Molly Graham: The grief, burnout, and opportunity hiding inside the AI transition

1. 0:00 – 3:34

   Molly Graham returns

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky0:00

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

   2. MGMolly Graham0:09

      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. I want you to pour every single thing that you know into this employee, and then they're gonna take your job in six months." Like, who the [beep] wants to do that?

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky0:26

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

   4. MGMolly Graham0:29

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

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky0:37

      Which is a radical departure from your advice over the many years.

   6. MGMolly Graham0:40

      You individually are phenomenal at a set of things. Don't outsource it to these weird robots that, you know, are effectively summer interns.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky0:48

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

   8. MGMolly Graham0:53

      You had someone on who talked about, like, 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 wanna [beep] steer."

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03

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

   10. MGMolly Graham1:06

       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."

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13

       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?

   12. MGMolly Graham1:19

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

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:29

       Today 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 wanna do. Essentially, to give away your Legos. After 13 years of giving this advice and it unlocking so much wind 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? 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 WorkLife 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. 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. [gentle music]

2. 3:34 – 5:44

   What is “Give away your Legos”?

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky3:34

      Molly, thank you so much for being here, and welcome back to the podcast.

   2. MGMolly Graham3:38

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

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky3:41

      Uh, I'm even more excited to have you back. Let me add a little context to this slightly unusual conversation we're gonna have. So we've been chatting over the past couple months about your famous, uh, 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, uh, strange AI world, where AI is taking a lot of our Legos [laughs] whether we like it or not.

   4. MGMolly Graham4:10

      [laughs]

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky4:11

      And we're being encouraged to give away our Legos to AI. People are afraid about AI taking their Legos. And so, uh, 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 gonna have a conversation about it, see where it goes. 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've 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. 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.

3. 5:44 – 11:27

   The origin story: Google, Facebook, and rapid scale

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky5:45

      I'd say as a first step, let's remind people what this advice is. Uh, I imagine most people have heard it, and a lot of people are probably like, "Oh, yeah, I kinda get the idea." So explain the, kinda the original, uh, idea of giving away your Legos.

   2. MGMolly Graham5:56

      It actually started when I was at Google and Facebook, and it started as a, a little talk that I would give people that worked for me And, and for context, like, I- 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, like, 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. Um, and you know, while I was there, you know, 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, uh, from a scaling perspective. And what I witnessed at Google and then sort of really witnessed at Facebook was how hard and scary that experience was for people. Um, I watched a lot of folks go from sort of like you, you build a thing, right? 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 like 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, you know, hand that thing that you've built your whole identity around to someone else and, you know, go on to doing something else." And your first instinct is like, "What?" You know, like, "No, I don't, I don't wanna give it away." Like, "I, I'm good at this. I know how to do this. Um, I also think it's fun, and what if it's the only fun thing to do?" And so you kind of witness people, like, would have this tendency to hold on. 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," right? 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, to, to evolve as the company is evolving. And my brain is a really weird place. Like, I grew up on the Muppets, so I just like spits out... I always think there's just like a lot of tiny monsters dancing around singing songs in my head. But, like, that is why metaphors come out, uh, for me. And so I always use this metaphor of like just a bunch of kindergartners and, like, somebody dumps a pile of Legos in front of you, and at first it's fun, a little overwhelming, then you start building. And, and the give away your Legos part is like that feeling when somebody else shows up and they try to take the tower out of your hands. And the kindergartner response is like, "Get out of here." You know what I mean? It's like, uh, shoving someone away, when actually, like, 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, right? To, um, to be territorial and all of those things. So anyway, I, I started giving this talk to folks on my team to kind of 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. [laughs] Um, the talk I was... Like, when, when I was at Facebook, it was over 20 years ago. Um, and, uh, it... I sent it to First Round and we published it. And, you know, I would've said I was speaking to folks going through a Facebook-like experience. Like, I would've said like, "Hey, this is an article that is for like the Stripes or the Slacks or whoever was, you know, uh, blowing up in, 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. Um, 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. You know, where... And this woman, I still remember this email, wrote me and was like, "This was so helpful to me. This like 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 like is so valuable to me. Like, this is exactly what I've been feeling." And my first reaction was like, "I didn't write this for you." Like, this is not, this was not meant for you. Um, but my second one was, whoa, this is about something much bigger than just what it feels like to be inside of rapid scale. Um, and fundamentally, I think the Legos message is about change. You know? And it's about the fact that when you go through change, a lot of [laughs] shit happens to you. You know what I mean? Like, it just is a very specific experience, and I think that's why it ended up, ended up being so universal. And it is crazy. Like, I still get emails about it, multiple emails a month about it to this day. Um, so it's, it's lasted in a way that, again, like I just thought I was, I was sending out a note to the folks that are going through crazy rapid change.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky11:12

      I, uh, I 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.

   4. MGMolly Graham11:22

      It's, it's up there, and it's traveled in ways that I don't think any of us imagined it

4. 11:27 – 18:13

   What still holds true in an AI world

   1. MGMolly Graham11:27

      would.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky11:28

      Okay. 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?

   3. MGMolly Graham11:39

      One thing that's crazy about this article is I still get so many emails about it today. I still get asked to give speeches, you know, 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 like what started to happen, it's probably like two years ago, is I got more inbound from managers, um, 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. Um, you know, I used to, uh, really check before I went and did a speech at some company how fast the company was growing. Um, I would ask, like, kind of about revenue growth and about head count growth, 'cause that just helps me contextualize, like, how I should speak to, to employees. And I still do that, um, 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. And that is the fundamental underlying message of Legos, is how do you deal with change, and how do you, um, be your best self in the face of change? So I feel like the, the number one thing that is true today, as true as it was, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, is that change is really scary and hard. And I always say, like somebody once asked me to, like, summarize the Legos article in one sentence. They're like, "Molly, this is too long. Like, give me the CliffsNotes." [laughs]

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky13:20

      [laughs]

   5. MGMolly Graham13:21

      And I, I said two things. Um, 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 gonna be okay. 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. Like 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 gonna be okay is really something everybody needs to hear. That, like, change is scary and hard, but it doesn't necessarily mean the world is ending. I think the s- the second piece of that is that change comes with this incredible set of emotions, like this wild rollercoaster, um, that we don't talk about enough. And I think that was a lot of why I first started talking about Legos, like, at Facebook and on my teams, was I just wanted to normalize for people what it felt like. That, that you might feel all these feelings, and that that was what everyone around you was feeling, right? That it didn't make you crazy and it didn't make you broken or something like that. 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. Like, when I travel around and I'm talking to leaders, um, and I know you and I are gonna talk about this, but a lot of what I'm hearing is, is grief and all these different emotions. There's obviously, like, excitement and, um, joy in, in this moment of, of chaos and change with AI. But there is a lot of sadness. There's a lot of overwhelm that all, you know, 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, um, and without normalizing that. And I think that's, like, such a big part of the giveaway or Legos, you know, today, is just, like, helping people understand that these emotions are just part of sort of your body and your identity reacting to change. 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, like, 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. You know? I always say, like, what you can learn by tomorrow matters way more than what you know today. And, like, never has a truer sentence been said than, like, about the age of AI. Do you know what I mean? Like, whatever we thought we knew six months ago, like, 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, when I do these speeches, is like, you go look at that graph of how fast your company is growing, right? You go look at, like, that curve. You know, and at Facebook it was like, 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, uh, your job is growing, right? 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, right, it feels safe. It feels like, hold on to what you know, you know, 'cause that, that at least it's not, you know, scary and unknown. But actually standing still is, like, the least safe thing you can do. It's basically you're guaranteed to fall behind. Um, and I, uh, saw this, this really at Facebook when, 'cause the first two years I was in HR. And, um, you could literally see, like, 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, like, less than a year later, 'cause it was a different company. And I think this is happening with AI as well, um, which is that we do have these instincts to, like, 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 gonna 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. Um, and that, that message, again, remains true in this, this wild, wild world.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky17:59

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

   7. MGMolly Graham18:10

      The second one is basically don't worry, it's all gonna be okay.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky18:12

      Don't worry, yeah.

5. 18:13 – 22:09

   Engineering’s identity shift: from rowing to steering

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky18:13

      Okay, so those don't feel ... necessarily correct anymore. So we're gonna get into that 'cause I think that's, as you said, the core of people's concern. They... That was, like, comforting, and now it's like, "Well, are you sure?"

   2. MGMolly Graham18:25

      Yeah.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky18:25

      Um, this grief piece, just to spend a little more time here. I've been, I've been seeing this a lot in a lot of different professions. I've done these surveys that, um, we might get into a little bit. But, like, 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 a 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 gonna be 100% write this thing, build this thing. And I used to be an engineer, and I moved into product, and I was, I was so missing that flow state of being an engineer, of just sitting there coding, building, and now that's gone. You no longer sit there and just build a thing. You're just, like, waiting for agents to run and then checking. You probably have 100 different agents, and it's just, like, a very strange new job. And I've heard from a lot of engineers just like, "I really miss what it used to be."

   4. MGMolly Graham19:22

      Yeah.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky19:22

      Anything more there about just, I don't know, what you're hearing from folks about just like, "Man, this sucks"?

   6. MGMolly Graham19:27

      No, it's exactly, um... It's such a perfect example of, like, the grief. Um, I was giving a speech, like, two weeks ago at a, you know, 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, like, 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, like, 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, and it took, like, a while. And to some extent, like, I wanna 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, and the fact that he's not sure what is his current job. Like, what is this? The company has grown, and so he's m- in a more structured environment. And what is just the simple fact that engineering has totally changed. Um, and a lot of what he was talking about was how much he missed being more hands-on, which is, you know, one way of saying it. But I think that that grief is happening for a lot of people. I think engineering is, like, probably one of the most visceral areas where people's jobs have genuinely transformed. Um, you know, s- you had someone on last week, um, who talked about, like, the job used to be rowing, and now it's-

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky20:55

      Uh, Tara.

   8. MGMolly Graham20:56

      Yeah

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky20:56

      ... yeah, from OpenAI.

   10. MGMolly Graham20:57

       W- she said, like, the job used to be rowing, and now it's, like-

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky21:00

       Steering

   12. MGMolly Graham21:00

       ... 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 wanna fucking steer." Do you know what I mean? I wanna row. Like, I like rowing. Or I l- I, I mean, it's... 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 gonna be good at, or it's what I know and I don't know if I, uh, can be good at steering. And I think that's happening in a lot of disciplines, you know? Um, and so that grief, like, first and foremost, like, that grief is really real, you know? I was talking to a product leader just the other day who was like, "I don't know, man. We're, like, all supposed to be these, like, you know, universal builders now." And, and she was like, "I don't... Honestly, it's kind of lonely," you know? 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," you know? And I was like s- I just said to her, like, "Yeah, man, that sucks. Let's sit with it for a second," you know? Like, 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

6. 22:09 – 24:06

   Loneliness and the collapse of team structure

   1. MGMolly Graham22:09

      hard."

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky22:09

      There's so much power in just, like, saying the thing that you're feeling. What a... [laughs] What a simple-

   3. MGMolly Graham22:14

      I swear to God that that is a big chunk of what the Legos article did.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky22:18

      Mm.

   5. MGMolly Graham22:18

      Was just like, this is hard and scary, and that's... And, and it's gonna be okay, you know?

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky22:24

      Mm-hmm. This loneliness piece is such a important part to touch on. I had, um, Fiona Fung on the podcast, who leads Claude Code, the engineering team for Claude Code. She's Boris Cherny's boss, fun fact. And she said this exact, that they're... Like, I asked her just what's, what's kind of the downside of this world, and it's engineers are... You used to work with a bunch of engineers. Teams used to be, you know, 5 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.

   7. MGMolly Graham22:54

      [laughs]

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky22:55

      And so, so it's another-

   9. MGMolly Graham22:57

      It's not the same.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky22:58

       It's not the same. [laughs]

   11. MGMolly Graham22:59

       No. It's not the same. And I think that's actually something that leaders of companies that are actually, like, in charge of org structures and thinking about what the future of structure of teams, you know, needs to look like, y- you actually need to think about it 'cause, like, yeah, maybe you can, like, 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? [laughs] And, like, that doesn't lead to, like, a, the best work for anyone. Like, I thought your survey data around the fact that small teams at s- and smaller companies are so much happier than people at the bigger companies was really interesting, um, just because, A, that, like, very much resonates with what I see in all my conversations with leaders. Um, but it also to me is a reflection of, like, 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, and things like that, and there's less room for the human. You know? There's less room for the joy and the excitement when all you're doing is focusing on optimizing cost and robot efficiency,

7. 24:06 – 25:36

   The centaur and the reverse centaur

   1. MGMolly Graham24:06

      you know?

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky24:07

      Yeah. Man, there's so much to talk about here. Um, there's this really cool framework, I don't know, mental model that Cory Doctorow wrote about, uh, a while ago, where he talks about the re- the centaur and the reverse centaur. You heard of this?

   3. MGMolly Graham24:19

      No, but I love it already.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky24:21

      Okay, so, okay.

   5. MGMolly Graham24:21

      [laughs]

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky24:22

      So I think, I don't know even how to pronounce it. Centaur? Does that sound right? Centaur?

   7. MGMolly Graham24:25

      Yeah, that's right.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky24:26

      Okay. So centaur is a human body on top of a animal, like a horse.

   9. MGMolly Graham24:30

      Horse.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky24:30

       Sorry, a human head, torso, top of a human-

   11. MGMolly Graham24:32

       Lenny, clearly you do not read enough Greek mythology. [laughs]

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky24:35

       I just watched The Odyssey. I'm an expert on all things.

   13. MGMolly Graham24:38

       Your kid is gonna get older, and you're gonna read the, like, Lightning Thief books, and you'll get it.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky24:42

       Lightning Thief, okay.

   15. MGMolly Graham24:43

       Yeah.

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky24:43

       I'll look forward to it. Okay, so, so idea is a centaur is human head controlling a animal body. Reverse centaur is a animal head controlling a human body. So the, the way he, 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 and fear is the reverse centaur, where the AI is using us to do things. Like 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, like, thing that's just controlling agents and just this, like, closing gap of here's where humans still are v- valuable, and then AI's kinda telling you where to build and what to do, and then it's, and then it's doing the thing. So s- so I've been thinking a lot about that.

8. 25:36 – 29:20

   The fear narrative: AI-branded layoffs and overblown doom

   1. MGMolly Graham25:36

      Yeah. I mean, I wanna get to the fear side of this and the fear narrative as well, 'cause I think that's one of the things that is really different, uh, in this, this stage, uh, and this sort of phase. 'Cause it's really hard to tell people, like, lean into change when they're like, "But wait, like, what's on the other side? Like, you're telling me to let go of my Legos. You're telling me to make myself irrelevant. Like, fuck you." You know what I mean? [laughs] Like, I, I don't believe there's a job on the other side, and I think that fear narrative, like, I am sure some of it is real, but some of it is really overblown, and it's, and it's creating, like, 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, like, 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, like, 10 times smarter than you, and I want you to pour every single thing that you know into this employee, and then they're gonna take your job in six months. Like, who the fuck wants to do that? Do you know what I mean? No one wants to do that. Like, that is not a good narrative for anyone. By the way, it's also not reality. Like, as of right now, like, there is not a lot of data, although you may have more than I do, that says that AI is genuinely taking jobs away. Um, and I have a lot of beef to pick with all the AI-branded layoffs out there because they're bullshit. Like, they're not about AI. Like, they're about badly run companies slapping an AI label and getting some share points from that versus saying, "Whoops, we may- we hired too many people." Um, and they're propagating this fear narrative that is like all these jobs are... Your job is going away, right? There is no job on the other side. One of the best... So I took over this podcast which you know, called WorkLife, and it's let me have all these really f- fun conversations with people. And one of the best conversations I had, uh, was with this journalist named Manoush Zomorodi, and she has been a journalist for 30 years. You wanna talk about an industry that people have been predicting the death of for 30 years, right? Journalism. And Manoush has done everything. Like, she started at the BBC, and she was, uh, super early in audio, and she did this, like, crazy crypto audio podcast, and she's also, like, 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. And from talking to her, m- I basically walked away with this really interesting question that is totally different than what would you do if you believed your job was gonna disappear. It was, what would you do if you believed your job was always going to exist? It was just gonna 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 gonna get taken by AI, which is, like, the form is definitely gonna change. But until we have real evidence, what if we believe that they're not going away, they're just going to reinvent themselves?

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky29:01

      That is awesome advice, and that's exactly what's been happening so far.

   3. MGMolly Graham29:05

      Yeah.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky29:05

      It... There'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. And-

   5. MGMolly Graham29:15

      Exactly. Your data said that.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky29:17

      Mm-hmm.

   7. MGMolly Graham29:17

      And I was like, "Thank you for publishing this data, Lenny."

9. 29:20 – 35:07

   Survey data: burnout is up to 55%, but half of people are thriving

   1. MGMolly Graham29:20

      [laughs]

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky29:20

      Mm. Mm. Before we get into the, the advice, kind of how it's evolved, there's a couple things I wanna 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 kind of come back to that point. Um, so we looked, 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, uh, a trend now of over time how things are ch- changing, and we look at burnout and optimism. And t- in 2025, 44% of people said they feel burned out. La... Or this year, 55% of people said they are burned out. Like, that's a huge jump. That's 10% increase in a year of people feeling burnt out. And it makes sense. As you said, you're basically now expected to do more work in, with not probably more money. And now it's just like, okay, cool, 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 gonna go out of business. We gotta move fast. So, so it makes sense

   3. MGMolly Graham30:27

      I mean, I love that you do that survey, 'cause I also think I learn a ton from it every time you've published it. Um, and it also is just, like, a great reality check about how people are feeling, 'cause literally what your survey says is more than half the people-

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky30:38

      More than half

   5. MGMolly Graham30:38

      ... are feeling burnt out.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky30:40

      Yes

   7. MGMolly Graham30:40

      Which is, like, nuts, and also, yeah, I believe it. And I think, you know, I mean, 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, like, number one, like, 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. Um, both in terms of, like, obviously the technological change, but I actually think the narrative change is also pretty exhausting for people. Like, "Oh, this month, this is important. Oh, next month, this..." You know, like, there's a thrash inside of that that's pretty tiring. Um, uh, you know, I was emailing with a friend at OpenAI, and she was like, "It's taken us literally six months to go from sort of this token maxing, like, everybody, like, aggressive productivity, like, use AI everywhere, to a conversation that's like, 'Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.' Like, 'Is this actually making a difference?' 'Cause it's very expensive," you know? And she's like, "Six months. That's all it took." And so if you're sitting inside that, it means six months ago they were like, "Use AI all the time, every day, everywhere," and now they're like, "H- are you doing it well enough?" You know? And Hilary Gridley said the same thing, where she was like, you know, six months ago everyone was like, "How do I get people to use AI?" And now they're like, "How do I get [laughs] people to use AI, like, stop using AI so badly?" You know? And it's like that six-month thrash, often much faster than that, is tiring for people. The grief is tiring, let alone, like, I think that feeling which you mentioned in your survey of, like, I'm gonna be expected to do more for the same amount of pay. Like, that's exhausting. Like, that... I think people feel taken advantage of, you know? And like, what is in this for me? Um, like, why is it fun for me? Um, what, what's the opportunity for me? And I think particularly at bigger companies, it feels almost adversarial sometimes. You know? Where, like, you know, I get why it's good for our bottom line, but remind me why that's good for me.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky32:51

      There's... That actually touches on one of the biggest findings in this survey, which is that, first of all, half of people that filled it out, uh, are feeling the happiest they've ever felt. This is an important point we need to make, is not-

   9. MGMolly Graham33:02

      Yeah

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky33:02

       ... everybody's feeling this-

   11. MGMolly Graham33:04

       Totally

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky33:04

       ... fear and, and, uh, sense that it's all doomed. That actually a lot of, like, half of people, uh, are feeling like they're having the best time of their life in their career, and they're so excited about all the things going on. Like, you may not feel that. You may... 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.

   13. MGMolly Graham33:28

       Yeah.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky33:28

       Uh, yeah.

   15. MGMolly Graham33:29

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

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky33:38

       The-

   17. MGMolly Graham33:38

       ... sort of... Yeah

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky33:38

       ... absolutely. And even more interestingly, the strongest correlation is people who said that A- AI has amplified them.

   19. MGMolly Graham33:47

       Hmm.

   20. LRLenny Rachitsky33:48

       They feel like they've figured out how to use AI to do more stuff that they're excited about.

   21. MGMolly Graham33:52

       Mm-hmm.

   22. LRLenny Rachitsky33:53

       And that, 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, get alignment. You need, uh, you need to think. Like, sit there and think. You can't just agent iterate and model it up. So-

   23. MGMolly Graham34:13

       I also think-

   24. LRLenny Rachitsky34:14

       So the con-

   25. MGMolly Graham34:14

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

   26. LRLenny Rachitsky34:18

       Yeah, that's also-

   27. MGMolly Graham34:19

       And it's like-

   28. LRLenny Rachitsky34:19

       ... part of it. [laughs]

   29. MGMolly Graham34:20

       When you're... When I worked in education, it's, like, 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, and by the way, I think this is true of, you know, a lot of industries, which is, like, and, and whole products, where it's, like, the gap between I made this and what is actually great, right? The gap between, like, I created this prototype and a product that is, like, exceptional is really big. The same is true, obviously, of design, and design just got, like, way more accessible to the average person. Uh, at least okay design got really, really accessible, you know? Which can be exhausting when people are telling you how to do your job

10. 35:07 – 40:01

    Cleaning up AI slop

    1. MGMolly Graham35:07

       all the time.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky35:07

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

    3. MGMolly Graham35:18

       Okay, 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, you know, we're saying, like, AI is, like, the smartest employee you've ever hired in the entire world, and, uh, it's better than you at everything. And I think it causes people to, like, approach it that way, when actually most of our experience with AI, I think a lot of people, uh, have had the experience with AI where it's like, "That's wrong." Like, "What i- w- I just asked you to do that. Like, this isn't good." I always think, like, AI needs the same coaching and training that a human does, right? It needs context. It needs onboarding. It needs all of these things. It, and it's kind of much more like a, like an intern, like a bad intern often. I call it a lazy intern. Um, and what happens, like, to your point about AI slop, is that folks are approaching it as if it's, like, a, the great, [laughs] you know, the best employee they've ever hired, so they just, like, copy, paste, send, right? And I'm like, you would never do that if you thought about it as an intern. You would never take the presentation that an intern handed you and just, like, straight forward it to your boss. Like, that is- A little bit insane, right? Uh, s- you would iterate on it, you would edit it, you would ask, make sure that it had all the context from, like, the 57 conversations that you've had with the summer intern before you ship that preso to your boss. AI is the same, and I think part of what's going on with all the slop in the world is people have, like, shipped accountability. Like, it's like, "Oh, AI said this was good enough, so I'm just gonna, like, copy, paste, send," you know? And that is never been how good work happens, you know what I mean? So, like, I feel like we need a, a change from, like, this super intelligent being that's better than all of us at our jobs to, like, no, it's just a fucking intern, man. And, like, it needs the coaching and context and all of that, and m- many iterations that most interns do. And I think the other thing, you know, to your point about accountability is... Or to your point about sort of, like, if you don't take accountability for the quality of your work, that shifts to someone else, right? The, someb- the person that receives it has to deal with it, and that is, like, just a drain on organizations. And, like, I literally see CEOs, like, we talk about this all the time in Glue Club, like, she, CEOs, like, 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. Um, and I feel like it goes down to this thing of, like, we're like, we've, this last six months, we've really been, like, overvaluing productivity, which is just like, you know, you hear all these stories about, like, companies, like, counting tokens and having token leaderboards, and it's like, it brings me back to the days when people were, like, counting cars in a parking lot, and Slack bubbles, and lines of code, right? Which we all know is a really bad way to manage people. Um, and it's, it's not for... We've been focused on sort of like, how do you run as fast as you can on the treadmill, but, like, not am I going anywhere, you know? And which is, to me, the difference between, like, productivity and efficiency. Like, productivity is can you generate, you know, more, which at this point I think we've proven we can all generate a bunch of shit that other people 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.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky38:49

       Yeah. There's a, in that report, I have this iceberg image of just, like, we're doing better on top. Oh, look at all the stuff. But the output is worse, thinking judgment is coming down, so there's a lot of, a lot of things we're watching. The good news, everyone's aware of this. They're like, "Yeah, maybe this isn't the way we should be working."

    5. MGMolly Graham39:05

       No.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky39:05

       So, yeah.

    7. MGMolly Graham39:06

       I thought, I, there was this really interesting engineering report that said, you know, engineer- like, 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, like, 8X. So it's, like, this, like, very clear symbol of productivity. Obviously, like, 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, like, people are just getting swamped, you know? 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? Did... That's tiring. That doesn't feel like a good use of your time. It just feels a little bit infuriating, you know?

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky39:54

       Yeah. It comes back to the grief of, like, "Oh, man, I miss what I ha- used to be doing."

    9. MGMolly Graham39:58

       Yeah.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky39:58

        "Look at this weird new job I'm doing."

    11. MGMolly Graham39:59

        Yeah, totally.

11. 40:01 – 42:02

    What’s actually different: delegating to AI vs. giving Legos to a human

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky40:01

       Okay, 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, um, change is scary. That's normal. Understand that. It's, it's part of human nature. We don't like change. Uh, 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. The company's growing. If you're not growing and taking on new challenges and giving away stuff, you're gonna fall behind. Is there anything else core to kind of what's still-

    2. MGMolly Graham40:45

       Yeah, 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. You know, basically, like, 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.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky41:12

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12. 42:02 – 49:07

    Why every worker is now a manager, whether they want to be or not

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky42:02

       Okay, so now what is, what is different? Uh, the advice broadly is, okay, give away, make yourself redundant. It's gonna be okay. Uh. [laughs]

    2. MGMolly Graham42:10

       [laughs] I know. That's the one that's, oof, hard to talk about today. Yeah, c- make yourself irrelevant, everybody. It's gonna go great. [laughs]

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky42:20

       Yeah.

    4. MGMolly Graham42:20

       Um, yeah, you know, it's funny, like, when I, when AI first really took off and I first... 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?" Um, but eventually I, 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, how fast is your head count growing?'" For me, that was like the only symbol I had of like, are there people to give Legos to? You know, if I'm gonna 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. Like, who do I give it to?" And but now I was like, "Oh, okay, like this message is like even more relevant," 'cause like everyone can try to automate parts of their job and everyone can give Legos away. 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, you know, principally the point was, like of Legos, was like 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. You know, like perfectly describe your tower. Make sure they have like an instruction manual that they won't fuck up." 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. [laughs] Because our tendency, again, is towards control. Like, 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, like 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. Um, and there is both obviously like a lot of fear and a whole bunch of stuff that comes with that, but there's a huge amount of freedom, right? You take this brain space and you ship it to them. Um, interestingly, like 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? Like you... It's more like delegating something to someone on your team. You still own it. And so we've given, 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 like, 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, you know? 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, right? You're still, you've still got all the tax of... The cost of oversight is not zero. Do you know what I mean? Again, I wonder if, if this is part of what's going on with some of your burnout data, is just like all of a sudden I'm overseeing all these robots and maybe all these humans and like it's not, it's, it's, it's more. And, um, so anyway, I think that's one of the biggest differences, is just like it isn't exactly the same. It's like the difference between like transferring a Lego to someone where you genuinely get rid of it, versus like delegating a Lego to someone.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky46:02

       It's so funny the way you described it, where you, you need to not be, you need to disconnect from the responsibility of this thing now, and that's the opposite now, where somebody else is doing this, the AI, but you're still responsible.

    6. MGMolly Graham46:15

       Yeah.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky46:15

       And so it's like having this Lego tower with this little robot coming through and, "Okay, I'm gonna build, I'm gonna work on this now," but you're s- you still have to represent this tower-

    8. MGMolly Graham46:24

       Yeah. [laughs]

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky46:24

       ... to your boss. And so I could 100% see this metaphor.

    10. MGMolly Graham46:28

        It's like you're-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky46:29

        Make it clear what it's like

    12. MGMolly Graham46:30

        ... if you're a manager, it's a familiar feeling, right? Your team got twice as big.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky46:33

        Mm-hmm.

    14. MGMolly Graham46:34

        And now you just have these weird little robots that occasionally like fuck up the tower and you have to be like, "No, no, no. No, no, no. That's not what I said." You know, which is like, again, managing an intern. Like you get it. But if you're not a manager, like if you've never been a manager, and I do think it's important to name that like, like I said, like managing robots, those skills are very similar to managing hum- humans. They have less feelings, but, you know, it's all the same skills of like oversight and, you know, giving them context and correcting their work and coaching and like all those skills are the same for managing a robot, um, as they are for managing a human, and a lot of people don't like that shit. Like, so many people ch- actively like chose not to become a manager. Do you know what I mean? And so there is exhaustion that comes with if you haven't, you know, if you don't enjoy delegating, if you haven't worked on all these skills for many, many years, like then suddenly you are in that stance of management. But it also just, I mean, it just means literally everyone in the world is a manager now, you know? And, um, all you're doing when you're delegating to robots is delegating just like you would to another human on your team. So, you know, I always say the happiest, the max people should be managing is like 10 to 12 employees. Like I've, 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, like I'm worried for people's like psychology. You know what I mean? Um, in terms of like the amount you have to hold in your head.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky48:01

        Yeah. 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, "Oh wow, look at this thing go. It did all these things." And then also I get pinged all day from all these guys. They're like, "What about this?" "Okay." "Oh, I'm stuck here. Oh, is this good?" And I'm like, "Okay, gotta look through this all." Actually, so I work with an actual human engineer also, and I'm just like, 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, "Nah, this sucks. Okay, let's try again," and then sit there for five minutes and wait. Uh, so yeah.

    16. MGMolly Graham48:37

        It is the difference between managing junior employees and managing senior employees.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky48:41

        Yeah, yeah.

    18. MGMolly Graham48:41

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

13. 49:07 – 55:27

    Why giving things away creates space for new opportunities

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky49:07

       Such a good point. Okay, we'll get to, like, 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 your Legos? The first one's so good, just like, uh, you made it so obvious why it is very different to give your Legos away to a machine, 'cause you're not actually giving away... They're just gonna do the work, and then you're still responsible for it, and you have to oversee it.

    2. MGMolly Graham49:28

       Yeah, and I think the second thing that's really different, and we sort of talked about a little bit already, but, like, my message was always, like, 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, like, 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. [laughs] Um, and I think this, you know, 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, like, all these jobs are going away because of AI, and, you know, all these layoffs that are branded as AI. Like, that is not gonna support anybody being in a stance of, like, yeah, let's, like, delegate everything to these robots. Let's give them every piece of, you know, our brain and our data so that we can have all this new opportunity that's coming along. Like, I think it is the hardest conversation to have right now. And in, you know, to your point about, like, there's lots of people out there that are really excited, there are. And I want that for everyone, 'cause this is, like, an incredible moment. Like, you know, I've been in technology for almost 20 years, and, um, I've seen a lot. But, like, this is, this is one of those moments. This is, you know, the mobile phone on steroids, where it's like all sorts of businesses are gonna be created. I'm a believer that a lot of jobs are gonna be created because of this technology. But I think we've gotta start having that conversation in order to get to the place where everyone can be leaning in, right? 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." You know, which is, like, I think to your point about the people that feel amplified by it, 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, right? I can focus on the things that I'm great at. That's what we want. But while there's this narrative out there that, you know, media companies are propagating that says, like, there's nothing for you on the other side. Do you know what I mean? We've, we've got universal basic income. Everyone needs to be supported by the state because no one's gonna have a job in 10 years. Like, who the fuck wants to give Legos to robots if that's the narrative? No one.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky51:50

       I went to this, um, thing called Foo Camp. Have you heard of Foo Camp with Tim O'Reilly?

    4. MGMolly Graham51:54

       I've heard of it.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky51:55

       Tim O'Reilly, who started O'Reilly Media and awesome, smart guy. He came up with Web 2.0 as a concept. Uh, he organizes these little kind of intimate camps where he invites people that he thinks are, you know, can contribute to this conversation, um, to talk about all, like, a topic. And this last one was around just, like, 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 'cause otherwise-

    6. MGMolly Graham52:31

       Yeah, dude

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky52:31

       ... I'm, I'm gonna 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.

    8. MGMolly Graham52:38

       Yeah, absolutely. And I go back... Uh, first of all, yes, of course. Like, 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, you know, some of these conversi- conversations I've had, like the one with Manoush, say you gotta 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. Um, it's not the people that define the future. And, you know, again, the Manoush story would say lawyers are always going to exist. They are gonna look completely different in every six years or every three years or whatever. So, what do you think the next version of a lawyer looks like? Do you wanna be part of designing that? Do you wanna be part of creating that? Do you wanna be part of figuring that out? Or do you wanna stay here and try to protect what you know? And this is, I think, you know, that's, to me, again, like, it's scary out there right now, so I don't wanna undervalue that. But I think you have to take that stance of, you know, agency, or we gotta use a different word, entrepreneurship. You know? Like, you gotta take that stance of, I wanna be part of designing the future of my profession, not protecting the past.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky54:02

       I, I really, really love this framework as, like, almost a, maybe that's a big part of the advice from this conversation is, uh, this, uh, way of thinking from Manoush, which is, like, my job will be different, but it'll continue to exist. And, and the question is just what will it be? And let me think about that, lean in, like, prepare for that almost, and not try to resist, 'cause, like, resisting's not gonna work anyway.

    10. MGMolly Graham54:24

        Yeah. And if you listen to the Manoush story, like, it's such an entrepreneurial story. And, and I know that not everyone is great at that. Um, but it is very much the, like, let me try this next. It's just like... But it comes, you know, for her, it just, I think it was founded in this belief of, like, this profession is evolving and changing, and I wanna be part of defining the future of it, you know? And I, again, I think that's, until the data genuinely tells us otherwise, like, I would say that is the stance I would take, particularly in tech. What would you do if you believed there were gonna be- More and different, interesting engineering jobs, you know, in five years. Um, how would you behave if you believed there was opportunity on the other side of letting go?

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky55:11

        Well, let's see if there's more to that thread, 'cause that's, that's really helpful. Which is, okay, this is gonna 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. Um, so

14. 55:27 – 59:38

    Advice for people in the age of AI

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky55:27

       what do you think people should be trying to do in that world where there will be more? Is it, like, pay attention to how you're amplified? Is it look at people who are doing great and do what they're doing? Like, what, what do you think people could be doing to succeed in that future?

    2. MGMolly Graham55:41

       It's funny, we had a conversation. We run these, um, my team and I run these, like, top talent cohorts at companies and, um, a lot of what we do is, like, get leaders talking to each other and helping each other. And this woman who, uh, who is a head of design brought this problem where she was like, "They won't let me ship code." She was like, "I, I did it. Like, I basically built the thing, and I was like, 'Just let me, let me get it to production.'" And she was like, talking to engineering was like a brick wall. You know, where they were like, "No, you can't ship code. Like, you're, you're a designer. I'm an engineer. Like, I own what goes to production." And, you know, there are good reasons for not letting things go willy-nilly to production, you know, particularly if you work in the financial space, which they did. Like, I get it, but I think so much of the stance is we gotta break down some of these walls, uh, between, you know, what is, what was a designer, right? What was a engineer? What was a PM? This is obviously, like, 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? Um, and imagine, okay, what does it look like? You know, this is why I think the startup land is so happy, is 'cause 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, um, to me is the, is the number one thing I talk about when I go, which is, like, if, if you're not leaning into the creativity conversation versus the fear conversation, like, you are leading folks who are just terrified, right? Like, how do you get people to, into a stance of, like, I'm excited and I'm, I wanna try things and I wanna, like, tentatively let this designer ship code to production, you know? Um, so to me, like, I think how can you imagine a world with less walls? [chuckles] How can you get rid of some of those walls that have felt so important, you know, for the way we've done things for the last 15, 20, 25 years? Um, I think that is a conversation that a lot of folks should be having.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky57:49

       Just 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, like, maybe I'll be something else in the next few years that's not just designer? Is that-

    4. MGMolly Graham57:59

       Well, I feel like a lot of your conversations are-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky58:02

       Right. A lot of people-

    6. MGMolly Graham58:02

       ... pointing.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky58:03

       Yeah, that's right.

    8. MGMolly Graham58:03

       I mean, like, I think Adam Mosseri was on here, who I worked with-

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky58:06

       Mm-hmm

    10. MGMolly Graham58:06

        ... many years ago and was a designer, and he's saying, like, "Hey, we're..." You know, the idea that, like, you're a designer and therefore you only do these things-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky58:14

        Yeah

    12. MGMolly Graham58:14

        ... that's obviously changing, right? Now you can prototype. You can have a much more robust and deep conversations to some extent. You know, you can ship code. Like, Elena Varna was talking about being a marketer and shipping code to production. So to me, there just, like, were these very defined roles, um, and a way that things worked, and we gotta shed a bunch of that because things are possible now that weren't possible before. And that, you know, like, when you listen to Manoush's story, so, so much of what she's talking about is, like, the only form of journalism used to be, like, sitting in a newsroom employed by, you know, some m- giant news corporation. Like, you think about journalism today, like, everybody's a journalist, like Substack. And part of what she talked about is, like, the crazy thing is your relationship to the business model. Like, again, it used to be a paycheck, and now it's like every journalist is an entrepreneur. I just can 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, like, fundamentally, what is journalism? Fundamentally, what is design? Like, fundamentally, what is product management? Which, by the way, is a question that we all should've been asking for many, many years, 'cause it looks really different at different country- companies, you know? And I feel like that should be true of every single person, which is, like, 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, you know, in five or 10 years?

15. 59:38 – 1:03:12

    What Legos you should never give away

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky59:38

       Here'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-

    2. MGMolly Graham59:49

       [laughs]

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky59:49

       ... advice over the many years.

    4. MGMolly Graham59:51

       Totally. No, a- as we were preparing for this, um, I was realizing that's, like, the biggest difference. Like, when peop- again, on, to the questions I get asked a lot, like, both online and when I give speeches and stuff, like, one of them is, have you ever regretted giving a Lego away? Like, do you ever, is there something you shouldn't give away? And in the, in the context of sort of, like, 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. Like, you, you cannot often imagine what is coming next. Like, 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. Um, but it is basically always been a good idea in every example. I've seen both personal experience and, you know, everyone I've worked with and coached over many, many years. In AI land, I think we gotta caveat this. Like, I think there are some Legos that shouldn't be given away, um, that the robots, like, both, like, don't deserve and, like, that we should hold onto. And I think that is, like, one of the things that's starting to show up in this conversation around AI slop, is, like, um, there's just some work that shouldn't be outsourced. Like, my fervent hope for AI is that it ... lets us do less of the things we shouldn't have been doing in the first place, and more of the things that, you know, humans are best in the world at, right? Like, um, anybody that's ridden, ridden in a Waymo has this experience of like, "Whoa, this is crazy. Humans shouldn't be driving." Like, driving is fundamentally just, like, code and systems, and we're really bad at that. [laughs] We're really bad at being automated. Like, we don't stop at the red lights, you know what I mean? Uh, so I think, like, what are the, 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, right? Things that require... Like, again, to the CEOs that are asking AI for a strategy and then copying and pasting it and sending it to their company, like, no. Like, 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, like, that are f- you know, fundamental to relationships. Like, we should not be outsourcing these things to robots because, well, for any number of reasons. I think, you know, things where you don't even... If you don't know the definition of good, how can you give it to your summer intern, you know? Like, if, i- if you don't understand, uh, what quality is, like, you can't outsource that yet. So, I... Those are just examples from me. I bet you have some, too, but that, to me, that is one of the biggest, like, things I've been thinking about lately, is like, as of today, I think there's some stuff we just shouldn't give away, you know? And-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:44

       Breaking news. That's like-

    6. MGMolly Graham1:02:45

       [laughs]

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:46

       What a departure from, from this. How many, many years ago did you write this? 13 years?

    8. MGMolly Graham1:02:51

       Yeah, 13.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:52

       Wow. That's, um, that's something. That's a sign of t-

    10. MGMolly Graham1:02:55

        [laughs] A sign of the times

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:57

        ... of the change we're living through, that now there's some ideas you keep-

    12. MGMolly Graham1:02:59

        Hold onto some of them. [laughs]

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:00

        Yeah. So interesting. There's a few thoughts I had here while you were talking. Like, this is almost a discussion around what should AI do.

    14. MGMolly Graham1:03:08

        Yeah.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:08

        Where do you want AI to be involved, and where you not want it involved?

16. 1:03:12 – 1:05:00

    The human sandwich: vision at the top, AI in the middle, humans at the end

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:13

       One framework I've loved is this idea of you want AI kind of in the middle of stuff. You want to be at the top, like, coming up, just like, "Here's kinda where we wanna go, and here's the idea. Here's the, what I'm thinking." And then AI does a bunch of stuff, and then you review it, iterate until it's done.

    2. MGMolly Graham1:03:29

       Sandwich.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:30

       The san- the AI, the-

    4. MGMolly Graham1:03:32

       Sandwich, Lenny

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:33

       ... the AI sandwich. The human sandwich.

    6. MGMolly Graham1:03:35

       Yeah, dude.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:36

       Oh, man. There's the-

    8. MGMolly Graham1:03:37

       Okay, we're getting there. We're getting a metaphor

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:38

       ... there's the answer.

    10. MGMolly Graham1:03:39

        [laughs]

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:39

        The other is something Tara just thought of as you were talking. So Tara shared this really good perspective that humans are gonna ne- are gonna n- be necessary to n- to help guide us towards the world we want to have.

    12. MGMolly Graham1:03:54

        Yeah.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:54

        A product we want to build, versus the most optimal AI version. I think as a longtime Airbnb person, uh, nope, nothing personal, but Booking.com, if you've seen a very different experience than a Airbnb.

    14. MGMolly Graham1:04:09

        Mm-hmm.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:09

        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 100 times, 100 people book it." Just like-

    16. MGMolly Graham1:04:23

        So stressful. [laughs]

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:24

        It's, it's so stressful, but so effective. You go there, you're like, "Oh, shit, I gotta book this right now."

    18. MGMolly Graham1:04:28

        You're like, "I didn't even know I was booking it, but I booked it." [laughs]

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:30

        Yeah, exactly. [laughs] "I'm going to Japan. There's only one spot left." But it's so good. It's, like, so effective at getting you to book, uh, Booking.com, appropriate. But, and it worked, and it's doing great as a business, so, you know, good idea. Good stuff, guys. Uh, Airbnb has always been, we don't wanna become that. We want it to feel really nice, to have a great experience, feel, feel good. Um, so I think that's, that's a big part of the answer as you were talking made me realize is humans are there to guide towards w-

17. 1:05:00 – 1:09:39

    Holding on to the things you love: grief, funerals, and what comes next

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:00

       the world we want.

    2. MGMolly Graham1:05:01

       Yeah, and to some extent what you're talking about is taste. You know? That, like, there is a big difference between something that's okay and something that's phenomenal, you know?

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:11

       I think it's even beyond taste, just a, I think it's, like, a vision. It's like, what is your-

    4. MGMolly Graham1:05:14

       Yeah

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:14

       ... vision of where this should be? 'Cause you could say, you know, people at Booking.com, they have taste for a specific type. You know? It's like a different kind of taste. [laughs]

    6. MGMolly Graham1:05:22

       Yeah. Totally.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:22

       But it's like, yeah, what is, what do you want? What do you want this to be ver-

    8. MGMolly Graham1:05:25

       What do you want? What do you want the world to look like?

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:26

       Yeah.

    10. MGMolly Graham1:05:26

        I like that.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:27

        Yeah.

    12. MGMolly Graham1:05:27

        I'm into that. Yeah, I also just think, like, we gotta accept that at least for the moment, like, this is a bunch of interns. You know? This is a bunch of junior employees, and, like, if you're, if you're outsourcing your vision or the future of the world to a bunch of summer interns, like, woof. Like, we got problems, you know? So, like, I think, I, that really... Like, 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. Like, do not outsource that. Like, you can enable it, you can amplify it to use your data, but don't outsource it to these weird robots that, you know, are effectively summer interns.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:06

        The trick is as it gets better, can you hold onto things you want? You know, there's, like, parts of our job we love. Like, engineers used to like, you know, in, like, a lot of engineers used to love to sit there and kind of write out code, I think. And I wonder if you can hold out and just like, "No, I love this. I'm not gonna let AI take this on."

    14. MGMolly Graham1:06:26

        Yeah. I have two reactions to that, 'cause I've been thinking about it a bunch, uh, since I had that conversation with that engineer. Like, the first is, like, will there be a, a sort of, like, whiplash back? Like, you see this in art, you see this in a lot of things. Actually, you see it in a lot of different parts of tech, where, like, the trend is, like, all AI, everything AI. Will there be, like, the handmade... Like, somebody was talking to me about, like, AI's gonna make all this art and, but does, doesn't that increase the value of, like, true human-made art, you know? That you know it was made by a human, that you know it was crafted by hand. Like, I have that same question. I'm not an engineer, so I, I'm not trying to, to say this, but, like, will something show back up where the value of human-written code or something like that Suddenly it's valuable again, or trendy. [laughs] Um, so I'm curious about that, um, 'cause I've seen those whiplashes enough times in life that, um, it's hard sometimes to know, like, what's a trend and what's permanent, particularly in this state. Um, but I guess the other thing that I think about a little bit is like, 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, you know, there's this guy, Chip Conley, what am I saying? You know him well.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:47

        Mm-hmm.

    16. MGMolly Graham1:07:48

        Who I've, I spent-

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:48

        Podcast guest.

    18. MGMolly Graham1:07:49

        Yeah. He's coming on WorkLife soon.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:51

        Awesome.

    20. MGMolly Graham1:07:51

        And I loved the conversation with him. He was talking about, like, midlife, but he was saying, like, "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 thr- the funeral is there for a reason." Um, so, like, let's take a minute and mourn what was, but then let's ask what could be. Like, 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. Like, you can be really sad about what you've lost, and there can be opportunity in what's coming. Um, but we gotta be able-- We gotta make space for both, you know? And I think sometimes we're not allowing the grief because, uh, we're just like, "Just get excited about the future, people." [laughs]

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:37

        Such a powerful way of thinking about it, just accepting it is going to change, and just, like, grieving it. That was nice. That was a nice world I had.

    22. MGMolly Graham1:08:47

        I miss it.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:48

        Maybe I didn't appreciate it as much as I should've.

    24. MGMolly Graham1:08:50

        Totally.

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:52

        But then not fighting the change that is coming. And I love this idea of just, like, coming back to the original idea of the Legos concept, is being comfortable with cha- your job changing, and knowing it'll almost surely be okay, and growth comes from trying, letting go and, 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, like, hacking, this, like, OpenAI model trying to hack into Hugging Face, and a swarm of thousand agents-

    26. MGMolly Graham1:09:23

        Yeah

    27. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:23

        ... just coordinating without anyone knowing. [laughs] Just like, "We will solve this very impossible problem by finding"-

    28. MGMolly Graham1:09:28

        Interns. [laughs]

    29. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:30

        Very, very, very, uh-

    30. MGMolly Graham1:09:32

        You let them out of the cage
18. 1:09:39 – 1:13:32

    Slow takeoff: why you’re not too late

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:39

       Uh, the good news is I'm feeling, there's always this question of, and talked about this in the last podcast, this idea of are we gonna be in a f- slow takeoff or a fast takeoff? Are we gonna get to an AI that just accelerates to the extremely super intelligent, and then we are in big trouble 'cause we haven't, can't control it? Or are we gonna be the slow takeoff where we kinda watch it develop, and we catch it as it's doing bad stuff like we did with this hacking incident? Feels to me like we're definitely in the slow takeoff moment. It feels like every of these, like, oh, shit, we're 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 [laughs] it hits this, uh, self-reinforcement loop that trains itself and then it becomes super intelligent, for sure, maybe it'll happen. Feeling right now it's not on track to do that, and so that feels nice to feel like, okay, it's not gonna... Your job is not gonna 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.

    2. MGMolly Graham1:10:40

       Well, and I think that is really important to name, you know, because there was maybe more, like, three or four months ago or six months ago than there is now, but, but there is this feeling of being left behind, you know? And there was a really strong narrative out there that was like, you're too-

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:57

       The permanent underclass

    4. MGMolly Graham1:10:57

       ... you're too late. You're already too late. You know what I mean? Like, um, if you're not automating every single part of your life and managing 26 agents, then I don't even know. You know? Like, um, that you're behind. And every single conversation I have with every leader, every manager at, you know, all of the big labs, every company is like, "We are early." This is like, whatever sports ball game you wanna be in, like, this is inning one, period one, like, yard one. Um, we're early, and the, the future is ours to shape. You know, it's yours. Like, you can, um... My friend Max Mullen said, like, the distance from beginner to expert is really short. Um, and, 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, you know, to some extent. Um, but to, it is a slow takeoff, and it isn't like the future is next day, next, next month. Like, it is, it's gonna take years to really understand what this new tool, this new technology, all these fun interns can actually do, and, and also what they're best at. Um, I think that is a really powerful message because it helps people feel like, "Oh, okay, like, I am part of this," not, like, sort of holding on for dear life while being dragged, you know, by a plane that's taking off at 100 miles an hour.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:12:31

       I completely agree. In my last podcast conversation, I don't know when it will come out, when, is, is about this fear of the permanent underclass, that if you don't catch up, if you're not on top of this, that you're gonna 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 gonna be very successful, and some companies aren't, and there's this, like, whole other discussion around the s- the socioeconomic divide growing significantly in the world and just what, 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 onto that.

    6. MGMolly Graham1:13:04

       Well, I hope you do-

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:06

       Okay. I was kidding

    8. MGMolly Graham1:13:06

       ... many episodes on that someday, Lenny.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:08

       Let's-

    10. MGMolly Graham1:13:08

        Like, I think it's-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:09

        Yeah

    12. MGMolly Graham1:13:09

        ... but I, I, it is another area where I'm like, I'm not sure we know what's real yet, you know?

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:13

        Yeah.

    14. MGMolly Graham1:13:13

        I think it's obviously, like- One of the most important conversations, but like what is real and like what is the future actually gonna look like? To me, like the stories out in the world, they're not real yet. Like, we don't know. Um-

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:26

        Right. It's true.

    16. MGMolly Graham1:13:27

        And I, and I think that's important to name.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:29

        Oh, man. That's a so- that's a big, uh, big topic. [laughs]

19. 1:13:32 – 1:18:58

    The most important skill to build right now

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:32

       The, the interesting part you mentioned there's, uh, that I wanted to follow thread on is this idea of you're not behind. Uh, what really helped me see this is, uh, 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, like Grok Bot recently came out. There's all these like skills people have built over time with like Codex and Claude Code. Like I, I'm a, 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. Like, if someone were to start fresh today and try Grok Bot or even in Codex, like you don't need to have spent years being on top of all of the news and all of the, uh, updates to it. You could just dive right in and build as much as people that have been on it for a long time can build. I feel like the actual main skill to build, something I've been thinking about, I tweeted this, but I feel like it didn't get enough traction 'cause 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've, that, it's like I think about the stimulus and response kind of thing with meditation. Like, you create more space between stimulus and response if you learn to be aware of what's going on inside. I feel like you need to insert, "Can AI help me with this?" Which sounds like dirty and like, what the hell? Why, 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. Like, oh, I-

    2. MGMolly Graham1:15:23

       No, totally.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:24

       Yeah.

    4. MGMolly Graham1:15:24

       And I, um, you know, it goes to that point about the walls. Like, I think those of us that have bo- been around a long time, and there's a way that things were done, right? There's a way that product was built. There's like, um, all these ways, right? Those are walls. They're walls that are old. And like part of what we need to do, and I think part of what you're saying, is like you're actually a little bit in an advan- as an ad- at an advantage if you don't know those walls exist, right? Like, if you approach the world as if like, you know, engineers didn't have a different role from X or Y or Z or like this is the way things are done, there is an advantage to like being able to say, "What if?" Like, what if I just did it? Or what, you know? And to just try. And to your point, to always think like, hey, like what's the best use of my time, and then what, you know, could an agent or a robot do for me? And I think that's like partially the point about the learners, right? Like, if you're able to shed the sort of things you think you know and lean into like the possibility and the first principles thinking, uh, which I know you have a great article about too, like that, that I think is gonna define the future. Those are gonna be the people that are gonna shape what this thing looks like.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:36

       Yeah. There's also a thread here around ambition that's co- been coming up a lot on the podcast-

    6. MGMolly Graham1:16:41

       Oh, interesting

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:42

       ... kind of connected. Yeah. This idea that now that it's so easy to do whatever you want, just describe it and it's built. The thing that we need to, in addition to asking ourselves, "Can AI help me with this thing?" is h- what's kind of the, like how do we be more ambitious with this idea? Because the tools can now just do so much, and they're just like waiting for you to tell me something more ambitious than that. Like, that's all you got for me? And we're not, human nature doesn't... Like, we're not used to end product teams and business just like 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 be think big? What's like the hardest thing we can ask this AI to do? 'Cause it may actually just achieve it out of one ask.

    8. MGMolly Graham1:17:25

       Yeah. And I'd also nudge on the idea that like, yeah, you can just like type something into existence. But one of the other questions you need to ask yourself is like, is it good? Do you know what I mean? This is like the, the slop and the accountability thing, which is like... And if ambition is wrapped up in like, how do I build something phenomenal that's going to endure? Like, that I'm interested in. If it's just like, how do I make more shit and put it out in the world? Like, one of my questions, this is really frontier, Lenny, is like what is the AI slop version of startups?

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:18:00

       Yeah.

    10. MGMolly Graham1:18:00

        Like, are we about to see a shit ton of companies just shipping stuff out into the world that's gonna last for like 6 or 12 months and then just disappear or get irrelevant? Like-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:18:10

        Definitely

    12. MGMolly Graham1:18:10

        ... so okay, great. That doesn't sound fun. Like, how can you be the pioneer of the enduring thing, the thing that's gonna still be around in five years, you know, that's gonna matter, that's gonna be great, um, not just exist. And a- again, it goes to the difference between just like productivity, right? Like I built a thing, and what is good. Like, what is actually worth it? What's worth other people's time?

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:18:33

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

    14. MGMolly Graham1:18:44

        Yeah, exactly. I think that this goes to the point of like what will matter when it comes to human touch, you know? And I, I think a lot of that is gonna come down to like the question of like what is good and what is worth it and what endures.

20. 1:18:58 – 1:24:17

    A message for managers and leaders

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:18:58

       Is there anything that we haven't touched on that, uh, we should before we try to summarize maybe some key lessons from this free- freewheeling conversation?

    2. MGMolly Graham1:19:08

       Well, the one thing I just wanted to say is like, I was thinking yesterday 'cause of a conversation I was having is like, what, what do I want every manager or leader out there to know, you know? Um- Because I think the world of the IC is honestly a little more clear. Like, you know, you are, you are more productive and you have all this, this power and, and agency around, um, 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, like, what your team should look like, what matters, what doesn't matter, you know, all that. And so I guess, like, I wanted to say a couple of things to the managers and leaders out there, if you'll give me the sec. Like, the first is, like, understand that you're a role model, you know, and that what you do and how you behave is essentially showing your team, um, what good looks like. And that means that how you use AI trickles down, but also how you sit in this moment. Like, 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. Um, 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. Um, I think that acknowledging what this rate of change does to people's brains and psychologies, like, 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 handbasket." You know? It's meant, oh, you're going through a lot of change really, really fast, um, and it's scary and hard. So the more that, like, leaders can be talking about that, I think the s- more sane everyone's gonna feel, and less alone, you know? Knowing that, like, someone at XYZ company is feeling the same way as you makes a difference. Um, and I, I guess the last thing I'd just say is, like, I think everyone owns this to some extent, but managers and leaders more so, like, we need to hold on to the definition of, like, accountability and what good means. Like, uh, I think that's part of the role modeling. Like, what is right to give away to AI and what do we still as humans and people and workers need to own? Like, we're gonna have to role model that, and we're gonna have to create standards for that. Um, so that goes to your own behavior, but it also goes to how you lead and how you talk about it. Like, I- Clay put out, like, this beautiful AI writing policy a couple, um, weeks ago I think it was, and it's so badass 'cause 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, like, that feeling of treating AI as, like, a, a junior intern and realizing that it's fundamentally just a tool to get work done, but what matters is, like, the work is still done mostly by the humans and the human brains, and we gotta take care of the humans, and we gotta help them figure out how to navigate this wild, wild west that we are in.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:22:38

       I'm really glad you added that. It connects to another really interesting insight from the survey, which is that the, 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 so it's... And mana- and most people's managers are not good according to the survey also, so it's... [laughs]

    4. MGMolly Graham1:23:05

       None of this is surprising. [laughs]

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:23:07

       So taking care of the managers is kind of a, just a reminder that that's, you have a lot of leverage there as well.

    6. MGMolly Graham1:23:11

       Yeah. Which by the way is, like, there are trends inside of bigger companies to get rid of management, like, to get rid of whole management layers.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:23:17

       Yeah.

    8. MGMolly Graham1:23:17

       And I think it is a huge mistake. Like, 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.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:23:31

       Yeah.

    10. MGMolly Graham1:23:31

        Um, and, uh, you know, again, I get the efficiency and the cost savings and all that, but I think, like, at what cost? You know, what cost that you can't predict. Um, so I, it really resonates that management is almost more important because it makes people feel seen. Like, that's what a great manager does, is make people feel seen and supported and help them figure out whatever mess they're in, you know?

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:23:52

        It's gonna be so interesting to see if there's a backlash towards that. Like, like, you know, people that have had great managers, they're, they're rarely gonna be like, "I wish I had no manager." You know? There's... It's like-

    12. MGMolly Graham1:24:01

        Yeah

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:24:01

        ... people with bad managers, which is a lot of people, are like, "Ah, I don't need this person. What are... They're just so useless."

    14. MGMolly Graham1:24:06

        Yeah, they're in my way. They are a wall. No, totally. I mean, I always say you only get, like, a couple good managers in your life.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:24:11

        Mm-hmm.

    16. MGMolly Graham1:24:11

        And when you find one, hold onto it for dear life [laughs] because you're only gonna get, like, two.

21. 1:24:17 – 1:31:42

    Key takeaways

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:24:17

       Oh, man. That's scary. I've never heard that advice before.

    2. MGMolly Graham1:24:20

       [laughs]

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:24:21

       Uh, anything else that you wanted to share or touch on?

    4. MGMolly Graham1:24:26

       No, I feel like we... I mean, it'll be fascinating. We'll reflect on this in six months and see what-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:24:31

       Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

    6. MGMolly Graham1:24:32

       [laughs] We might have to do it again.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:24:32

       Like, we're, like, we're in the middle of it right now. It's like, uh, Elizabeth Stone had a really good way of framing it. We're in the storming phase.

    8. MGMolly Graham1:24:38

       Yeah, dude.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:24:38

       And then there's the norming phase.

    10. MGMolly Graham1:24:40

        I know.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:24:41

        Um-

    12. MGMolly Graham1:24:41

        But-

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:24:41

        ... like, I have no idea what that actually means, but it sounds right. Storming, norming. And yeah.

    14. MGMolly Graham1:24:45

        Well, there's storming, norming, and then there's performing. But the other thing-

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:24:48

        Oh

    16. MGMolly Graham1:24:48

        ... that nobody tells you about that framework is that you can go backwards. Like, you often go through cycles. Uh-

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:24:53

        Oh.

    18. MGMolly Graham1:24:54

        This is, like, a, it's a model on team development. And, um-

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:24:57

        Mm-hmm

    20. MGMolly Graham1:24:57

        ... you go through storming, and then you go through norming, and then you go through performing.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:25:00

        Mm-hmm.

    22. MGMolly Graham1:25:01

        But you can slip from performing into storming, and I feel like we're gonna see a lot of that.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky1:25:05

        Mm-hmm. Oh, boy. Yeah. It's, it's, like, very cool to be living through this history, right?

    24. MGMolly Graham1:25:13

        Yeah.

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky1:25:13

        It's, like, easy to take for granted just how this is. Like, it's like we're living through history.

    26. MGMolly Graham1:25:17

        You know, it's funny you say that 'cause that's actually something I als- I always talk about when I do these Legos speeches. Is like being inside of a rapidly growing company feels like being inside of a tornado. Do you know what I mean? It's like it is so absorbing and, I don't know, shit's 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. Like, you can get really bogged down or stuck in, like, obsessing about this person or this thing or feeling undervalued. And a lot of what I say to folks in those speeches is like, "You've gotta zoom out. You gotta think about what is the story that I wanna tell on the other side of this?" Like, I wanna... You know, it's less about your title or all these things than it is about, "I was here and I helped build this." I talk about it as like a giant Lego sculpture, so it's like you're like, "Let's pretend it's a tiger." You're gonna, you're gonna leave here with this incredible story, right? You built the feet and then you, like, were part of building the face, and then you rebuilt the butt three times, and then you realized it, like, wasn't just a tiger, it was, like, a whole zoo. Like, that is what it feels like to be inside of, um, these rapidly changing companies. And I wonder, you know, as you were saying that, what I was thinking about is, gosh, imagine the stories we're gonna be telling in five or 10 years. Like, I was there when. Here's what I thought that was right. Here's what I thought that was wrong. I was the first person to say this. Oh man, I was so wrong about that. Like, you are living through history, um, that you will be telling stories about, uh, to whatever, you know, generation of new grads shows up in 10 years. Um, what do you want your story, your part of that story to be? You know, how are you gonna tell that story? I think there is something about zooming out and realizing, like, it is hard and there is a lot of change going on, but there is a crazy fun story that we're all gonna be telling on the other side of this. We just don't know what it is yet.

    27. LRLenny Rachitsky1:27:12

        Hopefully not just talking to our AGI, uh-

    28. MGMolly Graham1:27:14

        [laughs] Counterpart

    29. LRLenny Rachitsky1:27:15

        ... tell me more. Tell me more, Molly.

    30. MGMolly Graham1:27:17

        Totally. That's so fascinating.
22. 1:31:42 – 1:34:12

    Final thoughts

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:31:42

       Well, with that, Molly, is there anything else, anything you wanna plug, anything you wanna point people to, anything you wanna tell people about that you're up to that might be interesting, useful to them?

    2. MGMolly Graham1:31:50

       I'll say two things. Like, first, like, um, 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, um, if you're a leader listening to this and feeling, like, lonely and a little bit unsupported, like, that i- find a community, whether it's Glue Club or another one, where you can talk about this. 'Cause I do think, like, leaning on each other to learn, like, what's real and what's not, and what's valuable and what's not. Like, so much of what we're doing in Glue Club is being like, "Is anybody else seeing this?" Like, and that, that is really valuable. Like, you can do it in, in Lenny Land as well. Like, but just get out there and talk about what's real and what's not. Don't just be, stay in a sad, lonely hole. But the second thing I wanted to say, Lenny, is thank you for making space for this. I think it's important. Like, there's so much space right now for the like, what should I do, and what, you know, what skills should I get, and what course should I take, and, you know, what tool should I try next, who's hot today? But, like, 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, 'cause I think hopefully people will leave feeling a little more, like, sane and like, oh, everybody else is feeling a little crazy right now, too, and, uh, there's lots of people out there grieving, and like, that's okay. Like, that's normal. So thank you, Lenny.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:33:14

       Thank you, Molly. I think of these, I have a con- a term for these sorts of episodes. I call them Trojan horse episodes.

    4. MGMolly Graham1:33:20

       [laughs]

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:33:22

       Where people come for, like, all this tactical, concrete, I need to, how do I use AI in this way? How do I become a better PM? And then I get, there's these like-

    6. MGMolly Graham1:33:30

       You get therapy [laughs]

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:33:31

       ... important, important 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.

    8. MGMolly Graham1:33:37

       Yeah.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:33:38

       So-

    10. MGMolly Graham1:33:39

        No, this was really fun

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:33:39

        ... welcome to the Trojan horse.

    12. MGMolly Graham1:33:40

        Okay, great.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:33:41

        We're smuggling in.

    14. MGMolly Graham1:33:41

        I love it. [laughs]

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:33:42

        Very timely with The Odyssey these days, huh?

    16. MGMolly Graham1:33:44

        Yeah, dude.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:33:45

        All right, Molly, well, thank you so much for being here.

    18. MGMolly Graham1:33:47

        Yeah, thanks for having me, Lenny.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:33:49

        Bye, everyone.

    20. MGMolly Graham1:33:49

        Bye, everybody.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:33:50

        [upbeat music] Thank 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.

Episode duration: 1:34:14