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

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

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 6 months. Like, who the fuck wants to do that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

What would you do if you believed your job was always going to exist? It was just gonna look completely different every 6 years.

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 want to do. Essentially to give away your Legos. After 13 years of giving this advice and it unlocking so much win for so many people over the past decade, Molly has 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+ 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 rewatched and shared segments from our long-form episodes. You can now check it out and subscribe to the channel at lennyspodcast.com. There's also a link in the description. Finally, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI and non-AI products in the world. That's lennysproductpass.com. With that, I bring you Molly Graham. Molly, thank you so much for being here and welcome back to the podcast.

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

Uh, I'm even more excited to have you back. Let me add a little context to this slightly unusual conversation we're going to have. So we've been chatting over the past couple months about your famous, uh, infamous giveaway, 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, whether we like it or not. And we're being encouraged to give our Legos to AI. People are afraid about AI taking their Legos. And so, 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. I'd say as a first step, let's remind people what this advice is. Uh, I imagine most people have heard it. A lot of people are probably like, oh yeah, I kind of get the idea. So explain the kind of the original idea of giving away your Legos.

It actually started when I was at Google and Facebook, and it started as a little talk that I would give people that worked for me. And for context, like, 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 9 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. 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 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. I watched a lot of folks go from sort of like 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 hand that thing that you've built your whole identity around to someone else and go on to doing something else. And your first instinct is like, what? No, I don't wanna give it away. I'm good at this. I know how to do this. I also think it's fun. And what if it's the only fun thing to do? And so you kind of witness people 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 evolve as the company is evolving. And My brain is a really weird place. Like, I grew up on the Muppets, so it 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 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 giveaway 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 outta here. You know what I mean? It's like 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 be territorial and all of those things. So anyway, 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. The talk I was like, when I was at Facebook, it was over 20 years ago. And 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, blowing up in 2013 to normalize, hey, this is what it feels like and this is what you have to do to grow as fast as your company is growing. But what happened when it was published is that I got emails from all over the world. I got emails from people at companies like Safeway, 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 2 people to 4 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. But my second one was, whoa, this is about something much bigger than just what it feels like to be inside of rapid scale. And fundamentally, I think the Legos message is about change, you know, and it's about the fact that when you go through change, a lot of shit happens to you. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Like, it just is a very specific experience. And I think that's why it 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. So it's lasted in a way that, again, like, I just thought I was sending out a note to the folks that are going through crazy rapid change.

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 posts on the first round review.

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

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?

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 2 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. You know, I used to really check before I went and did a speech at some company how fast the company was growing. I would ask like kind of about revenue growth and about headcount growth because that just helps me contextualize like how I should speak to employees. And I still do that. But it's also become really clear that every single company in the world is going through enormous change of varying shapes and kinds right now. And that is the fundamental underlying message of Legos is how do you deal with change and how do you be your best self in the face of change? So I feel like the The number one thing that is true today, as true as it was 10 or 15 years ago, is that change is really scary and hard. And I always say, somebody once asked me to summarize the Legos article in one sentence. They're like, Molly, this is too long. Give me the Cliff Notes. And I said 2 things. Unfortunately, they didn't get one sentence. They got 2. The 2 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 a sort of second summary of it, was don't worry, it's all going to 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 this, 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 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, and I know you and I are going to 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 joy in this moment of chaos and change with AI, but there is a lot of sadness. There's a lot of overwhelm that all manifests. Some of it manifests in burnout, but it's like there is just a lot going on for people right now. And you really can't lead right now without talking about that and without normalizing that. And I think that's like, Such a big part of the giveaway your 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 2 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 6 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, because 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. And I saw this viscerally at Facebook when— because the first 2 years I was in HR and you could literally see like the highest performer one year, if they didn't grow and change, and if they didn't evolve 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, which is that we do have these instincts to like hold onto 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.

Before we get into just what, how the advice is different, which, uh, when you go back to your summary of the 2 kind of items that kind of summarize the idea, one is become redundant. And then 2, what was the second, uh, sentence?

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

Don't worry. Yeah. Okay. So those don't feel necessarily correct anymore. So we're gonna get into that cuz 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?

Yeah.

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 2 years. It's been like the same job forever, writing code, sitting there writing code in various forms of IDEs, no longer part of the job. Now it's talking to your AI to write the code, whether you're there or not, that's where it's all going. It's 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, 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. 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.

Yeah.

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

No, it's exactly, it's such a perfect example of like the grief. I was giving a speech like 2 weeks ago at, 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 a while. And to some extent, I want to go talk to him again because I feel like I missed it in the first conversation where actually I think what he was talking about was the grief that is very present for him now in the fact that he's not sure what is his current job. What is this? The company has grown and so he's in a more structured environment. And what is just the simple fact that engineering has totally changed?

Yeah.

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. You know, you had someone on last week who talked about like, The job used to be rowing and now it's—

Tara.

Yeah.

From OpenAI.

She said like the job used to be rowing and now it's like steering, 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, 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 can be good at steering. And I think that's happening in a lot of disciplines, you know? 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 she was like, I don't know, 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, 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 hard.

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

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

This loneliness piece is such an important part to touch on. I had, um, Fiona Fong on the podcast who leads Claude Code, the engineering team of Claude Code. She's Boris Journey'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, 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. And so, so it's another—

It's not the same.

It's not the same.

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, 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? And like, that doesn't lead to like the best work for anyone. Like, I thought your survey data around the fact that small teams and smaller companies are so much happier than people at the bigger companies. Was really interesting, just because, A, that very much resonates with what I see in all my conversations with leaders. But it also, to me, is a reflection of, 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 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, you know?

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

No, but I love it already.

Okay. So I think, I don't know even how to pronounce it. Centaur? Does that sound right? Centaur? Yeah, that's right. So, centaur is a human body on top of an animal, like a horse.

Horse.

Sorry, a human head torso on top of a human body.

Clearly you do not read enough Greek mythology.

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

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

Lightning Thief. Okay. Yeah, I'll look forward to it. Okay, so, so the idea is a centaur is human head controlling an animal body. Reverse centaur is an animal head controlling a human body. So 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 fears. You're just this like thing that's just controlling agents and just this like closing gap of here's where humans still are really valuable. And then AI's kind of telling you where to build and what to do, and then it's, and then it's doing the thing. So, so I've been thinking a lot about that. Yeah.

I mean, I wanna get to the fear side of this and the fear narrative as well, cuz I think that's one of the things that is really different in this stage and this sort of phase. Because it's really hard to tell people lean into change when they're like, but wait, what's on the other side? You're telling me to let go of my Legos. You're telling me to make myself irrelevant.

Fuck you.

You know what I mean? I don't believe there's a job on the other side. And I think that fear narrative, I am sure some of it is real, but some of it is really overblown, and it's creating a pretty toxic environment for people where it's so hard to lean into this change with joy or excitement or any sense of opportunity. I always say the narrative right now is literally like, okay, we hired this new employee, This new employee is the smartest employee that you have ever met. This employee is 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 6 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. 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 hired too many people. 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 Work Life, and it's let me have all these really fun conversations with people. And one of the best conversations I had was with this journalist named Manoj Somarodi, and she has been a journalist for 30 years. You want to talk about an industry that people have been predicting the death of for 30 years, right? Journalism. And Manoush has done everything. Like, she started the BBC and she was 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, I basically walked away with this really interesting question that is totally different than what would you do if you believed your job was going to disappear? It was, what would you do if you believed your job was always going to exist? It was just gonna look completely different every 6 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.

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

Yeah.

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.

Exactly. Your data said that. And I was like, thank you for publishing this data, Lenny.

Before we get into the advice, kind of how it's evolved, there's a couple things I want to share which touch on things you mentioned about how people are feeling. So I'll share these images on the screen as we talk about this of just people's feelings right now, just to kind of come back to that point. So we looked, we did the survey for 2 years now in a row of how tech people are feeling and how they're feeling about AI and all these things. And so we have a trend now of over time how things are changing. And we look at burnout and optimism. And in 2025, 44% of people said they feel burned out. This year, 55% of people said they are burned out. That's a huge jump. That's 10% increase in a year of people feeling burned out. And it makes sense. As you said, you're basically now Expected to do more work 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 outta business. We gotta move fast. So, so it makes sense.

I mean, I love that you do that survey cuz 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 cuz literally what your survey says is more than half the people are feeling burnt out.

Yes.

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, 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. You know, I was emailing with a friend at OpenAI and she was like, it's taken us literally 6 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? Because it's very expensive, you know? And she's like, 6 months, that's all it took. And so if you're sitting inside that, it means 6 months ago they were like, use AI all the time, every day, everywhere. And now they're like, are you doing it well enough? You know? And Hilary Gridley said the same thing where she was like, You know, 6 months ago everyone was like, how do I get people to use AI? And now they're like, how do I get people to use AI? Like, stop using AI so badly, you know? And it's like that 6-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? Like, why is it fun for me? 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.

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 everybody's feeling this fear and, and, uh, sense that it's all doom, 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.

Yeah. 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 sort of, yeah.

Absolutely. And even more interestingly, the strongest correlation is people who said that a AI has amplified them. They feel like they figured out how to use AI to do more stuff that they're excited about.

Mm-hmm.

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 to think, like sit there and think. You can't just age and iterate and monitor it up.

So I also think, 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.

Yeah. That's also a part of it.

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 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, it's really big. The same is true obviously of design. 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 all the time.

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

Okay, so I have a lot of feelings about this, and it goes to this superintelligence 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 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 have had the experience with AI where it's like, that's wrong. Like what? 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. And it's kind of much more like a, like an intern, like a bad intern. Often I call it a lazy intern. And what happens, like, to your point about AI slop, is that folks are approaching it as if it's like a great, 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 straightforward it to your boss. Like, that is a little bit insane, right?

Yeah.

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 prezo 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 has 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. jobs to like, no, it's just a fucking intern, man. And like, it needs the coaching and context and all of that and 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 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 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. And I feel like it goes down to this thing of like, We're like, we've, this last 6 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. And it's not, we've been focused on sort of like, How do you run as fast as you can on the treadmill? But like, not am I going anywhere? 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.

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 this 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 is everyone's aware of this. They're like, yeah, maybe this isn't the way we should be working.

No, 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?

Yeah. It comes back to the grief of like, oh man, I missed what I used to be doing. Yeah. Look at this weird new job I'm doing.

Yeah, totally.

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, change is scary. That's normal. Understand that it's, it's part of human nature. We don't like change. Learning over knowing, still a very important thing to focus on. It's okay if you don't know, but if you're focused on learning, you'll be probably okay. This idea of standing still at successful companies is actually falling behind. The company's growing. If you're not growing and taking on new challenges and giving away stuff, you're going to fall behind. Is there anything else core to kind of what still—

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. We basically Like, you need to lean into this discomfort 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.

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Uh, I know that's the one that's hard to talk about today.

Yeah.

Make yourself irrelevant, everybody. It's gonna go great. Um, Yeah, you know, it's funny, like when I, when I 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?

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 headcount 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

Yeah.

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— you still have to represent this tower to your boss. And so I could 100% see this metaphor.

It's like if you're a manager, it's a familiar feeling, right? Your team got twice as big and now you just have these weird little robots 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 I said, like managing robots, those skills are very similar to managing 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 as they are for managing a human. And a lot of people don't like that shit. Like so many people 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 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.

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 for all these guys. They're like, what about this? Okay. Oh, I'm stuck here. Oh, is this good? And I'm like, okay, I 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 5 minutes and wait.

Uh, so yeah, it is the difference between managing junior employees and managing senior employees. Yeah, 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 in 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?

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 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, cuz you're not actually giving away to— they're just gonna do the work and then you're still responsible for it and you have to oversee it.

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 2 assumptions under it. One, that it's good to give things away, and 2, that there's new opportunity on the other side. 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. It's 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 because this is like an incredible moment. Like, you know, I've been in technology for almost 20 years, and 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 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.

I went to this, um, thing called Foo Camp. Have you heard of Foo Camp before?

I've heard of it.

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 is 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 because otherwise I'm, I'm going to be replaced. They don't need me anymore. And I feel like a lot of people are probably feeling that, a lot of specific niche professions especially.

Yeah, absolutely. And I go back— 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 6 months or 5 years, but I'm like, every piece of data I have from my entire life, and, you know, some of these 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. 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 6 years or every 3 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.

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

Yeah. And if you listen to Manoush's story, like, It's such an entrepreneurial story. And I know that not everyone is great at that, 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 5 years? Um, how would you behave if you believed there was opportunity on the other side of letting go?

Well, let's see if there's more to that thread, cuz 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 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?

It's funny, we had a conversation. We run these, um, my team and I run these like top talent cohorts at companies and A lot of what we do is get leaders talking to each other and helping each other. And this woman who is a head of design brought this problem where she was like, they won't let me ship code. She was like, I did it. I basically built the thing. And I was like, just let me get it to production. And she was like, talking to engineering was like a brick wall where they were like, no, you can't ship code. You're a designer. I'm an engineer. I own what goes to production. And there are good reasons for not letting things go willy-nilly to production, particularly if you work in the financial space, which they did. I get it. But I think so much of the stance is we gotta break down some of these walls between what was a designer, right? What was an engineer? What was a PM? This is obviously a lot of what's happening, but how do we really shed— what we knew, which again is hard. It's hard to let go of those Legos, you know what I mean? And imagine, okay, what does it look like? This is why I think the startup land is so happy is '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? To me is the number one thing I talk about when I go, which is like, 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 into a stance of like, I'm excited and I wanna try things and I wanna like tentatively let this designer ship code to production, you know? So to me, like, I think, how can you imagine a world with less walls? 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.

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?

Well, I feel like a lot of your conversations are pointing— Yeah, I mean, like, I think Adam Masseri was on here, who I worked with 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, that's obviously changing right now. You can prototype, you can have 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 were these very defined roles and a way that things worked. And we got to shed a bunch of that because things are possible now that weren't possible before. And when you listen to Minouche's story, so much of what she's talking about is the only form of journalism used to be sitting in a newsroom employed by some giant news corporation. You think about journalism today, everybody's a journalist, like Substack. And part of what she talked about is the crazy thing is your relationship to the business model. Again, it used to be a paycheck and now it's like every journalist is an entrepreneur. I just can't imagine a lot of those transformations in tech, but you have to be willing to break down all the walls and start asking the questions of fundamentally, what is journalism? Fundamentally, what is design? Fundamentally, what is product management? Which, by the way, is a question that we all should have been asking for many, many years, because it looks really different at different companies, 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 5 or 10 years?

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 advice over the many years.

Totally. I know as we were preparing for this, um, I was realizing that's like the biggest difference. Like when people, again, onto 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 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 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, but it has basically always been a good idea in every example. I've seen both personal experience and 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, 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, 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 humans are best in the world at, right? Anybody that's ridden in a Waymo has this experience of like, whoa, this is crazy. Humans shouldn't be driving. Driving is fundamentally just code and systems, and we're really bad at that. We're really bad at being automated. We don't stop at the red lights. You know what I mean? 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, 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 you don't understand what quality is, like, you can't outsource that yet. So those are just examples for 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 breaking news, that's like, what a departure from, from this. How many years ago did you write this? 13 years?

Yeah, 13.

Wow. That's, um, That's something. That's a sign of the change we're living through that now there's some—

Hold on to some of them.

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? Where do you want AI to be involved and where you not want it involved? One framework I've loved is this idea of you want AI kind of in the middle of stuff. You want to be at the top, like coming up Just like, here's kind of where we want to go, and here's the idea, here's what I'm thinking. And then AI does a bunch of stuff, and then you review it, iterate until it's done.

Sandwich.

The sand— the AI—

Sandwich, Lenny.

The human sandwich.

Yeah, dude.

Oh man.

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

The other is something Tara— I just thought of as you were talking. So Tara shared this really good perspective that Humans are gonna are gonna be necessary to to help guide us towards the world we want to have, a product we want to build versus the most optimal AI version. I think as a long time Airbnb person, nope, nothing personal. But Booking.com, if you've seen it, very different experience than Airbnb. Booking.com, their whole philosophy: let's optimize the shit out of. Every second of interaction, so it's just all these upsells and pressure and stress.

Just like, oh my God!

Only one spot left. You have five seconds left. Just book a hundred times. Hundred people book it. It's just like stressful. It's so stressful, but so effective. You go there, you're like, oh, I gotta book this right now.

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

Exactly. 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 booking.com appropriate. But, and it worked and it's doing great as a business. So, you know, good idea, good stuff, guys. 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. 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 what the world we want.

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. Yeah.

I think it's even beyond taste, just to, I think it's like a vision. It's like, what is your vision of where this should be? Because 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.

Yeah.

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

What do you want the world to look like? I like that. 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 outsourcing your vision or the future of the world to a bunch of summer interns, like, oof, like, we got problems, you know? So like, I think 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.

The trick is, as it gets better, can you hold on to 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.

Yeah, I have 2 reactions to that because 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 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 is going to make all this art and but Doesn't that increase the value of true human-made art? That you know it was made by a human, that you know it was crafted by hands. I have that same question. I'm not an engineer, so I'm not trying to say this, but will something show back up where the value of human-written code or something like that suddenly gets valuable again or trendy? So I'm curious about that because I've seen those. Whiplashes enough times in life that it's hard sometimes to know like what's a trend and what's permanent, particularly in this state. But I guess the other thing that I think about a little bit is 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 Connelly— what am I saying? You know him well.

Mm-hmm. Who I've—

My guest guest. Yeah. He's coming Work Life soon, 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— the funeral is there for a reason. 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 to— 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.

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

I miss it.

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

Totally.

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 change, 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 the swarm of 1,000 agents just coordinating without anyone knowing, just like, we will solve this very impossible problem by finding—

Interns.

Very, very, very, uh, motivated interns.

Yeah, exactly.

I love how motivated this AI is to like solve the problem.

Yeah.

I'm gonna, uh, the good news is I'm feeling, there's always this question of, we talked about this in the last podcast, this idea of, are we going to be in a slow takeoff or a fast takeoff? Are we going to get to an AI that just accelerates to this extremely super intelligent and then we are in big trouble because we haven't, can't control it? Or are we going to be in the slow takeoff where we kind of watch it develop and we catch it as it's doing that stuff like we did with this hacking incident. Feels to me like we're definitely in the slow takeoff moment. It feels like every one 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 it hits this 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 going to— Your job's 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.

Well, and I think that is really important to name, you know, because there was maybe more like 3 or 4 months ago or 6 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 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, and 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 1, period 1. Like, Yard one. We're early, and the future is ours to shape. It's yours. My friend Max Mullen said, the distance from beginner to expert is really short. And I think that goes again to the fear narrative, where I'm just like, we need to be encouraging people to be part of shaping the future, not just making them terrified of it. And I feel like that is on all of us, you know, to some extent. But it is a slow takeoff, and it isn't like the future is next day, 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 also what they're best at. 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.

I completely agree. In my last podcast conversation, I don't know when it'll 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 this, 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 all into that.

Well, I hope you do.

Okay.

Many episodes on that someday, Lenny. Like, I think it's, But I, I, it is another area where I'm like, I'm not sure we know what's real yet. You know, 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, it's true. And I, I think that's important to name.

Oh man, that's a, so that's a big, a big topic. The, the interesting part you mentioned there's, uh, that I wanted to follow a thread on is this idea of you're not behind. What really helped me see this is Ian Silber, head of design at OpenAI, was on the podcast recently and he made this really good point. He's like, this is the best time in history to be a designer. If you just came in fresh as a new grad into design and just become really, you just start with all these tools that designers have now, you can accelerate so quickly and learn to do design faster than anyone's ever learned to do design. And I feel that with like GroqBot recently came out. There's all these like skills people have built over time with like Codex and Claude Code. Like I'm such a pro with all these tools. And now it's just, the tools are getting so much smarter. You don't need a lot of the scaffolding that people have built over time. Like if someone were to start fresh today and try GroqBot 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 updates to it. You could just dive right in and build as much as people that have been on it for a long time could build. I feel like the actual main skill to build, something I've been thinking about, I tweeted this, but I feel like it didn't get enough traction because I think it's very important. I feel like the biggest skill to build right now is when you're about to do something, to ask yourself, can AI help me with this thing? Because once you get good at that, and I've been getting, I've, that it's like I think about the stimulus and response kind of thing of 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, okay.

No, totally.

And I, you know, it goes to that point about the walls. Like, I think those of us that have 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 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 of an, as an, At an advantage if you don't know those walls exist, right? If you approach the world as if engineers didn't have a different role from X or Y or Z, or this is the way things are done, there is an advantage to being able to say, what if? What if I just did it? And to just try. And to your point, to always think, hey, 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, 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.

Yeah. There's also a thread here around ambition that's been coming up a lot on the podcast. It kind of connects to 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 how, 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.

Yeah.

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.

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? 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, definitely.

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 5 years, you know, that's gonna matter, that's gonna be great. Um, not just exist. And it, 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?

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.

Yeah, exactly. I think 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.

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

Well, the one thing I just wanted to say is, like, I was thinking yesterday because of a conversation I was having is like, what do I want every manager or leader out there to know? Because I think the world of the IC is honestly a little more clear. You are more productive and you have all this power and agency around building. And the world that feels very hard to me right now is the world of the managers and the leaders because so much is changing so fast. It's a little bit hard to know what to tell people. It's a little bit hard to know what your team should look like, what matters, what doesn't matter, all that. And so I guess I wanted to say a couple of things to the managers and leaders out there, if you'll gimme 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 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. 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. 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. It's meant, oh, you're going through a lot of change really, really fast, and it's scary and hard. So the more that leaders can be talking about that, I think the more sane everyone's going to feel and less alone. Knowing that someone at XYZ company is feeling the same way as you makes a difference. And I guess the last thing I'd just say is, I think everyone owns this to some extent, but managers and leaders more so. We need to hold on to the definition of accountability and what good means. I think that's part of the role modeling. What is right to give away to AI and what do we still as humans and people and workers need to own? We're going to have to role model that and we're going to have to create standards for that. So that goes to your own behavior, but it also goes to how you lead and how you talk about it. Clay put out this beautiful AI writing policy a couple 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.

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 manage, and most people's managers are not good according to the survey also. So it's—

None of this is surprising.

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.

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. 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.

Yeah.

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

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

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, and when you find one, hold onto it for dear life because you're only gonna get like 2.

Oh man, scary. I've never heard that advice before. Uh, anything else that you wanted to share or touch on?

No, I feel like we, I mean, it'll be fascinating. We'll reflect on this in 6 months and see what—

That's what I was thinking.

We might have to do it again.

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.

Yeah, dude.

And then there's the norming phase. I know. Madam, like, I have no idea what that actually means, but it sounds right. Storming, norming, and yeah.

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

Oh boy.

Yeah.

It's, it's like very cool to be living through this History, right? It's like easy to take for granted just how this is. Like, it's like we're living through history.

You know, it's funny you say that because that's actually something I always talk about when I do these Lego 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 going to 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 3 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 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 going to be telling in 5 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 that you will be telling stories about to whatever generation of new grads shows up in 10 years. 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.

Hopefully not just talking to our AGI. Yeah.

Counterpart.

Tell me more. Tell me more, Molly. Totally.

That's so fascinating.

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

To me, like most important is change is scary and hard, but that doesn't mean it's bad. That means you have to embrace the emotions that come with it. But you also have to lean into it, and you should let go. Like, yes, it's scary, and yes, it feels like there might not be anything waiting on the other side, but what's the alternative? To hold on to this thing that might be slowly dying? Like, that's not safe either. So leaning into change feels like, to me, the most important thing for folks to take away. I think as part of that, I would just say, like, Grief is part of this, and sometimes grief needs a funeral, or do what you gotta do, you know, to like be sad. Let your teams be sad. Let the people around you make space for that. 'Cause like, with change comes shedding things that you loved, and that sucks. I think like one of the other things that feels like it really came out, Lenny, is like, there is opportunity here. And we gotta like start ignoring or muting or whatever some of this fear narrative, because right now the data isn't saying like there are no jobs for you. The data is saying like, actually, there's gonna be a lot of opportunity created by this, particularly if you're willing to lean into reinvention, right? What, not what was the form of your job 2 years ago, but what might it be in 5 years? What else? I guess like breaking down walls is the other thing I was thinking, but what came to your list?

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

Yeah, exactly. I love, I just, it was a real mind change for me when she said that, because I was like, whoa, like, yeah, what is engineering going to look like in 5 years?

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

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

And so far there's more, more, uh, PMs, more product, more, um, engineers.

Yeah.

Like so far that's going well. Another kind of takeaway is just be deliberate about what you do, what you give to AI. And there's a few ways to think about it. One is just like, what is AI going to do a terrible job at? Don't do that. What is it you love? that you don't want it to take for you? How do you avoid like brain rot and just overrelying on AI? It's like, there's a few things there, just like AI's not gonna, don't give everything to AI.

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

I think that's the core of it. Yeah.

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

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

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

What a moment in time we're in, Molly, right now.

I know.

Trying to figure all this out.

We're gonna rewatch this in a year or two and make fun of ourselves.

Yeah, we're gonna be, we nailed it. We got everything right.

Perfect.

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

I'll say 2 things. First, I get a lot of wisdom, but also a lot of support for this kind of conversation from the community in Glue Club. And I think if you're a leader listening to this and feeling lonely and a little bit unsupported, Find a community, whether it's Glue Club or another one, where you can talk about this. Because I do think like leaning on each other to learn like what's real and what's not and what's valuable and what it'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 tools 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, because 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 there's lots of people out there grieving and like, that's okay. Like, that's normal. So thank you, Lenny.

Thank you, Molly. I think of these, I have a term for these sorts of episodes. I call them Trojan horse episodes where people come for 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 You get therapy. 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. Yeah. So, well, welcome to the Trojan horse that we're smuggling in.

I love it.

Very timely with the Odyssey these days, huh?

Yeah, dude.

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

Yeah, thanks for having me, Lenny.

Bye everyone.

Bye everybody.

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