35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley

38:18Why is this so important? Yeah, so look there's whole websites dedicated to design principles and if you go and you read it You'll see a lot of principles like simple clear beautiful Fast secure, you know, you'll you'll hear these words and all these words are great I mean, obviously I have nothing against any of these words But they're not useful as decision -making tools because nobody would ever argue the opposite You know, nobody ever sat in a meeting and said oh, let's like forget clear. Let's try to make it as confusing as possible So the idea of clear it's nice to have out there is a I don't know sort of a platitude to move towards but I just don't help but think it helps you make decisions And so tenants are really decision -making tools and it's sort of You know like a classic one is paper versus plastic like it's just too complicated to reconsider that every time You're at the grocery store.

39:02So you sort of make a rule for yourself And you're just a paper person or a plastic person you move on from there And so it's sort of that at scale And the story comes from when they were starting to work on keynotes apparently the guy who was responsible for Originating keynotes went to Steve and said you know, how should we think about keynote And uh and Steve said I want you to keep three things in mind one is it should be difficult to make ugly presentations To you should focus on cinematic quality transitions and three you should optimize for innovation over PowerPoint compatibility And if you take that last one in particular if he hadn't kind of said we're gonna go this way instead of that way That team would have spent the next 10 years gouging each other's eyes out Over whether they should try to go for PowerPoint compatibility or innovation And so when I was at thought spot I realized pretty early on that I wasn't gonna be able to Have any sort of commanded control over everything that was gonna happen in the product There was too many people involved too many engineering teams most of them were in India like I needed to move from a mindset of Control to one of choreography I needed to try to set the culture and set certain design tenants that everyone could internalize and follow and hope Then make the right decisions in that in that Groove if you will and so we had three I think you can't have more than three or four because you need everybody to memorize them You can't you know you can't be consulting a handbook and so one of them was Documentation is a failure state right like an enterprise companies a lot of times people think Oh, we'll just put it in the manual be part of the trading and I would constantly be coming back and go stop it Nobody wants to learn our software nobody cares We are just one more browser tab and a world of browser tabs.

40:42We are not this user's complete world They do not want to learn this stuff Documentation is a failure state Maybe we can't always abort it, but we should do everything we can to simplify things so you can figure it out in the context of the product That's ever one number two is every interaction should start simple and the users should have to opt into complexity So our main competitor at the time was tablo Tablo started with complexity that was their whole value prop is like we are super powerful tool We can do all sorts of stuff so when you sit down to tablo You know it feels like you're flying the space show and if you're a professional Data analyst like that's great.

41:16That's the kind of tool you wanted that wasn't what thought spot was about We were trying to take data analytics into the hands of what I call mirror mortals also known as business users People who didn't live and breathe this stuff every day So our goal with them was they could sit down and it was an approachable piece of software And they could turn on all the bells and whistles and power if they wanted it So that was the second one start simple Let the users opt into complexity and the third one was the entire product should look and feel like it came from a single mind And this was a tenant to try to combat the natural tenancy of enterprise companies to really fragment Because you have all these different teams working on they're incentive to work just on their little piece And so they think about what's right for them and they don't back up to look at the whole thing And so we had this tenet, you know, the whole thing should look and feel like it came from a single mind to just try to remind people How does this fit into the whole system and sometimes we need to go along and do things that work for the product that don't necessarily work Quite the way we might want them to for our feature And so those tenants were all again, they were all decision -making tools And when we would have design debates we could just come back to this wait Are we actually starting simple enforcing them to opt into complexity or are we doing something else here So there's kind of this implication in this discussion about tenants is is is that you need to be very opinionated There's like a clear here's what's in and here's what's out.

42:30Yeah. Is there anything more along those lines and are there other tenant Examples you could share to give people some inspiration as they think about their potential tenants You know, it's very context specific. So it's a little bit like you know, what are your tenants for parenting? It's a very specific personal type thing that's germane to your particular context So I'm not sure if I have a lot of other examples and I haven't heard this used by a lot of other companies So I haven't you know been able to to add a bunch of stuff We tried to come up with tenants for individual features and we kind of had trouble with that It felt like they kind of operated at the it's sort of the design strategy level And I just think that varies dramatically from company to company what what I would look for is You know if you're a design leader or a product leader Try to pay attention to what are the debates that we keep happening over and over where people kind of seem to be digging in and and things Sort of seem to be you know Bifurcating into two camps and then is there something we can do where we just settle that You know, we just have that debate once and for all we decide as an organization We're going left instead of right and you're in your absolutely correct.

43:32You have to be opinionated But that's how you're going to win. You know, there's there's no Unapunyance on an unapunyinated software that's been successful You have to have a point of view the question is what's it going to be? So let's say practically like just Try to look for places where it seemed the teams having the same debate over and over That have it once get it done and put it behind you And make it a tenant and what's why is there word tenant versus principle some important? I don't know I just had hold on I said on tenant I'm not even I'd have to go look up the definition. I was trying to differentiate it from principles Because I think principles are just you know, it's I describe principles as sort of applehood and mother pie Again, they're just not something people are going to argue over and so I didn't think it was Why is to try to co -op that word and change how people think about it so much as I might be more successful Just coming up with a different word altogether This entire episode is brought to you by stripe every single one of the Forbes top 50 AI companies That has a product in the market today uses stripe to monetize it 1 .4 trillion dollars flows through stripe annually, which is equivalent to over 1 % of the entire global GDP And stripe isn't just a payments platform They also have a product called stripe billing which powers billing for companies that you may have heard of open AI and Thropic Figma Atlassian and over 300 ,000 other companies stripe billing lets you bill and manage customers No matter your pricing model from simple recurring billing to usage -based billing to sales negotiated contracts Collect and retain more revenue automate revenue management workflows and accept payments globally You striped to handle all of your payment related needs including billing revenue operations checkout flows or simply launching or Inventing new business models learn all the ways that stripe can grow revenue for your business at stripe .com Okay, I want to zoom out a little bit and another theme that came up a bunch when I asked people about you and how you think is that you have a really Strong feeling that building great product and building successful product is an immoral obligation Of people that are in in tech talk about why you feel that way and what that even means Well, look the example I use mostly is if you go to an airport and you walk and you look around You'll see a lot of people using their phone to navigate that system You know, they're trying to figure out where their gate is with time their flights on whether or not they can they pull it their boarding pass etc And just just watch people watch their faces watch the level of confusion and frustration You know some of them some number tech superheroes like you and me and most your listeners But a lot of them are just mere mortals and they're not living and breathing this stuff all the time And a lot of times they're super frustrated, you know, and then take that And scale it out to their entire day and almost everyone living in a modern economy now is going to have hundreds of interactions With the phone or with the computer and a lot of those interactions are gonna be consequential And unfortunately a lot of those interactions are not gonna be great They're gonna be confusing and frustrating and when I'm speaking to live audiences I often kind of ask people you know, okay, please raise your hand if you've had a frustrating or you know Confusing experience with software in the last month and obviously yeah every hand goes up Okay, how about so far this week most of all hands stay up.

46:45I'm like, okay, how about so far today You know in most the hands stay up and it's often that I speak in the morning I'm like, okay, everybody's had a frustrating experience with software. It's 10 o 'clock in the morning like That's a problem people because each one of those interactions It takes a little bit of energy away from you and it ups it ramps your frustration just a little bit And the bummer about software both for the audience and for the creators is that it's an anonymous Medium like nobody gets to see who's making these things You and I together we might be able to name six designers that have worked on products We care about and the only reason we could do that is because I'm a designer.

47:19I know a bunch of them I'd buy yourself. I'd be surprised if you could name more than a handful So you know and then again, we work in tech So if you think about the billions of people out there that don't work in tech to them These products are just these crazy faceless things created by a bunch of people Who knows where and these products are causing them untold amounts of frustration and confusion And it just takes away from their life quality and they I think we have an obligation is Product people to put that emotional energy back into people's lives You know, they don't they don't want to try to figure out how to navigate our login screens or go through our onboarding process They just want to get home and spend time with their families and pet their dogs and have a nice dinner What guy?

48:02I just think every time we make a demand on the audience That's a failure on our part and so I do think it kind of comes I cast it in a moral way and I talk about it that way because I don't think many people working in the industry Understand the scale of what they're doing again, because it's an anonymous field like we don't we never see anybody on the other side of the glass But I think what you know if this podcast it'll go out to hundreds of thousands of people like If you and I saw all the people that will potentially listen to this in one place We would think to ourselves oh my goodness.

48:31That's like a lot of people Wait and we might think of it differently. We might behave differently You know, I's my team at Apple, but also my friends that are working at Facebook or Google or wherever it's very hard to really understand that they're creating something in Figma on their computer That's going to be interacted with by billions of people thousands and thousands of times and I If you lose sight of that, I think you just I don't know you get sloppy and Disrespectful is the wrong word, but I think you just lose sight of how much impact you're having on other people Well, that's really inspiring.

49:07It makes me want to build products and make them awesome There's so much power to that uh, I think a little bit what this makes me think about a little bit is kind of random But when I see someone click and watch one of my my podcast videos on YouTube I'm like wow, that's like one person that's going to spend their time watching this thing Wow, I really want to make it gives me more Motivation to make these even better and better yeah look I think you have to find ways to go You have to you have to find mechanisms where you go out of your way to see people using software in real time I've worked on products have been used by billions of people have friends of touch billions of people None of us ever get to see anybody use this stuff in the wild in their natural state Maybe we see him in a lab or something like that But I've never seen anybody just randomly using even Pinterest, you know But there's ways that you can go and as a creator to maker you can go and watch people Using software in the wild.

49:59So like go watch just go observe people going through self -check out at target Which is the best self -check out self -check out I've ever seen go go watch that and go watch it It's some other grocery store where it's not as great, you know, and like really notice what happens with people much to my kids frustration When they when their friends are over I often grab their friends phone and just sort of flip through it To try to understand how people are organizing their home screens and which apps they use and maybe there's something in there that I'll That I haven't seen. I'll ask them what that is and ask them to kind of give me a tour of it like I think We're living in a time where people don't do so many usability studies So a lot of folks get pretty far into their careers without ever ever having watched mirror mortals actually use software Instead, we're relying on metrics and stuff which is I sort of joke that like relying on metrics to understand what's happening at the user level is like Looking at raw data from a radio telescope instead of just going out inside and looking at the night sky Like you got to find a way to watch the audience Movie you know filmmakers can go to a theater.

50:55They can watch people understand stuff Comedians can go to a comedy club. They can help start to develop an intuition about why people laugh None of us have an obvious way to go watch people use software So don't really understand how humans process what's happening on the screen and you have to just find ways to do that Unfortunately software is everywhere. It's not just Desktop or mobile software. I mean there's ATM machines. They're ticketing chaos the kiosk There's point of sale systems everywhere I mean go watch somebody over 70 fumble with a with a chip card insert, you know Or watch somebody try to figure out Apple pay like and these are pretty seamless experiences and still there's kind of diffriction and all Just go rent a car and then look Notice how long it takes you to figure out what the heck is going on with the dashboard You know Like there's there's lots of opportunities to try to Develop that intuition of how people navigate the human computer interaction And we need to find ways to good do that An important element of what you're describing here, which I think Maybe people miss is that you're talking about just any software in order not your own product in order to start building your sense of taste and gut feeling for what works and doesn't work and I had a guest on recently Gamer Roush from Versel founder of herself and he had a really great phrase Something of something they do at their company.

52:15They they have this Kind of mission of exposure hours Increase your exposure hours to people using our product and then you can extrapolate that to any product Yeah, well, there's using your product But I always think when you watching somebody use your product you come into it with a psychological bias That makes it hard for you to really see what's going on So there's something about just understanding the audience and how they process information on a screen Not your product like at one point when I was redesigning a checkout system We did what I called a reality check which was we held a traditional usability style Exercise in a lab and all that sort of stuff But we had the subjects come through and go through checkout in other products So we watched them go through like eBay and William Sonoma and Amazon or something like that And we learned a ton about checkout about what was important to them How like it turns out like ship code is almost as important as price like things that if we had been watching them Use our own product I'm not sure we would have picked up on because we would have been sitting there You know yell it out and to click on the button or you know We would have had a bias in wanting to see the positive things Whereas if you just watch people they're using adjacent products could be super useful And again, you know, we we work in a medium software is a medium and we need to understand our medium in the same way again Musicians go to concerts filmmakers go to movies, you know comedians go to comic clubs like when to people like you and I go watch people Just use software.

53:37Where do we develop that intuition and unfortunately? I think you have to go out of your way to to do it Talk about more about this idea that software is a medium this uh something that came up a bunch also and Conversations with folks that have worked with you that this is something that you believe yeah, you're so good with the research, Lenny So um Yeah, look so so I left Pinterest in 2014 fit 2016 sorry 2016 and I didn't have anything lined up So I had some time to myself and I was driving up and down the peninsula here in Silicon Valley meeting with other design leaders And just sort of you know, I know commiserating with people and you may remember there was a very consequential presidential election The United States in 2016 and there was some impression that social media had had a significant impact on that election So I was kind of driving around Silicon Valley.

54:24I was just sort of wondering like what the heck happened You know, I mean I moved here in 1990 when the hippie ethos That was really at the core of Silicon Valley and the hippie ethos was still very visible and you could I mean it was very much a part of What was interesting to me about the valley when I moved here? But you know 2016's a long time later in that hippie ethos it gotten pretty quiet And so I was listening to a podcast about the history of Silicon Valley by a Stanford group of the podcast was called raw data And it was season two and it starts off with an episode called Dead monument to a dead child which is about Stanford University and it end with Zuckerberg's testimony in front of Congress And in the middle of that they start talking about the counterculture revolution in the late 1960s and San Francisco and elsewhere And they quote this book by a guy named Fred Fred Turner.

55:13I think it is the books called from counterculture to cyberculture And he has this quote that is you have to ask why it is personal computing got started In northern California in the late 1960s when at the time every major tech company in the country was on the east coast And the answer is because there was a very small group of people in and around Stanford University that caught that saw software as a new form of media on par with movies music and books And when I heard that all of a sudden what wait a second like boom like that that is why I do this I am fundamentally a maker in high school.

55:48I was a photographer in college. I was going to be a filmmaker after college I went to music school after music school. I started a graphic design studio I am a maker and I realized looking back I was just hunting for my medium and it took me until I was 27 to find software as my medium It's like oh, I'm a maker that designed software and then then when I heard that software is a medium that that whole You know concept of what I've been doing with my life and who I was about it just sort of like all came together really quickly And I realized oh, I'm into software Because software makes me feel a certain way when it when it's working well And what I find so troubling now is that a lot of time it's not working that way And I remember the first time I saw a computer I mean probably a lot of people on listening to the show can remember maybe the first time they saw a desktop computer Probably the first time they saw a pension zoom on a phone You remember all that stuff like it was just freaking magic man.

56:40I mean it was the future. It was so Cool and it just felt like the most amazing Royalis or sunrise or whatever there was like a sense of awe and wonder That filled me and probably a lot of listeners Yeah, that's probably the thing that motivated you to be in the field and so I I realized like software is a medium because there's an emotional component to it You know like a like a hammer and saw I don't They're not really pulling out an emotion for me like maybe there's some if you're a carver But I don't naturally have an emotion with kitchen tools or you know things that think even more sophisticated tools like calculators and pullies I still have an emotional response to them But every piece of software I have an emotional response to I either feel confused or empowered You know, I feel like my world's gotten bigger my world's gotten smaller like they all have an emotional component And I think once you Realize and accept that Then you can say oh there there is an emotional component to what we're doing with this product I could just leave that to chance which is what most people do or I could try to be conscious of it And we could try to bring that into our conception of what the products about and try to be purposeful in the emotion We're trying to To to elicit from the user and I think that's where design and particularly visual design can have a huge impact So again in many conversations that I'd have in design reviews some some executive would go I don't know ultimately this just kind of comes down to a matter of opinion, right?

58:06And I was always like no it does not like whether we choose blue or red is going to elicit a certain different A certain emotional response from the user what is it we want them to feel and then let's make sure that we design something visually that evokes that emotion So um again, I think what you Really get your head around the fact that there are people on the other side of the glass real live human beings having emotional It moments, you know with the thing that you're putting in their hand and that they're focusing their attention on like you are In those moments and are you going to own it and show up and be the person you want to be in those moments or not You know a few a few months ago.

58:45I was I guess a little longer ago I was talking to the team at toast who makes the handheld point of sale stuff that they use in restaurants and the thing I was trying to tell them is Whether or not you see it this very you know tonight you're going to be a dinner with a few hundred thousand people All across the country and if we take just one example, you know You're going to be at a very nice Diner with a grandmother and her two teenage sons in Ohio and the checks going to come in the Waiter the waiter the waitress is going to hand over the device to that grandmother and she wants to pick up the bill And you have the opportunity to either make her look like a superhero because she knows what she's doing Or to make her look like a fool and one of her teenage grandsons is going to grab the device and do it for You're at the dinner table What are you going to do for grandma you to show up as well as you can or you're going to just like let this whole thing follow Park as you didn't thank hard enough by grandma And that's true for toast.

59:34That's true for every product any of us are working on all the time Mm -hmm This is so interesting and fascinating and inspiring I was going to ask how you Use this insight that software is kind of the most powerful medium media More than even the TV and movies and you shared it which I think is really important So just to kind of double down on this is the advice here is think about the motion you want The user of your software to have as you're starting the design process not just what do you want them to do How do you want how fast do you want them to get to this for low? It's what's the motion you want them to have Yeah, I often don't think about what I want them to do.

1:00:11I just think that's sort of a selfish way to think about it, you know like I Like they they have something they want to do like I'm trying to help them like I'm not if I I just don't ever approach these things of the user something for me to exploit and take advantage of and manipulate I know there's people that do approach it that way which I think is a little unfortunate But I just as a designer. I guess I have my own set of values my own kind of Compass on these things that push me in a certain way of thinking about it And so I'm kind of constantly asking what's the right thing for the user and I believe in my heart That if we prioritize that Wonderful things will happen for all the metrics including the money metrics that matter I've never seen a product Be successful that used metrics as a driver for what they were doing I've seen a lot of companies be really successfully seeing metrics as a consequence and a way to evaluate the quality of their decisions And then using those to you know trying to make better decisions moving forward So they're kind of a very useful feedback mechanism But I think you know, there's definitely a risk to confusing Doing something because it's a driver versus something as a consequence There's there's a few more questions.

1:01:21I want to ask but I want to come back to something that asked earlier that I think is on the minds of a lot of say founders and product managers listening to this I've just like okay, this all is sounds really great. I would love to make these experiences So great. I just it's going to take us a lot of time to do this really really well You said that it doesn't have to what's like a tactical tip or two that you can suggest to a founder or product manager To help them can kind of contain the design process while also achieving these outcomes that you're describing Well, I think if you can give you know, I mean maybe what way to think about it is like a big giant AI prompt You know the more context you can give it the more specificity you can give it the more this is what I'm about And what we're trying to get to the more the designer is going to be able to figure out which Swimlaying they're supposed to be into produce something So if you I think if you're going into it feeling like the design process is going to take a lot of time It's because you haven't been you haven't been clear in your creative brief so to speak Which often means you're not really clear in your own head and I think I have worked with a lot of founders And we could identify a bunch of big companies who I think got started that weren't clear in their own head I mean, I don't want to you know, Yahoo was an amazing company But but if we just look at Yahoo for a second, I worked there It was never clear to me what the founding vision of Yahoo was and I Talk a lot about vision statements and we could say like the vision statement at Google is Organizing all the world's information.

1:02:46That's a great vision. They'll never achieve that That's a that's something that's always over the horizon And it's been a very useful organizing principle for their acquisitions and how the company grows Amazon to be the earth's most customer -centric company. Okay, great. That gives that's that's a vision They will never get there. It tells you how they're going to expand Apple doesn't have an explicit vision, but I might describe it as Personal computing can have a transformed effect on the lives of individuals Right, and I think that kind of Focuses a lot of what they're trying to do Disneyland still the best vision statement of all time which is the happiest place on earth So once you tell an employee this is supposed to be the happiest place on earth Then you're signaling all sorts of things about how they need to pick up the trash and how they need to show up on time and how they need to wear their Their their uniform like you're just signaling a whole bunch of stuff So when I talk to founders a lot of times they just don't have that clarity of what's the vision of the company to go back to Yahoo for a second I never heard a vision And so I'm not really sure what they were ever about they kind of stumbled into the directory And then they added a bunch of stuff around the edges, but it never seemed to make a lot of sense And so I think people operating inside Yahoo You know, they ended up to it ended up being inefficient because they were having to deal with all that ambiguity So I think that that can also be a pretty big risk for founders They end up kind of with a product idea And they think that the company is the product the company is not the product the product is the product and the company's bigger than the product And so you need to have some vision that speaks beyond just this particular thing Nick slack slack and for honestly both slack and Pinterest I think are examples of companies Products that became companies, but neither one of those places really knew what to do next because they didn't have a bigger Vision of the change they were trying to see in the world So I mean back to your you were asking a very pragmatic question like I think you need to work on your prompt before you go to your designers and try to give them as much clarity about what you want to produce as possible And I think if you leave it open as to the emotional response you want users to have You're inviting a lot of ambiguity, which is going to invite a lot of inefficiency I love that answer and it's so interesting that A .I.

1:04:52could help us work better together as humans because when you find that it The A .I. is not achieving the outcome you want as effectively as you want That's a lesson this you this also translates to working with humans like make the prompt more specific add more context in life Not just when you talk into AI. Yeah, yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's so interesting So the so the advice here is just if you're finding designers taking too long or you want to just level up your Success with your design team give more context spend more time on the brief on what you're actually trying to achieve and Make sure there's a clear vision or mission that everyone can Rotorals.

1:05:32Yeah, look design is a problem solving methodology So the more variables you can remove before they go into the process the more efficient it's going to be And if you give designers a lot of ambiguity They're going to spend a lot of time spending around and honestly that's your fault is the client You know, I mean as a design leader I think one of my main challenges is frankly trying to make the PM's better clients You know helping them get more specific It's very common if we're a design team to get extremely ambiguous asks from a product team And then they have and the problem for design is they have to take all that ambiguity and they've got to ring it all out So when they give it to engineering engineering knows exactly what to code because computers don't tolerate ambiguity Like engineers need to know what the thing's going to be And so design gets stuck with a really ambiguous input But they have to have a highly specific output and then they're often time box to do that and it's just not a recipe for success So you're much better off Either kind of compressing the PRD experience, you know and bringing the designers into that kind of co -creating with product and design really rapidly But you need to I mean you could think of it in some ways as designers are going to draw the storyboards And if you don't give them a great script they have a very hard time Yeah, and then you give you know you can't give the shooting crew And big you a storyboards or you're just going to waste untolds amounts of money on set So if you think about those three steps from script to storyboard to production like It's all about getting rid of ambiguity And so the more ambiguity that can be removed upstream the faster design is going to go This begs the question then a lot of you know you don't want to give designers here exactly Here's the thing we're designing make it really great and pretty You know, there's always this balance of just give designers space to think and be creative and explore advice there just How to navigate that well if you go back to my example the script and storyboard scripts don't contain pictures Right, there's still a lot of opportunity to think differently and you know to come up with with original things into And have a lot of creative input in the storyboarding process So the script is living mostly in words, which is largely how pms How pms function the thing that I will say about To keep in mind for pms It's there's always a tendency on pms to want to draw something and then try to give a sketch to a designer And I would caution them against that Sometimes they have to draw themselves so they can think it out but Like you know if a pm came to me with something That was drawn and kind of fully baked my response was like thanks for giving me that now I know exactly what we're not going to do because you know What is a point of pride there's no way I'm going to go execute that exact thing So that so you're right like pms have to give you the space to operate And I think a lot of what they're trying to achieve can be done in more informal ways Conversationally and whiteboards Think things like that, but yet You need you need to narrow the problem for the designers You know get you they need constraints they don't need They don't need a tiny little box, but they they need constraints You know they can think in terms of like you don't you don't give them an airport tarmac And you don't even give them a football field they give them something more like a basketball court You know, there's sort of a scale at which they can do their design thing I want to talk about basketball later, but not yet You've shared a lot of counterintuitive lessons on building product designing building teams leadership Is there is there another very counter intuitive lesson you've learned about building products hiring leading teams that Goes against common startup wisdom The thing I would Say is that you should wait as long as possible to draw a picture like And that I think that pushes against All the gen AI tools that help you create prototypes And there's obviously a lot of excitement around that I can just give a prompt in the The AI is going to they're going to crank out a UI for me.

1:09:21So I don't think I'm using the term right, but I had this idea from arc that I call the primal mark And that's the first mark that you make on the canvas And once you make that mark on the canvas everything you do after that is in response to that mark It sort of sets your baseline And so For me I always felt that as soon as we drew a picture that looked even remotely real Like everybody gravitated towards that and said oh, that's the thing and people are so uncomfortable with ambiguity That they can't really deal with the tension of well, that might not be the thing So as soon as you draw a picture That looks even slightly realistic much less something that comes out of one of these gen iA tools You know everybody kind of goes oh, that's the thing You just keep doubling down on that thing and what's happened is you've taken the Possibilities from this big broad thing down to this tiny little thing From an AI system that's trained on existing solutions and existing ideas and maybe not even thinking about it the right way Because all you've really given is your first order of thinking and so I think there's a way you can stay in these things Conceptually and conversational where you can get to your second third fourth idea And that's where stuff gets really interesting and you get I don't think that has to take a lot of time I can be over the course of a single meeting you could get to a second third fourth idea You just have to be willing to not jump at the first thing that looks like a possibility like you get that possibility Okay, well, that's interesting.

1:10:45Let's table that. What else we got? You know, there's one story that kind of related that's useful In one of my previous jobs I was responsible for the public website I remember coming across where the product managers one day and she's like hey this link on the homepage You know, we have to make it blue I was like well, we don't use blue links anywhere. She's yeah, but we just have to make it blue It's like well, we're not making it blue and a couple days go by and I saw the homepage and the link had been made blue Because she had gone around me and she got an engineering and just made it blue And I started the hallway again.

1:11:12I was like, you know, what the hell's up with that? And she goes well people couldn't see it and I'm like, oh, they couldn't see it. So it wasn't prominent enough, right? She's like, yeah, it wasn't prominent enough. I'm like, well great You know, there's like a hundred different things we could do to make a more prominent one of which is making it blue And I thought which is the thing that came to you first because you're not the designer and like it That's naturally because it's the most obvious thing But it actually doesn't fit in with these larger things we're trying to do So I've often I try to encourage the product managers to like what's the what's the problem with the thing and then let us solve it Don't jump to it and tell us this is what we're sput you know, don't tell us this is just exactly what we're supposed to do And again, I do the same thing on the roadmap like You decide to roadmap tell us what we're supposed to do I will ask you about it and I may push back and we may have some back and forth But that's your responsibility I'm gonna trust that you are trained and you know what you're doing and you're gonna make the right call And I just want you to give me the same level respect This advice about not drawing quickly and not making that primal mark which I love that term Is I met I'm curious to your take on AI prototyping tools these days because that's like the extreme version of that Not only you just creating a sketch.

1:12:20It's like oh, it's working here. It is here's what it looks like Thoughts on that do you discourage people from doing that? Especially well, I think it's a production tool right so like once you know what you want and you can give it a really robust prompt then I mean, I have a play with it a lot myself because I'm not an operational role right now But you know presumably it's really useful like cranking out that actionable prototype which you can click and You know experience and I've said for a long time that an interactive idea needs to be expressed interactively So we're not talking with our hands and we can really understand what's gonna happen So when the idea is ready to be expressed.

1:12:52I think those tools are probably fantastic um, but you know ideas start off pretty fragile and the best ideas start off really fragile and I think when you Push them to develop too quickly and you put them out in the world and expect them to be able to stand up to critique too early You're just gonna squash them. I often think about them like the little plant and in the Pixar movie Wally You know you've kind of you've got to give that little guy a little space a little time some water and some nourishments And you can't really just suddenly put him out in the wind and think he's gonna make it and so I think a lot of There's a lot of very fragile interesting quiet ideas that I think you need to give some space And when you when you jump to the expression of them, I think you're putting them at risk.

1:13:32I'll also say that You know everybody when they when they look at a prototype what they're focusing on is the visual and textual expression And so as soon as you produce something in higher resolution the feedback you're gonna get is gonna be back colors and shapes and like these these presentation layer things which are very Losely related to usability and value, right? It's it's like It's like focusing on the special effects of a movie that has a really bad story And so it thought spot we used to use what we called block frame diagrams which were Even simplified versions of wire frames. It was just big chunky blocks If here's how the screen could be and where things might be located and because it was so low fidelity People couldn't get into commenting on what it looked like you know We had to talk about conceptually what it was and so we were trying to build up this firm foundation where we could go from the block frames to wire frames Like to kind of the final expression and I think it helped us Clarify what we were trying to do conceptually.

1:14:28So the by the time we got to the final visual presentation That stuff was actually really simple and it initially it made The product team really nervous because we would be sitting in these block frames or wire frames for sometimes weeks And they'd be like when are we finally gonna see the cops and then what would happen is because we had such a robust design system Once we locked down on the on the block frames We could send it to an agency and they could do the full high -res cops like in a day You know exactly what they were doing instead of the pms were always like what the hell happened overnight You know like well turns out that the high -res stuff that's not the hard thing the hard thing is like the heavy lifting of thinking What are we really trying to do that's the hard part and if you do the high -res stuff you just you really muddy the waters And I think you end up spending a lot more time churning if you didn't again I'm gonna go back to the movie metaphor because I studied film you know If you're trying to fix script issues when you're in production or storyboarding You're gonna churn you're gonna waste a lot of effort so you kind of you got to figure out what you're trying to do before you go Draw the hard high -res stuff, and I think a lot of the GNI tools It's this seductive thing of hey, let's just go Let's go make the comp and see what we think.

1:15:36I just I don't I don't really know if you're gonna get anything great out of that process Maybe That's that's a really interesting counter narrative because it feels like every product team now is just like straight to prototypes I just have the see She's one of the cpos that Microsoft I realized there's many cpos As she has this concept of demos before memos and just like prom sets or any prds You should just be prototyping all your ideas And so it's interesting to hear that the perspective of maybe it's actually hurting your ability to come up with a really clever solution versus the obvious solution Yeah, look I think at some point hopefully people just back up and ask themselves Are we actually producing better product because of this process?

1:16:15You know, I mean and we're going faster, but faster can't be the ultimate goal like you need to Be creating something great as well, right? Something that's sustainable and frankly that you're proud of and that your users find value in And if you're just throwing so much spaghetti at the wall I don't know if having a Spaghetti throwing machine that goes faster. Yes, you know, I mean, I look there's a there's a counter argument that's You know, you can say oh, it's like Darwinian evolution and we're just gonna spend through a bunch of random mutations and see what You know what happens and I used to joke that you know, it's it's true that you know If you take a bunch of hydrogen atoms and give them 14 billion years you could end up with a tiger But you don't know you're going to get a tiger and you could get a six headed shrimp instead You don't really know when it's going to ship so I'm not exactly sure Darwinian evolution is the way we create great product But a lot of companies are Make it a run at it.

1:17:01I want to take us to a recurring segment on the podcast called AI corner And in AI corner, I ask guests to share what's one way that you've learned or figured out to use AI in your job to help you Do better work to help you do faster work? Well my job right now is trying to figure out what my job is And so the thing I've been using AI for is I've very explicitly been using it as a life coach And so I had seen a couple of prompts about asking it if you know what the blind spot was or what my strengths and weaknesses were I'd seen some prompts about that stuff and what I was really fantastic what I what I was What's a what's an outdated mindset that I'm holding on to that's not still serving me And he came back with this a very polite prompt or very polite response About well given your age and your profession.

1:17:47It's not surprising that you're very wedded to the idea of control But that's not really the world we're living in anymore And that's not probably going to suit the thing you're trying to do next which is writing and publishing and speaking and stuff And uh, although it's statistically derived it did come back with a really nice phrase Which I've used in your show which was try to focus on choreography over control And so I thought that was that was really useful I asked to show my blind spots. That was also useful. I used it for a lot of exercise input That's useful and the exercise that I've gone through most recently was uh, I I I realized that it was inferring these things about me from the things that I had asked it to help me with in the past So instead I just switched I just went to chat TPP started a new project and said I want you to be my life coach I want you to ask me five questions a day for the next five days Let's go through those so you can explicitly come better helping me with this task And so we've just gone through that process and and it's been it's been really useful for me It's no substitute for a therapist or a real coach or anything like that is not a human being It doesn't care about me.

1:18:50I'm not saying that you should use it instead of these other options You need a human being as well, but it's been very good at Reflecting back to me things that I think have been floating around in my undermine and so I There's there's a wonderful book called um hair brain tortoise mind by a gentleman named guy claxton and in that he talks about the undermine and sometimes you might have heard this is your unconscious or something like that But I think of your undermine as the part of your brain that's processing Information before it gets a language and then when you go to consciousness You've turned it into language and language isn't the full universe of things you can think language is what you can think in English And if you talk to multi -lingual speakers They'll tell you that they can think things and other languages than what they can think in English So if you only speak English only in one vein of what you can think But your undermine is operating through all this other stuff and You know for the computer nerds out there you can think about it as a compiled code versus interpreted code Right, so you undermine how to work in a compiled code and it could do a lot of stuff But you can't really do in the interpreted code which moves slower and it kind of has different orientations and we call that consciousness So I was feeding chat GPT all this stuff over the last year or so and There are all these patterns in my undermine that had been going into that that I wasn't able to express with conscience conscious language And so when I started asking it questions I think what it was doing was it was statistically reflecting patterns back to me that already existed in my undermine But because it was putting them into language my conscious mind can now recognize them and respond to them Um, and so again, I found it as a is a sort of a life coach I found it very useful is a mirror back to things that I was probably already thinking and it helped me clarify my thoughts It's not pushing me in new directions that like a human might do But it's still been super useful That is extremely cool.

1:20:39That is a really cool use case I don't know if you heard the Jerry Cologne episode that I did recently he has okay We'll link to it He's got four questions that he suggests people ask themselves The first is the title of the actual episode. How are you complicit in creating the conditions? You say you don't want And this often leads to a lot of interesting insights about yourself And there's an important part of it like complicit being like you're not responsible But you are actually yeah, yeah helping achieve a thing and then for word yeah, yeah Yeah, and then also and it's important element of say you don't want like you say you don't want to be busy But something you just create keep creating busyness for yourself.

1:21:17Maybe you do want this so anyway We'll link that episode. There's a lot of good stuff there. Yeah, that's great Okay, one final question before you get to our very exciting lightning round. This is one that we That I don't think you have any idea. I'm gonna ask you about and so I'm curious where this goes This is a story that Jof redfern suggested I ask you he told me that you're obsessed with space You love talking look at researching space telling stories about space There's a story that you share about this guy named John Hobolt Does that ring a bell? Oh, yeah totally okay share that story and because I think there's something really powerful here for people building products So I should clarify I'm also I am a fan of astronomy in space But I'm a particular fan of the Apollo program Because I viewed the Apollo program in the moon landings as the greatest peacetime accomplishment of mankind ever and I think it's An incredible there's there's a profound number of leadership lessons and individual lessons to be learned from that program And I've done multiple talks about this I could go on for hours That's to be used to it Here we go the particular question you're asking is John Hobolt so John was I can't remember exactly where he was in the NASA hierarchy But he was one of the people that was tasked with figuring out the question of how do you go to the moon So just to take yourself back in history a little bit John Kennedy present Kennedy goes to Rice University I believe is 19th September made 1962 they gives the famous moon speech we choose to go the moon not because of it's easy But because it is hard that whole thing which I also have to say and maybe you'll link to this in the show notes as well Everyone should go watch that talk that that is the perfect Ted talk it clocks in right at 18 minutes It shows you how to sell a big giant bold vision the specifics the Kennedy gets into the way he sets context at the beginning The technical problems are gonna happen how much money it's gonna cost the way he puts the passion why we're gonna go to the moon the whole thing It is an incredible talk is the only moonshot talk ever ever Because a moonshot has to actually go to the moon and so it is it is an incredible talks to go watch the talk But he steps off the stage and people are NASA like you know We've we've only recently put Alan Shepherd into space and he just went up and went down I mean that was like almost like a as a blue origins types thing That was just up and down We didn't even do a lap around the earth like the Russians did with Yuri Gagarin and now we're talking about going to the moon like Nobody knows how to go to the moon and there was three different options for going to the moon one at the time One was to build a big giant rocket and just go straight to the moon's called direct descent And the main advocate for that was Werner von Braun who was the main rocket guy in the world A little bit of a complicated past but nevertheless Werner von Braun's a big guy.

1:23:55He's got the president's ear Yeah, he's like let's build a big giant rocket go to the moon people are like yeah Problem is when you get to the moon the rocket's still super big So like these guys are gonna have to descend a big ladder. That's kind of a problem So that was one idea. There was another called Earth orbit rendezvous where you spend two two spacecraft in the earth and then you you link them up in our orbit Then what ever goes off to the moon? But you still got to land that thing on the moon And then there's a third idea called lunar orbit rendezvous Which is where you build a spacecraft that includes a smaller spacecraft So you so you send up two spacecraft together one of them smaller much lighter and you use that just as this The ship that goes down to the earth the moon surface and back up and that spacecraft is truly a spacecraft Only flies in space Which means the engineering requirements around it are profoundly different Because it doesn't have to survive Reentry into the earth right and so as a result it can be much lighter and it turns out that the whole problem of landing on the moon Is it's a weight problem like you got to lift all the stuff off the earth?

1:24:50Which is incredibly expensive for fuel they got to land it on I mean, there's just a lot goes on And so cubald had come across this paper from a gentleman named Yuri Kandratjak Who was living in Ukraine in like the 1916 1918 when he wrote this paper And he was the first guy to theorize lunar orbit rendezvous And I try to take people back to that like you and I can think about going to the moon But Yuri Kandratjak in 1918 is on the plains of Ukraine looking at the moon And he's actually thinking about how to really go to the moon like he's figuring it out And so he writes his paper John discovers it years later And John's tried to sell lunar orbit rendezvous.

1:25:30It's not going over at NASA And so eventually he decides to go around all the hierarchy And he sends a very famous memo to one of the top guys at NASA The memo starts somewhat as a voice in the wilderness And then it goes on and there's points in there where he's really emphatic And we want to go to the moon or not And then he goes through all the math of how go to the moon is all about weight And this was the only way to do it And there was no other option And stuff like that. He just made the case And you know, it was I mean, he risked his whole career A whole thing could have blown up He could have been fired for going around the hierarchy and all that sort of stuff But of course he's able to champion the idea And I think it was another year So after that famous memo which you could read online It's like nine pages long or something After the after the memo It was still some time before they adopted lunar orbit But eventually they do And even with Don Brott himself was very complimentary to he vault for kind of pushing that perspective So I tell the story one Because it's just an amazing story And it does kind of force you to go back to the moment of like Wait, they didn't actually know how to do it Like we only know how to do it now because they've done it You know, but there's that moment of uncertainty I think you kind of have to embrace and be amazed at that And it also shows you the power of these ideas Like a really great idea Somehow finds a way to live on Somehow it just sits out there and it just waits for its time You know and Yuri had brought this idea to the world and it just sat around And then somebody discovered it and dusted it off Was able to push for it and it came through And then maybe the third lesson is like ideas need champions And they need champions We'll end up put themselves on the line for them So if you believe in something And you've made your case And you can really make your case You know, have the courage to have the courage of your convictions And get behind it and fight as hard as you can for it Mm Such a great story And I love that you summarize the takeaways too With the way so Like to me the takeaways and the lessons here is One is coming back to your Pinterest board in the office Say the hard thing To is be patient You know it may take a little bit of time for an idea to Like a radical idea especially To resonate and stick and get adoption So if you're you know pitching a big new product idea Like if don't assume and they'll immediately agree Also just this idea of like if you really believe in it Do go go and champion it There needs to be someone passionately arguing for this Yeah, I'll just add to that one thing Like I think people need to understand That they're advocating for ideas And not for themselves And when I talk to a lot of designers That may be true for PMs I hear a lot of people Say that they're reluctant to post on social media Or linked to anything Because like well I don't want to be you know I don't be self -promoting And I try to counsel them And like look it's not about self -promotion Like it's a like there are ideas that you care about That you want to see succeed in the world And so get out there as an advocate of the idea It's not about you It's about the idea And like don't be afraid to stand behind the idea We've spread a lot of good ideas in this conversation Bob with that we reached our very exciting Lightning round are you ready?

1:28:32Yeah, let's go We added a ding to this There's that like that drama he added And that's a whole thing now Okay, first question What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people So the three books I'm going to recommend The first one's a beautiful poetic book about typography Called The Elements of Typographic Style By Robert Bringerse Robert was the poet laureate of Canada And the first 80 pages will change how you think about typography He will open you up to the wonderful world of typography that we all live in You will think differently about every sign you look at About every movie credit you see Like it will give you an insight I think into the designer mindset that is like when you understand typography I think you understand where designers come from And the best designers I know are just total type nerds So highly recommend Elements of Typographic Style Second book Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Many people may know Ultimately a philosophy book But it's about the concept of quality Which I think is a very important topic So it talks about quality and the importance of how things integrate into cohesive whole Which I believe is the main challenge facing most software teams They create something that's highly fragmented Instead of a single hole So Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance And then the last one is a book called Time in the Art of Living by Robert Gruden It's just a very interesting collection of Sort of impressionistic views of time and how time passes and what time means So that's very different from the others And it's not something Probably gets recommended on your show too often But I think it will I think it will help people in their lives in a powerful way I think these are all brand new entries in this question Next question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed So I really enjoyed Severance I enjoyed it as a filmmaker I really I was just blown away at the filmmaking I was intrigued with the story and the characters And I think as someone who's worked in corporate America When you understand that it's Basically critique and commentary about the modern workplace There were times that I just thought were unbelievably funny and insightful It was it was definitely interesting watching with my wife who who was an attorney And hasn't worked in those kinds of environments So it's like an episode where some people kind of got disappeared And the language that we're using was all around the language You would hear around a layoff And so like I was laughing myself to death But she was like what?

1:30:54So I thought Severance is super fascinating And then I'll throw one other in there which is not something I've recently seen But something I highly recommend for everybody which is Lawrence of Arabia The Lawrence of Arabia is I think one of the two or three best expressions of the medium of film And so when you think about the ability to hold moving pictures, character, story, music, photography, set design, costume Like the whole constellation of variables that come to play into a movie I think Lawrence of Arabia is probably one of the two or three most complete expressions Of what the medium is capable of And I think it's useful to think about in technology All the different elements of a product And all the different elements of the user interface And how you can break those down the way You can break down all these elements of a movie And how many pieces of software do we use Where somebody is actually conducting that symphony In a really coherent, powerful, full -on way I love that movie Next question You have a favorite product that you have recently discovered that you really love You're focused on recent and I'm just going to push back No, here's the terribly recent The stuff that I go back to, I'll give you a couple of nerdy one I have a Leica M6 cam, which is a film camera And I recently started shooting with film again Which I absolutely love because it forces me to slow down I always talk about Leica cameras They're obscenely expensive But the thing about Leica cameras is you show up different when you shoot with a Leica So when people think about cameras, they think about the quality of the image They don't think about how the tool is going to change them And when you show up with an iPhone, you're thinking about sharing When you throw up, when you show up with a film camera, you're thinking about saving film And you're spending more time composing and thinking exactly about the shot When you show up with a digital SLR, you just take a whole bunch of pictures And hope something's going to turn out And so I think these cameras are very useful metaphor For being conscious about how the tools you pick Are going to impact the thing that you produce So once you go into Figma, you've made a decision about the thing you're going to produce If you're staying a sketchbook, you've made a different decision You know, if you go into something else, you've made a different kind of decision So I say the Leica M6 with film because of that And then the software product I would point out, which is not terribly new But I think it's worth noting, is a tool called Habitica And Habitica is really fascinating It's a, it's ultimately it's a habit tracker and task management app But it's fundamentally a game It's a role -playing game where you create a character And your character revolves and can buy armor and go on quests and things As you check off your habits and stuff And it is the most interesting expression of shifting conceptual models that I've ever seen So if you think about a conceptual model, it's sort of the software equivalent of a genre in a movie And so like once you say it's a project management software, you're kind of in a certain genre If you say it's a productivity tool, you're kind of in a certain genre So if it's social media, you're kind of in a certain genre But these are different genres and Habitica is really interesting because it mixes genres It mixes role -playing game with with with with to -do manager And so I think it's a really powerful example of how you can really shift the user's thinking In the same way like movies for example, like Star Wars is ultimately a cowboy movie set in space And when you come to that, those those two genre mashups are really interesting When you come to a romcom, you have a certain expectation of what's going to happen to a romcom If somebody suddenly got shot in a romcom, you would like that would not make sense to you In the same way that if somebody made a really funny joke in a John Wick movie, it wouldn't make sense So I think Habitica is just the most interesting example I've ever found is somebody really doing a fascinating mashup of conceptual models Which is sorry, this is just it's an unexplored and unexploided possibility of software ideas I love how profound this lightning round of her is The point about like a changing the way you even think about the photo is so interesting I've never thought of it that way You mentioned Star Wars have you seen the Andor by the way?

1:34:50I know but my what everybody's raven about it. It's just yes I've been watching basketball so I just haven't had spare time yet But see I have a basketball question, but first of all before we get to that Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to you? Find these full and worker in life? Yeah, so there's three quotes that I come back to all the time that are repeating most of my talks First I've already used which is design is clear thinking made visible by Edward Tufty Second one is from the American landscape photographer Ansel Adams And I've also alluded to this and the quote is there's nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept And then the last one is an African proverb and it goes like this If you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together And I think we've kind of touched on all three of those things today When we've talked about the resolution of cops we've talked about using Gen AI to try to go faster things like that and you know those two ideas Kind of collide in an interesting way, you know people think if they cut their colleagues out of the pie They can go faster and it's true.

1:35:48They can't go faster. You just can't go very far Like you need a group if you want to go far And just because you can create a brilliant image doesn't mean you got a good concept go look on Instagram You'll fight plenty of photographs that like Tingle your senses with a visual perspective and you will forget them by the time you close the app because they don't mean anything And so we live in a time when it's very easy to produce things it incredibly high production values But they don't mean anything and so they're just like fancy potato chips There's no there's no nourishment there man. I think I love that this connects back to the vibe coding apps and prototypes that people build that you you know You can do it really quickly But he won't go too far potentially.

1:36:29Yeah, yeah, not to hit on this tool. They're amazing Okay, they are they are at like all this AI stuff is profoundly amazing Um, and I I will encourage people like one of the most amazing things for me about this moment AI is that this the kind of AI we're experiencing has been theorized for well over 50 years So there is a vast now a vast warehouse of Of interesting amazing thoughts from philosophers and engineers and social scientists and people thinking about what is this moment Gonna mean when we have this sort of artificial intelligence that challenges our conception what it means to be human So like there's so much stuff you could be reading to help you process this moment and the in the very intense and profound psychological challenges it's bringing forth It definitely feels like we're finally living in the future like the future is actually happening It's gonna be robots walking around soon.

1:37:18We get self -driving cars all over San Francisco. It's yeah, really really start It's a future. Yeah, I say future That's that's my concern with a lot of the the fiction of the future is most of it is dystopian and like here's all the problems that we're gonna run into Which and you know is gonna be useful. I like here's the robot laws that we gotta be thinking about Yeah, I just just to go back to this idea of how once you once you create an expression of something people baseline off of it I recently got to hear Henry Mota set who's headed designed at a perplexity give a talk And one of the things he said that to really struck me was that people's conception of AI was founded by it was Was put out there by Hollywood years ago So this idea that that AI is gonna take stuff over and is ultimately like really dystopian and malevolent towards humans and stuff like that It's actually something that's created by Hollywood and we're all like and now we're like trying to outlive how you know Stuff like that and so it's just just such a great example of somebody Put the concept out there and planted that seed in people's heads And now we're struggling to get people off that baseline and to look at it with fresh eyes That's a that's a really good point.

1:38:26Yeah, it's much more entertaining to watch AI try to kill a soul not just oh everything's amazing. That's a great job. Yeah, I Okay, final question. I know you're a huge sports fan in particular you're a big warriors fan So let me just ask you this say we're running the warrior say we're the owner of the Golden State Warriors What would you what would you change? What would you change to help them win? You know a team like a real team can't be dependent on a single player And I think there's such a dramatic difference In the warriors when stuff is on the court and off the court You know if you listen to the so the local announcers, they're always like these non -steff minutes really matter You know like like I look at that and like that's not that's not really a team then right?

1:39:09That's like stuff and you know It's like stuff in the in the in the band of Maryman and the warriors are bigger than that right and mostly spathcable teams are bigger than that Currently, I think across a lot of places in the NBA There's a single player that can go down that makes a difference in the organizations success and that just seems Dangerous and not a team. So I mean, I kind of don't know what to say. I don't know how you replace Steph Curry He is as you know singular. I don't even if you know I've been calling him a generational player It's been bigger than that, you know He is unequivocally the greatest shooter in the history of the game and he's one of only two or three players is actually fundamentally changed how the game's played But I just know for winning the warriors are at risk Because Steph is meaningfully old for an NBA player and You know that you can't have the whole franchise built around just him I love this hot take a great way to end it Bob I kill us into you all day.

1:40:01This is so fun and interesting in so many ways on so many levels Two final questions. We're convinced funny online if they want to reach out and maybe learn more about what you're up to and how can listeners be useful to you So BobBaxley .com's the easiest place right now. It's just a bento site But I'll get some more stuff up there in the coming coming days Hopefully before this episode goes out. We'll see but there's plenty of links there Then it'll help you connect to me on LinkedIn and some of my talks and a few links to some other things that I find useful Just find me on LinkedIn, you know I publish pretty much every day on LinkedIn That's an easy way to find me.

1:40:34Yeah, I'm happy to Happy to be connected to whoever is interested in being connected and then in terms of how you can help me You know, I'll go back to what I said earlier. It's not really about me, Lenny It's it's about these ideas. It's about the idea that software matters You know that we're making something for people on the other side of the glass and then it's a way that we show that we care and that we should care So I wouldn't it's it's not about me. It's about us Together trying to create a digital world that we want to live in You know the digital world right now. It's not something we really want to live in It's not a place any of us would turn our kids loosen You know, you know, I talked about this earlier like the digital world not safe for our kids like have we kind of done something wrong So I just uh Yeah, I just I hope people take that responsibility more seriously and try to But I hope clean things up a little bit.

1:41:21I think we've we've made a dent in that Bob. Thank you so much for being here Now, thank you so much, ladies. It's been it's been a real honor privilege and it just a ton of fun So thank you so much same for me. Bye everyone Thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on ample podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com See you in the next episode