Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I can have the AI write the thing and I'm just going to show up and do my performance." And so it's the same kind of triangular configuration, and again, what's great about it is they're all correct. Each person in each of those three fields is going to be able to expand laterally and pick up those additional skills, and then as a consequence, you're going to have more people who can write and direct or write and act or direct and act or do all three. I think to your point, your T-shaped thing, I think that's going to be true basically across the entire economy. And if you think about the T, if you think about the T configuration, it's like, yeah, the breadth, the top of the T is like how many individual domains are you familiar enough with to be able to use the AI tools to be able to do really good work. And then this part of the T is how deep can you go in at least one of those domains so that you really, really deeply know what you're doing. But if you're super deep on coding and you can use AI to do design and you can use AI to do product management, that's your T right there, and you're a triple threat at the top of the T, but with this level of technical grounding underneath that. I mean, at that point, again, you're the super-powered individual, you're going to be able to just perform like sheets of magic, for example, in terms of designing and building your products that people in my generation couldn't have even dreamed of. And so I think that this is a universal kind of theory that I think can apply across the entire economy. I'm going to invent a new framework right now. Okay, forget the T framework. I'm picturing an F sideways or an E where there's three, two or three, I don't know, downward parts. And so what I'm hearing is get good at least two or three. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. Yeah, the combination, yeah. My friend, Larry Summers, had a different version of the Scott Adams thing, which is he used to tell people, he said, " The key for career planning is," he said, "don't be fungible." He's an economist and so that was economic speaking. What that means essentially is don't be replaceable. And so don't be a cog, and what that meant was don't just be one thing. So if you're, quote unquote, again, just a designer, just a product manager, just a coder, then in theory you can be swapped in or out. But if you have this E or F laying on the side kind of thing, and if you have this combination of things that's actually quite rare, then all of a sudden you're not fungible. Not only you're not fungible, you're actually massively important because you're one of the only people in the world who can actually do that combination of things. And yeah, your ability to not become one of those people is just titanically enhanced with AI as compared to anything we've ever seen before.…

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