this problem where she was like, "They won't let me ship code." She's like, "I did it. I basically built the thing." And I was like, "Just let me get into production." And she was like, "Talking to engineering was like a brick wall where they were like, 'No, you can't ship code. You're a designer. I'm an engineer. I own what goes to production.'" And there are good reasons for not letting things go willy-nilly to production, particularly if you work in the financial space, which they did. I get it. But I think so much of the stance is we got to break down some of these walls between what was a designer, what was an engineer, what was a PM? (00:56:35): This is obviously a lot of what's happening, but how do we really shed what we knew, which again is hard. It's hard to let go of those Legos, you know what I mean? And imagine, "Okay, what does it look like?" This is why I think the startup land is so happy is because they're not fighting against the way things were. They're inventing the way things could be. And how can you make more space for that inside of a company to me is the number one thing I talk about when I go, which is if you're not leaning into the creativity conversation versus the fear conversation, you are leading folks who are just terrified. How do you get people into a stance of, "I'm excited, and I want to try things, and I want to tentatively let this designership code to production"? So to me, I think how can you imagine a world with less walls? (00:57:35): How can you get rid of some of those walls that have felt so important for the way we've done things for the last 15, 20, 25 years? I think that is a conversation that a lot of folks should be having.

57:49Just along those lines, just to be clear, is the idea here, okay, I have been a designer my whole life, is the advice there, okay, maybe I'll be something else in the next few years that's not just designer.

58:00Well, I feel like a lot of your conversations are pointing.

58:03Yeah, that's right.

58:04I mean, I think Adam Messeri was on here who I worked with many years ago and was a designer. And he's saying, "Hey, the idea that you're a designer, and therefore you only do these things," that's obviously changing, right? Now you can prototype, you can have a much more robust and deep conversation. To some extent, you can ship code. Elena Varna was talking about being a marketer and shipping code to production. So to me, there just were these very defined roles and a way that things worked, and we got to shed a bunch of that because things are possible now that weren't possible before. And when you listen to Manoush's story, so much of what she's talking about is the only form of journalism used to be sitting in a newsroom employed by some giant news corporation. (00:58:51): You think about journalism today, everybody's a journalist, Substack. And part of what she talked about is the crazy thing is your relationship to the business model. Again, it used to be a paycheck, and now it's every journalist is an entrepreneur. I just can't imagine a lot of those transformations in tech, but you have to be willing to break down all the walls and start asking the questions of fundamentally, what is journalism? Fundamentally, what is design? Fundamentally, what is product management? Which by the way, is a question that we all should have been asking for many, many years because it looks really different at different companies. And I feel like that should be true of every single person, which is, what is the value of all these different roles when you strip away a lot of the stuff that we've built up, and then what might it look like in five or 10 years?

59:38Here's the big question, Molly, that I think a lot of people are wondering. Are there any Legos you should not give away that you should resist giving away, which is a radical departure from your advice over the many years?

59:51Totally. No, as we were preparing for this, I was realizing that's the biggest difference. Again, to the questions I get asked a lot, both online and when I give speeches and stuff, one of them is, "Have you ever regretted giving a Lego away? Is there something you shouldn't give away?" And in the context of the rapid scale company where opportunity is flying at you and getting dumped on your head, my answer is, "No, give them the fuck away." You cannot often imagine what is coming next. You can't always design the future, and it's not always clear. Sometimes you are genuinely giving away the known and stepping into the unknown, but that has basically always been a good idea in every example. (01:00:35): I've seen both personal experience and everyone I've worked with and coached over many, many years. In AI land, I think we got to caveat this. I think there are some Legos that shouldn't be given away, that the robots both don't deserve and that we should hold onto. And I think that is one of the things that's starting to show up in this conversation around AI slop is there's just some work that shouldn't be outsourced. My fervent hope for AI is that it lets us do less of the things we shouldn't have been doing in the first place and more of the things that humans are best in the world at, right? (01:01:17): Anybody that's ridden in a Waymo has this experience of like, "Whoa, this is crazy. Humans shouldn't be driving." Driving is fundamentally just code and systems, and we're really bad at being automated. We don't stop at the red lights. You know what I mean? So I think, what are the things that we're uniquely suited to do? Those are the things we should hold onto. And some of that is inside this slop conversation, which is things that require judgment, things that require... Then, to the CEOs that are asking AI for a strategy and then copying and pasting it and sending it to their company, no, that is fundamentally something that a human brain that you as a CEO of your company need to own, right? And I think things that require trust that are fundamental to relationships, we should not be outsourcing these things to robots because for any number of reasons. (01:02:16): I think things where you don't even, if you don't know the definition of good, how can you give it to your summer intern? If you don't understand what quality is, you can't outsource that yet. So those are just examples for me. I bet you have some too, but to me, that is one of the biggest things I've been thinking about lately is as of today, I think there's some stuff we just shouldn't give away.

62:44Breaking news. That's what a departure from this. How many years ago did you write this? 13 years?

62:52Yeah, 13.

62:53Wow. That's something. That's a sign of-

62:56A sign of the times.

62:57... the change we're living through that now there's some [inaudible 01:02:59]

62:59Hold on to some of them.

63:01Yeah. So interesting. There's a few thoughts I had here while you were talking. This is almost a discussion around what should AI do? Where do you want AI to be involved and where you not want it involved? One framework I've loved is this idea of you want AI in the middle of stuff. You want to be at the top coming up just like, here's kind of where we want to go and here's the idea, here's what I'm thinking. And then AI does a bunch of stuff, and then you review it, iterate until it's done.

63:29Sandwich.

63:31AI sandwich.

63:32Sandwich, Lenny.

63:33The human sandwich.

63:35Yeah, dude.

63:36Oh, man.

63:39Okay, we're getting there. We're getting a metaphor.

63:39That's the best answer. The other is something Tara, I just thought of as you were talking. So Tara shared this really good perspective that humans are going to be necessary to help guide us towards a world we want to have, a product we want to build versus the most optimal AI version. I think I was a longtime Airbnb person, nothing personal, but Booking.com, if you've seen it, a very different experience than Airbnb. Booking.com, their whole philosophy, let's optimize the shit out of every second of interaction. So it's just all these upsells and pressure and stress just like, "Oh, my God, only one spot left. You have five seconds left. Just book a hundred times, 100 people book it."

64:22Sounds stressful.

64:24It's so stressful, but so effective. You go there, you're like, "Oh, shit I got to book this right now."

64:28You're like, "I didn't even know I was booking it, but I booked it."

64:30I'm going to Japan. There's only one spot left. But it's so good. It's so effective at getting you to book. Booking.com appropriate. And it worked, and it's doing great as a business. So good idea, good stuff guys. Airbnb has always been, we don't want to become that. We want it to feel really nice, to have a great experience, feel good. So I think that's a big part of the answer as you were talking, made me realize is humans are there to guide towards the world we want.

65:01Yeah. And to some extent what you're talking about is taste, that there is a big difference between something that's okay and something that's phenomenal.

65:11I think it's even beyond taste. I think it's like a vision. It's like, "What is your vision of where this should be?" Because you could say, people at booking.com, they have taste for a specific type. It's like a different kind of taste. But it's like, "Yeah, what do you want? What do you want this to be?"

65:25Totally. What do you want/ What do you want the world to look like? I like that. I'm into that. Yeah. I also just think we got to accept that at least for the moment, this is a bunch of interns, this is a bunch of junior employees. And if you're outsourcing your vision or the future of the world to a bunch of summer interns, we got problems. So I think the human brain is powerful at a lot of things. We are powerful at a lot of things. You individually are phenomenal at a set of things. Do not outsource that. You can enable it. You can amplify it to use your data, but don't outsource it to these weird robots that are effectively summer interns.

66:06The trick is as it gets better, can you hold on to things you want? There's parts of our job we love. A lot of engineers used to love to sit there and write out code, I think. And I wonder if you can hold out and just like, "No, I love this. I'm not going to let AI take this on."

66:26Yeah. I have two reactions to that because I've been thinking about it a bunch since I had that conversation with that engineer. The first is, will there be a whiplash back? You see this in art, you see this in a lot of things. Actually, you see in a lot of different parts of tech where the trend is all AI, everything AI. Will there be the handmade? Somebody was talking to me about AI is going to make all this art, but doesn't that increase the value of true human-made art, you know? That you know it was made by a human? That you know it was crafted by hands? I have that same question. I'm not an engineer, so I'm not trying to say this, but will something show back up where the value of human written code or something like that suddenly gets valuable again or trendy? (01:07:15): So I'm curious about that because I've seen those whiplashes enough times in life that it's hard sometimes to know what's a trend and what's permanent, particularly in this state. But I guess the other thing that I think about a little bit is, "Yes, you loved that, and, yes, you were extraordinary at it." And that is amazing. And we should grieve it. We should grieve that maybe that's going away. And there's this guy, Chip Connolly, what am I saying? You know him well, who I-

67:49Podcast guest.

67:49Yeah. He's coming on Worklife soon.

67:51Awesome.

67:51And I loved the conversation with him. He was talking about midlife, but he was saying, "Sometimes you need to throw a funeral for things. Do you know what I mean?" And I was like, "Yeah, man, sometimes you need to. The funeral is there for a reason." So let's take a minute and mourn what was, but then let's ask, "What could be?" What could you love that way again? What could you be extraordinary at that way again in this new world if the robots are doing X, Y, and Z? And I think both things can be true. You can be really sad about what you've lost, and there can be opportunity in what's coming, but we got to make space for both. And I think sometimes we're not allowing the grief because we're just like, "Just get excited about the future people."

68:37Such a powerful way of thinking about it. Just accepting it is going to change, just grieving it. That was nice. That was a nice world I had.

68:48I miss it.

68:48Maybe I didn't appreciate it as much as I should have.

68:50Totally.

68:52But then not fighting the change that is coming. And I love this idea of just coming back to the original idea of the Legos concept is being comfortable with your job changing and knowing it'll almost surely be okay, and growth comes from letting go and that kind of stuff. Another thought I had as I'm thinking about this, something I've been noticing, so you know this whole hacking, this open AI model trying to hack into Hugging Face and the swarm of thousand agents just coordinating-

69:24Yeah.

69:24... without anyone knowing, just like, "We will solve this very impossible problem by finding- "

69:29Interns.

69:30Very, very, very motivated interns.

69:32You let them out of the page.

69:33Yeah.

69:34Yeah, exactly.

69:35I love how motivated this AI is to solve the problem. The good news I'm feeling, there's always this question of, we talked about this in the last podcast, this idea of, "Are we going to be in a slow takeoff or a fast takeoff? Are we going to get to an AI that just accelerates to the extremely super intelligent and then we are in big trouble because we can't control it?" Or are we going to be in the slow takeoff where we watch it develop, and we catch it as it's doing that stuff like we did with this hacking incident? It feels to me like we're definitely in the slow takeoff moment. It feels like everybody's like, "Oh, shit." Or just like, "Okay, look, we got it. We see it. We're evolving. We're learning." Obviously there's always this fear. Okay, but until it hits this self reinforcement loop that trains itself and then it becomes super intelligent, for sure, maybe it'll happen. (01:10:24): Feeling right now it's not on track to do that. And so that feels nice to feel like, "Okay, your job's not going to go away tomorrow. We have time to adapt and learn and see how all this goes, and it's not as crazy as people thought it might be."

70:41Well, and I think that is really important to name because there was maybe more like three or four months ago or six months ago than there is now, but there is this feeling of being left behind, and there was a really strong narrative out there that was like, "You're too late."

70:58You're coming in underclass.

70:58You're already too late. You know what I mean? If you're not automating every single part of your life and managing 26 agents, then I don't even know that you're behind. And every single conversation I have with every leader, every manager at all of the big labs, every company is like, "We are early. This is whatever sports ball game you want to be in, this is inning one, period one, yard one. We're early, and the future is ours to shape. It's yours." (01:11:37): My friend Max Mullen said the distance from beginner to expert is really short. And I think that goes again to the fear narrative where I'm just like, "We need to be encouraging people to be part of shaping the future, not just making them terrified of it." And I feel like that is on all of us to some extent, but it is a slow takeoff, and it isn't like the future is next day.

72:00... the slow takeoff, and it isn't like the future is next day, next month. It's going to take years to really understand what this new tool, this new technology, all these fun interns can actually do, and also what they're best at. I think that is a really powerful message because it helps people feel like, "Oh, okay, I am part of this," not holding on for dear life while being dragged by a plane that's taking off at a hundred miles an hour.

72:31I completely agree. In my last podcast conversation, I don't know when will come out when, is about this fear of the permanent underclass that if you don't catch up, if you're not on top of this, you're going to be left behind. I think there is definitely a part of that in a sense of many companies are doing extremely well and people that have joined those companies are going to be very successful and some companies aren't, and there's this whole other discussion around the socioeconomic divide growing significantly in the world and just what that causes in a world where there are many wealthy people, many more than there have ever existed. That's its own thing. We don't need to get all into that.

73:05Well, I hope you do many episodes on that someday, Lenny. But it is another area where I'm like, "I'm not sure we know what's real yet." I think it's obviously one of the most important conversations, but what is real and what is the future actually going to look like? To me, the stories out in the world, they're not real yet. We don't know, and I think that's important to name.

73:29Oh, man. That's a big topic. The interesting part you mentioned that I wanted to follow thread on is this idea of you're not behind. What really helped me see this is Ian Silber, head of design at OpenAI was on the podcast recently and he made this really good point. He's like, "This is the best time in history to be a designer. If you just came in fresh as a new grad into design and just become really... You just start with all these tools that designers have now, you can accelerate so quickly and learn to do design faster than anyone's ever learned to do design." And I feel that with Grok Bot recently came out. There's all these skills people have built over time with Codex and Claude Code. I'm such a pro with all these tools and now it's just the tools are getting so much smarter you don't need a lot of the scaffolding that people have built over time. (01:14:17): If someone were to start fresh today and try Grok Bot or even in Codex, you don't need to have spent years being on top of all of the news and all of the updates to it. You could just dive right in and build as much as people that have been on it for a long time could build. I feel like the actual main skill to build, something I've been thinking about... I tweeted this, but I feel like I didn't get enough traction because I think it's very important. I feel like the biggest skill to build right now is when you're about to do something to ask yourself, "Can AI help me with this thing?" Because once you get good at that, and I've been getting... I think about the stimulus and response kind of thing of meditation, you create more space between stimulus and response if you learn to be aware of what's [inaudible 01:15:05]. (01:15:06): I feel like you need to insert, "Can AI help me with this?" Which sounds like dirty and what the hell? Why would you want AI? But I feel like that's a really new skill because then you can start... As these AI tools get better, you can start to leverage them in all these different ways that I think is what separates a lot of people right now.

75:23No, totally. And it goes to that point about the walls. I think those of us that have been around a long time and there's a way that things were done, there's a way that product was built, there's all these ways, those are walls. They're walls, they're old. And part of what we need to do, and I think part of what you're saying is you're actually little bit at an advantage if you don't know those walls exist. If you approach the world as if engineers didn't have a different role from X or Y or Z, or this is the way things are done, there is an advantage to being able to say, "What if? What if I just did it?" And to just try. (01:16:07): And to your point to always think, "Hey, what's the best use of my time? And then what could an agent or a robot do for me?" And I think that's partially the point about the learners. If you're able to shed the sort of things you think you know and lean into the possibility and the first principles thinking, which I know you have a great article about too, that I think is going to define the future. Those are going to be the people that are going to shape what this thing looks like.

76:36Yeah. There's also a thread here around ambition that's been coming up a lot on the podcast.

76:42Oh, interesting.

76:43Yeah. This idea that now that it's so easy to do whatever you want, just describe it and it's built. The thing that we need to... In addition to asking ourselves, can AI help me with this thing is how do we be more ambitious with this idea? Because the tools can now just do so much and they're just waiting for you to tell me something more ambitious than that. That's all you got for me? And human nature doesn't... We're not used to end product teams and business just thinking about the most ambitious version of a thing. We're thinking about the MVP and what's the quickest way to get this out, and now it feels like the push is how do we think big? What's the hardest thing we can ask this AI to do because it may actually just achieve it out of one ask.

77:25Yeah. And I'd also nudge on the idea that, yeah, you can just type something into existence, but one of the other questions you need to ask yourself is it good? Do you know what I mean? This is the slop and the accountability thing, which is like... And if ambition is wrapped up in how do I build something phenomenal that's going to endure, that I'm interested in. If it's just like, how do I make more shit and put it out in the world? One of my questions, this is really frontier, Lenny, is what is the AI slop version of startups? Are we about to see a shit-ton of companies just shipping stuff out into the world that's going to last for six or 12 months and then just disappear or get irrelevant?

78:10Definitely.

78:11So okay, great. That doesn't sound fun. How can you be the pioneer of the enduring thing, the thing that's going to still be around in five years, that's going to matter, that's going to be great, not just exist? And again, it goes to the difference between just productivity, like I built a thing, and what is good? What is actually worth it? What's worth other people's time?

78:34Yeah. I think that's a big differentiating opportunity right now instead of just shipping the thing fast, it's what's a very good version of this thing. And people see that. They're like, "Oh, wow. This is different."

78:44Yeah, exactly. I think this goes to the point of what will matter when it comes to human touch, and I think a lot of that is going to come down to the question of what is good and what is worth it and what endures.

78:58Is there anything that we haven't touched on that we should before we try to summarize maybe some key lessons from this freewheeling conversation?

79:08Well, the one thing I just wanted to say is... I was thinking yesterday because of the conversation I was having is like, what do I want every manager or leader out there to know? Because I think the world of the IC is honestly a little more clear. You are more productive and you have all this power and agency around building, and the world that feels very hard to me right now is the world of the managers and the leaders because so much is changing so fast. It's a little bit hard to know what to tell people. It's a little bit hard to know what your team should look like, what matters, what doesn't matter, all that. (01:19:50): And so I guess I wanted to say a couple of things to the managers and leaders out there, if you'll give me the sec. The first is understand that you're a role model and that what you do and how you behave is essentially showing your team what good looks like. And that means that how you use AI trickles down, but also how you sit in this moment, how you show up. And for me, what I want a little more space for in the world is to be able to acknowledge what this change feels like. I hope there's more managers out there because of this conversation talking about grief and talking about the emotions that come with change and talking about how hard this is for people. (01:20:37): I think that acknowledging what this rate of change does to people's brains and psychologies, it just... Honestly, even acknowledging it makes it easier for people. Like I said, I swear to God, that's most of what the Legos article did is just tell people, "Hey, that thing that you're feeling, other people have felt it before you and it hasn't meant that everything is going to hell in a hand basket. It's meant, oh, you're going through a lot of change really, really fast and it's scary and hard." So the more that leaders can be talking about that, I think the more sane everyone's going to feel and less alone. Knowing that someone at XYZ company is feeling the same way as you makes a difference. (01:21:20): And I guess the last thing I just say is I think everyone owns this to some extent, but managers and leaders more so, we need to hold on to the definition of accountability and what good means. I think that's part of the role modeling. What is right to give away to AI and what do we still as humans and people and workers need to own? We're going to have to role model that and we're going to have to create standards for that. So that goes to your own behavior, but it also goes to how you lead and how you talk about it. (01:21:57): Clay put out this beautiful AI writing policy a couple weeks ago, I think it was, and it's so badass because it's literally just talking about being accountable for what you ship out in the world and being accountable for what good is regardless of how you made it. And for today, to me, that feeling of treating AI as a junior intern and realizing that it's fundamentally just a tool to get work done, but what matters is the work is still done mostly by the humans and the human brains, and we got to take care of the humans and we got to help them figure out how to navigate this wild, wild west that we are in.

82:39I'm really glad you added that. It connects to another really interesting insight from the survey, which is that the one thing that you can actually change to increase people's happiness right now at work is their manager. That's the strongest lever for happiness at work. You can actually do something about it. All this other AI stuff you can't do a ton about, that's one. And most people's managers are not good according to the survey also.

83:06None of this is surprising.

83:07So taking care of the managers is kind of just a reminder that you have a lot of leverage there as well.

83:11Yeah, which by the way, there are trends inside of bigger companies to get rid of management, to get rid of whole management layers, and I think it is a huge mistake. I think it is going to end up biting people in the ass long term because I see no signs right now that management matters less. If anything, to your point, I think it matters more. And again, I get the efficiency and the cost savings and all that, but I think at what costs that you can't predict. So it really resonates that management is almost more important because it makes people feel seen. That's what a great manager does is make people feel seen and supported and help them figure out whatever mess they're in.

83:53It's going to be so interesting to see if there's a backlash towards that. People have had great managers, they're rarely going to be like, "I wish I had no manager." It's like the people with bad managers, which a lot of people are like, "I don't need this person, but they're so useless."

84:06Yeah, they're in my way. They are a wall. No, totally. I mean, I always say you only get a couple good managers in your life and when you find one, hold onto it for dear life because you're only going to get two.

84:17Oh, man. Scary. I've never heard that advice before. Anything else that you wanted to share or touch on?

84:27I mean, it'll be fascinating. We'll reflect on this in six months and see what-

84:31That's what I was thinking. We're in the middle of it right now. It's like Elizabeth Stone had a really good way of framing it. We're in the storming phase and then there's the norming phase. I have no idea what that actually means, but it sounds right. Storming, norming.

84:45Well, there's storming, norming, and then there's performing. But the other thing that nobody tells you about that framework is that you can go backwards. You often go through cycles. It's a model on team development and you go through storming and then you go through norming and then you go for performing, but you can slip from performing into storming, and I feel like we're going to see a lot of that.

85:06Oh, boy. Yeah. It's very cool to be living through this history, right? It's easy to take for granted just how this is. It's like we're living through history.

85:18It's funny you say that because that's actually something I always talk about when I do these Lego speeches is 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 absorbing and I don't know, shit just flying at you at all times and everything's changing all the time. And it is so easy in that state to lose the forest for the trees. You can get really bogged down or stuck in obsessing about this person or this thing or feeling undervalued. And a lot of what I say to folks in those speeches is you got to zoom out. You got to think about what is the story that I want to tell on the other side of this? It's less about your title or all these things than it is about, I was here and I helped build this. (01:26:08): I talk about it as a giant Lego sculpture. So you're like, "Let's pretend it's a tiger". You're going to leave here with this incredible story. You built the feed and then you were part of building the face and then you rebuilt the butt three times and then you realized it wasn't just a tiger, it was a whole zoo. That is what it feels like to be inside of these rapidly changing companies. And I wonder... As you were saying that, what I was thinking about is, gosh, imagine the stories we're going to be telling in five or 10 years. I was there when, here's what I thought that was right. Here's what I though that was wrong. I was the first person to say this. Oh, man. I was so wrong about that. You are living through history that you will be telling stories about to whatever generation of new grads shows up in 10 years. (01:26:55): What do you want your part of that story to be? How are you going to tell that story? I think there is something about zooming out and realizing it is hard and there is a lot of change going on, but there is a crazy fun story that we're all going to be telling on the other side of this. We just don't know what it is yet.

87:12Hopefully not just talking to our AGI, "Tell me more. Tell me more, Molly."

87:17Totally. That's so fascinating.

87:19Yeah, exactly. "You're so great. You're so smart." Oh, man. Okay. What if we do just some bullet points, like takeaways for folks, just like here's a few key things to keep in mind coming from this giving away your Legos framework, see where your mind goes and then maybe I'll add a few for my notes.

87:37Okay. To me, most important is change is scary and hard, but that doesn't mean it's bad. That means you have to embrace the emotions that come with it, but you also have to lean into it and you should let go. Yes, it's scary and yes, it feels like there may not be anything waiting on the other side, but what's the alternative, to hold on to this thing that might be slowly dying? That's not safe either. So leaning into change feels like to me the most important thing for folks to take away. I think as part of that, I would just say grief is part of this and sometimes grief needs a funeral or do what you got to do to be sad. Let your teams be sad. Let the people around you make space for that because with change comes shedding things that you loved and that sucks. (01:28:37): I think one of the other things that feels like it really came out, Lenny, is there is opportunity here and we got to start ignoring or muting or whatever some of this fear narrative because right now the data isn't saying there are no jobs for you. The data is saying actually there's going to be a lot of opportunity created by this, particularly if you're willing to lean into reinvention, not what was the form of your job two years ago, but what might it be in five years? What else? I guess breaking down walls is the other thing I was thinking, but what came to your list?

89:19Well, there's the minute kind of perspective of imagine your job isn't going to go away, imagine your job will continue, but be different.

89:22Yeah, exactly. It was a real mind change for me when she said that because I was like, " Whoa. Yeah, what is engineering going to look like in five years?"

89:35Right. It's not going to go away. It's going to be something different.

89:38Maybe there'll be more of it, like journalism. There's more journalists out there for better or for worse.

89:43Yeah. And so far there's more PMs, more product, more engineers. So far that's going well. Another kind of takeaway is just be deliberate about what you give to AI. And there's a few ways to think about it. One is just like what is AI going to do a terrible job at? Don't do that. What is it you love that you don't want it to take for you? How do you avoid brain rot and just overrelying in AI? There's a few things there, just AI is not going to... Don't give everything to AI.

90:11Yeah. And I think also for a lot of us acknowledging that AI is not this super intelligent being, it is much more like an intern, and that means literally think about it as an intern. What would you give to an intern and what would you never give them?

90:11I think that's the core of it.

90:28Yeah. And I feel like... Well, I feel like we said this, but there just may be some things we should never give away, and that is genuinely different. Give away your Legos, but be discerning about what you should keep and what should be human and what humans are here for. I think that's part of the conversation for the next however many years is what are humans uniquely good at?

90:52And what I think about there, just very concretely in my mind is be the person that guides what you're doing to a place, to the vision you have of the world you want, not just the simplest thing, not the thing that AI is kind of pointing to, just what do you actually want, and that's kind of our job for a while.

91:09Yeah. And at the individual level, how can this new tool, this fun, intelligent intern that you've hired, let you do more of what you love, let you bring more joy into the world, let you lean into the things that you love doing. How can it amplify you instead of feeling like all you're doing is losing things to it?

91:28What a moment in time we're in, Molly, right now, trying to figure all this out.

91:32We're going to re-watch this in a year or two and make fun of ourselves.

91:35Oh, we're going to be, "We nailed it. We got everything right."

91:39Perfect.

91:39Visionaries. Oh, man. Well, with that, Molly, is there anything else? Anything you want to plug? Anything you want to point people to? Anything you want to tell people about that you're up to that might be interesting, useful to them?

91:50I'll say two things. First, I get a lot of wisdom, but also a lot of support for this kind of conversation from the community in Glue Club, and I think if you're a leader listening to this and feeling lonely and a little bit unsupported, find a community, whether it's Glue Club or another one, where you can talk about this because I do think leaning on each other to learn what's real and what's not and what's valuable and what it's not... So much of what we're doing in Glue Club is being like, "Is anybody else seeing this?" And that is really valuable. You can do it in Lennyland as well, but just get out there and talk about what's real and what's not. Don't just stay in a sad, lonely hole. (01:32:33): But the second thing I wanted to say, Lenny, is thank you for making space for this. I think it's important. There's so much space right now for the what should I do and what skills should I get and what course should I take and what tools should I try next? Who's hot today? But we aren't talking enough about the human side of this and what it feels like to be going through this for everyone. And so I'm grateful that you reached out and we talked about making space to talk about this because I think hopefully people will leave feeling a little more sane and like, "Oh, everybody else is feeling a little crazy right now too." And there's lots of people out there grieving and that's okay. That's normal. So thank you, Lenny.

93:14Thank you, Molly. I think of these... I have a term for these sorts of episodes. I call them Trojan horse episodes where people come for all this tactical concrete, how do I use AI in this way, how do I become better PM, and then there's these like-

93:30You get therapy.

93:31Important episodes that slip right in. Yeah, exactly. And you're like, "Oh, okay. I didn't know I needed that, but that was very helpful." So welcome to the Trojan Horse. We're smuggling in.

93:41I love it.

93:42Very timely with the Odyssey these days.

93:44Yeah, dude.

93:45All right, Molly. Well, thank you so much for being here.

93:47Yeah. Thanks for having me, Lenny.

93:49Bye everyone.

93:50Bye everybody.

93:51Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.