How to make AI worth your time with Max Mullen

Summary

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Podcast Summary

WorkLife with Molly Graham

Episode: How to Make AI Worth Your Time with Max Mullen
Date: May 19, 2026
Host: Molly Graham
Guest: Max Mullen (Co-founder, Instacart; Early-stage Investor)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming work and daily life, cutting through the industry hype to focus on practical, meaningful use cases. Host Molly Graham, a self-described “late adopter,” speaks with Max Mullen, serial company builder, product leader, and early-stage investor, about what’s real versus what’s noise in today’s AI revolution. They discuss the evolution of technology, the accessibility of AI, overcoming skepticism and fear, and offer concrete advice for listeners on where and how to start leveraging these tools.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why the AI Hype Feels Different

• Tech skepticism: Molly shares her initial reluctance to embrace AI, colored by the failures of recent tech cycles like Web3 and crypto.
  • “When ChatGPT launched and suddenly every conversation in Silicon Valley turned into an AI conversation, I was skeptical.” (04:13)
• What changed Molly’s mind: Uploading her own writing to an LLM and getting a “robot collaborator” that instantly produced a first draft - making her life easier, saving time, but replacing a human task.
  • “In one moment, it had done three things. It made my life massively easier, it saved me a bunch of time, and it replaced someone’s job.” (05:43)
• Bigger than the last hype cycle: Both agree AI represents a genuinely new paradigm, unlike crypto, because it’s already solving real-world problems in accessible ways.

2. The Value of Early Adoption & Skepticism

• Max’s approach to new tech: He emphasizes playing with emerging products repeatedly over time to spot real progress and usefulness.
  • “If you want to know what the frontier of technology is going to do next, you kind of have to be in today’s moment trying the riskiest, most interesting, most fringe things that you can.” (10:25)
• High standards for utility: Max reflects that, unlike crypto, AI instantly provided value (e.g., drafting writing), while many past technologies never solved a real personal problem.

3. AI as an Accessibility Revolution

• No coding required: Natural language is now a “programming language”—anyone can direct a computer with words.
  • “This used to be the domain only of people classically trained in engineering, and now we're all basically computer programmers.” (16:11)
• Democratizing creativity/work: Tools like ChatGPT enable previously inaccessible possibilities, both for adults and kids.

4. Real-World AI Use Cases

• Personal: Planning trips (e.g., AI-generated Japan itineraries vetted by friends)
  • “I gave it the ages of my kids...a couple minutes later it came back with a very compelling, dense itinerary...” (17:09–18:44)
• Work: Drafting emails, performance reviews, research reports.
• Family/fun: Coding websites and games with/for his 8-year-old son, simply by talking.

5. The “Six-Week Rule”

• AI capabilities are evolving so rapidly that tasks that failed just weeks before may now be possible.
  • “If you tried to do something with AI more than six weeks ago and it didn’t work, forget about that, you have to try it again.” (24:30)
  • “We might have to reduce this to the six-day rule.” (25:00)

6. Building Trust and Navigating AI Limitations

• Hallucinations are less common: AI models now rarely make stuff up, especially for “normal” tasks.
• Human oversight is still needed: AI usually does the first 80-90% of work; the “last mile” (editing/correcting/implementing) remains human.
• Stick with a platform: Max urges listeners to pick one app and use it consistently, so the system can personalize responses and improve over time.

7. Practical Starting Points for AI Skeptics

• Try simple, non-risky tasks:
  • Rewriting an email for clarity.
  • Asking for personalized career advice from a performance review.
  • Exploring fun or educational queries with kids.
  • Experimenting with AI for coding (via “vibe coding”), building a website or game in minutes.

8. Addressing Fear and Exhaustion

• AI can feel overwhelming and disruptive, but “expertise” is only a few days or weeks away for anyone willing to play and experiment.
  • “The best experts at using AI, they learned a month or two ago. So nobody’s too far ahead of you.” (26:20)
• Human role persists: Curation, editing, adding taste/judgment, and empathy are not going away.
  • “There's a bunch of interesting ways where being human is actually more valuable than being faster or better, being computerized.” (43:54)

9. Why Engagement is Worth It

• Efficiency gains: AI can handle mundane tasks, freeing you for strategic, creative work.
• Adaptation is the new skill: Keeping up is less about deep technical mastery, more about curiosity and experimentation.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “Great technology should come to you. You shouldn’t have to go to it.” – Molly Graham (03:09)
• “I look at any technology...through this lens of like, well, what is the problem that it really solves in a consumer’s life?” – Max Mullen (11:34)
• “Now we are all basically computer programmers.” – Max Mullen (16:11)
• “If you tried to do something with AI more than six weeks ago and it didn't work, forget about that, you have to try it again.” – Max Mullen (24:30)
• “The best experts at using AI...learned a month or two ago. So nobody's too far ahead of you.” – Max Mullen (26:23)
• “Vibe coding is this idea that the computer is sort of coding and you're just approving things...somebody that isn’t professionally trained...can create an application very quickly.” – Max Mullen (32:10)
• “There’s still this role for humans to curate [AI output], to do that last 5% of work manually. I still have not gotten my AI tools to fully write something that I don’t have to edit at all.” – Max Mullen (40:35)
• “Being human is actually more valuable than being faster or better, being computerized.” – Max Mullen (43:54)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:42–07:50: Molly’s skepticism about AI and her “conversion moment”
• 09:06–12:56: Max explains his early adoption mindset and why crypto didn’t solve real problems for him
• 13:09–16:24: Evolution of AI’s utility and conversational interfaces
• 17:09–19:50: Real example: Using AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) to plan a family trip to Japan
• 23:24–25:19: The “six-week rule” for retesting AI capabilities
• 28:16–29:38: Trust and privacy—uploading sensitive data (e.g., lab results to ChatGPT)
• 30:01–32:29: Where to start: entry-level use cases and AI with kids (“vibe coding” and building a website)
• 36:49–38:16: Is spending time on AI worth it? Companies vs. personal “Saturday projects”
• 38:16–41:06: AI’s true scope for change—technology vs. people adapting, and the “last human mile”
• 42:43–44:03: What will never change—value of uniquely human work and connection

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Takeaways & Final Thoughts

• AI is becoming as foundational as the internet or the smartphone—but most people, even experts, are learning as they go.
• Don’t be discouraged if your first try flopped; experiment again soon.
• Expertise with AI is rapidly attainable; the learning curve flattens fast for persistent tinkerers.
• Use AI for practical, time-saving work, but know that your judgment and creativity are still essential.
• Being human—empathy, taste, curation—remains irreplaceable, even as AI automates more tasks.

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WorkLife with Molly Graham is a production of TED. For more, join Molly’s community on Substack (“Lessons”) or connect via her social links in the show notes.

Transcript

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[Molly Graham]

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If you're like me. Moments like this can feel exhausting.

Your bosses are telling you to play around with AI and it makes you want to punch them in the face. Someone told you to spend your Saturday setting up a new AI tool and it makes you want to throw your computer across the room.

I get it.

Despite working in the tech industry, I

am actually a late adopter. I did not run out and buy the first iPhone. I don't pick up every piece of software that Twitter or the venture capital ecosystem is hyping. I have this strongly held belief that great technology should be easy to use. Great products don't need a user manual. I often say that great technology should come to you. You shouldn't have to go to it. And what I mean by that is simple. Great products make it really obvious why they're going to make your life better. I've been around long enough to see a few real revolutions in tech. Things like the Internet, the smartphone, social media. But I have also lived through plenty of hype cycles that turned out to be to mostly be noise. And to be honest, when ChatGPT launched and suddenly every conversation in Silicon Valley turned into an AI conversation, I was skeptical. When venture capital websites rebranded overnight and every startup pitch had AI in the title, I was honestly a little jaded. There were two reasons. The first is that AI and automation research have been around for decades. Chatbots have been hyped before, responsive AI has been a thing since Siri came out in 2011, and big tech has been automating all sorts of things, from resume screening to user support for what feels like forever. So I genuinely did not understand what made this moment different. The other thing is that we had just come off a very loud, very expensive hype cycle around web3 and crypto that just did not live up to its promise for most people. But then something shifted for me. I kept playing around with, like, basic tools that anyone can access. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. And at first it felt like fancy Google. It was helpful, it was interesting. But it did not feel revolutionary. And then one day, I tried something different. I uploaded a bunch of documents that I'd written in the past, blog posts and essays and notes and emails. And I asked it to help me organize an idea for a new piece of writing. And suddenly I had this robot collaborator. It produced a really solid first draft

of a blog post, something that might have taken me hours.

It did in minutes. Something that I had previously experimented with paying ghostwriters to do. This Robot did for 20 bucks. In one moment, it had done three things. It made my life massively easier, it

saved me a bunch of time, and

it replaced someone's job. That was the moment that everything changed for me. I couldn't help but become a believer. Not because the writing was perfect and not because I want AI to replace everyone's jobs, but because I could suddenly see the shape of what this technology might become. Slowly, over time, I've come to the conclusion that AI is going to be as big and disruptive as the introduction of the Internet. But I also think that we are very, very, very, very early in this cycle. And I think most people that are talking about AI don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

So now I am on a quest.

I want to understand what's real and what's hype. I don't want the VC hype machine. I don't want the scare tactics that say everyone is ahead and you're behind. I actually want the use cases. I want the real tangible changes that make a difference in my life. The stuff that will help me understand what this technology is actually going to do to our work and our lives. So I'm going to do what I do when I want to learn something. Every now and then I'm going to spend an episode asking some very smart people some very dumb questions. And I'm going to make them explain this technology to me. And either they're going to convince me that it is worth spending my Saturdays learning this stuff, or I'm going to tell you that maybe it's too early for the rest of us. My goal is simple. I want to understand what the average person, not the engineer, not the venture capitalist, not the hyper technical early adopter. What you and me should actually be doing right now, what's real, what's useful and what's actually worth our Saturdays. I'm Molly Graham and this is Work Life, where we untangle the messy human side of work.

Today we're going to talk to Max Mullen.

Max is the co founder of Instacart. He led product in the early days, building software that coordinated millions of real world actions. Groceries, shoppers, deliveries, all moving through one system.

He's also someone I trust enough to

ask all the dumb questions. These days he invests in very early stage companies, often just ideas. Which means he sees a lot of new technology before most of us do. And yes, technically that makes him a venture capitalist. Which might sound like exactly the kind of AI hype machine I just told you I'm trying to avoid. But the reason I like talking to Max is that he is not breathless about technology. He's a builder, he's practical. He's spent most of his career turning messy real world problems into software that actually works. And he's been using AI tools inside his work and his life long before most of us started playing with ChatGPT.

Max is firmly in the camp that

AI is going to reshape almost everything about how we work. So today I want to push him on it. What does he actually see happening? Max Mullen, welcome to Work Life.

[Max Mullen]

Thank you for having me.

[Molly Graham]

Molly, I'm glad you're here. I've been looking forward to this conversation.

[Max Mullen]

Me too.

[Molly Graham]

So. So I am curious just to start with, like, Max, do you consider yourself an early adopter?

[Max Mullen]

I think so, yes. I mean, I do love trying products early and often. I mean, I early adopted Facebook when it first came out on college campuses, and then I tried it over many years, and I think through looking at the way it evolved as a product, I think I understood something about that company and about how people use social media.

[Molly Graham]

So when something new comes out, you're like, let's try it out.

[Max Mullen]

Yeah, I'm excited to try it. And as an investor, I want to kind of know what's going on with people and what interesting things they're trying out there in the world. Like, not just early adopting each thing once, but I try to early adopt whole categories of things at a time and sort of say, okay, here's how four or five different people are thinking about the same thing.

[Molly Graham]

What did it teach you to be

so early on Facebook and then watch it evolve?

[Max Mullen]

There's just something different about playing with a product once and then playing with it again in six months and then again in six months and seeing how it evolves. Right. And like, great products evolve pretty rapidly.

[Molly Graham]

It almost sounds like you like being like part of the story, watching a product grow and change.

[Max Mullen]

I think if you want to know what the frontier of technology is going to do next, you kind of have to be in today's, you know, in today's moment trying the riskiest, most interesting, most fringe things that you can. And those things often look a little bit weird and contrarian today.

[Molly Graham]

Okay, so I have a question for you because obviously today I want to talk about AI and this moment that we're in that has, you know, a lot of hype and a lot of conversation around it. Part of what happened for me with

AI was there was this just massive

hype cycle around crypto and Web three. And I Actually, like, it was so loud that I like tried to buy in at some point. Like, I really tried. And then I feel like it, in

my opinion, didn't really deliver on the

sort of like, hype, though. I'd love to hear your opinion. But then like, AI followed so quickly

after that that it actually made me jaded.

Will you just, like, tell me a

little bit about like, your experience of

like those two hype cycles?

[Max Mullen]

Yeah. And what's really interesting is there's a bit of an overlap between some of the people that were involved in each of those cycles and sort of pull me once. I also didn't get too involved in crypto and Web three. And I look at any technology or any company through this lens of like, well, what is the problem that it really solves in a consumer's life if it's a consumer technology? And I could never find the problem that Web3 or crypto was going to solve for me. I don't mind my bank. I didn't have a problem sending money and I don't send money internationally. So it wasn't really a big problem that, you know, that the crypto solved for me in terms of the money transfer. And I thought blockchain as a technology was very interesting, but it was also so early, and then I also just saw a lot of bad behavior and I said, I don't really want to be involved with that and I don't think I fully understand it. And there are a lot of people that specialize in crypto and so that'll just be an area that I just don't invest in, was how I thought about it.

[Molly Graham]

Interesting. So you actually tried it, played around with it and then opted out?

[Max Mullen]

Yeah, I followed Bitcoin very closely and still do. And Coinbase was in the same Y Combinator class as Instacart, and I thought it was fascinating, but I just didn't. It never, for me solved a real problem. And meanwhile there were other more interesting technologies that I think were solving real problems.

[Molly Graham]

Yeah. Well, talk a little bit about with AI, Was there a moment when you, when that made it real for you where you personally realized that it was different than crypto and what was that moment?

[Max Mullen]

Yeah, I mean, the first use case for me was writing I could ask it to draft the first version of a blog post or really anything written in email and it would get 80% of the way there. Right. Which really does save you quite a bit of bunch of time. And then there was kind of from there, there were little moments since then until now, where it got a little bit more useful. So now we can do research on the web. You remember this thing called deep research came out, and you could now ask it to go off for five minutes and think and get a bunch of websites and summarize them all and then come back with like a report on a topic for you. And now you're saving not 20 minutes writing the first draft of a blog post, but you're maybe saving two hours of work that you otherwise would have had to do manually. And another interesting thing that's changed is you used to have to be good at prompting the AI, and you used to have to know all these tips and tricks. And in the last six or eight months, that has all gone away. Now you can be very lazy, actually, and give it just what you want, ask it for just what you want, and it'll give you almost exactly what you expect.

[Molly Graham]

You've obviously been part of a lot of different phases in computing and just technology. What was it that natural language conversation with a computer sort of made you think was possible that hadn't been possible before?

[Max Mullen]

Well, you have to zoom out a little bit. We used to use computers exclusively by clicking and pointing our mouse at applications that were fairly structured and did one thing that somebody spent a lot of

[Molly Graham]

time building, like Microsoft Word or something.

Is that what you mean, like Excel?

[Max Mullen]

Yeah. And you're doing all this work on your computer to eventually get an answer, correct answer in the work context. And then you got mobile apps, which really made things a lot easier. You could tap and drag and zoom, and it was with you all the time. And it had GPS and a bunch of new things were capable then. And you got the beginnings of voice as an input. Right. With Siri. And the Google Android equivalent of that AI, to me represents a new paradigm for user experiences that I think people don't yet fully appreciate. And that is just the one where you use the language you know how to program in very well, which is the language you speak doesn't even have to be English. And you just tell the computer exactly what you want and then you get the answer that you're ultimately trying to get to Very, very quickly. And very importantly, this new paradigm of back and forth, you know, this personal chat assistant paradigm can ask you questions. So if you are. If you have some information in your brain that the computer needs in order to make a good decision for you, it'll just ask you. And I think that's very different and that's very interesting and that's full of Potential too. Yeah. You know, basically any problem that you could solve by tasking another smart human in the real world to do for you, you could imagine tasking a computer to do for you now, because you

[Molly Graham]

can talk to it like a human,

[Max Mullen]

because you can just talk to it and you don't need to know any special programming language in order to do that. This used to be the domain only of people classically trained in engineering, and now we are all basically computer programmers.

[Molly Graham]

Yeah.

So one of the arguments behind that, which is really interesting, is that AI actually makes the power of computing more accessible. And I think that's like some of the products that have come out are sort of all about like all of a sudden the average person can. Can actually access the something that was previously really only accessible to someone that could code. Does that sound right to you?

[Max Mullen]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's even for me still, still not clear exactly all the different ways that I'll be able to use AI in my own life. But one of the ways that I think about it is just if you have some problem that you think an AI application might be able to solve, you can now just ask it to solve that problem and you can see very quickly if it will work or won't. This is where it starts to get interesting because this technology is moving very, very fast. And what that means is that by the time you launch this episode of this podcast, this answer will be out of date. But. But AI can do all kinds of wonderful things for you. I'll give you an example of something that I did. I'm going to take my family to Japan soon and I don't know the first thing about exactly where to go or what to do. And so I asked one of my AI assistant apps to plan a full itinerary for me and my family. And I gave it a bunch of information that in my mind I would have had to give a travel agent. Gave it the ages of my kids. I gave it the sort of things we like to do. I told it I don't like to be over scheduled. I don't want to do more than one or two big things in a day, like try to cluster things around the hotel that you think we should stay at so that it's like less intercity travel. And I gave it the flights which I had already booked, which were into one city and out of another city. And I said, let's see what this can do. And a couple minutes later it came back with a very compelling, dense itinerary for this eight day Tokyo, Japan, trip.

[Molly Graham]

Is it. Is this just out of curiosity because you said AI assistants, is this literally

you doing this in ChatGPT?

Yeah, like, yes.

[Max Mullen]

Well, I'm a bit crazy. So I put this prompt into ChatGPT, I put it into Google's Gemini, and I put it into Anthropic's Claude, and I got back all three answers, and then I went with the one that I thought was the best.

[Molly Graham]

Did it actually give you, like, a good itinerary that you're going to use?

[Max Mullen]

So that was very interesting. I didn't know if it was a good itinerary. I didn't know if it was plausible or if the places that it recommended were the right places. And so I asked a couple friends who had recently taken their families to Japan, and they said it was an incredible itinerary. So it took a little bit of, you know, a little bit of elbow grease to validate that this AI had magically developed kind of what a travel agent might have spent a week doing. But it turns out that it was a very good itinerary, and it is now the itinerary that we will be traveling on. Interestingly, though, at that point, I said, well, now I need to make a bunch of hotel bookings and I need to find out some things that are not available on the websites of the hotels, so I need to call Japan. And so I ended up actually hiring a travel agent to book the hotels for me. And so this is this line, right? What can you do with AI and where does it stop? And a human has to get involved. And I think a lot of people kind of assume that AI can either do nothing or everything, but the reality is it's somewhere in the 80 or 90 percentile range. And you eventually, or someone eventually has to get involved and do the last mile, at least. Today.

[Molly Graham]

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[Molly Graham]

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You're kind of talking about one of my challenges with it. And I think a lot of people where it's like you start to ask it to do something, but you don't entirely know whether to trust the information. You know, how do you handle this new relationship with a computer where you're like, I know you can do these things, but are you actually good at them?

[Max Mullen]

Well, AI used to hallucinate a lot a couple years ago.

[Molly Graham]

What does that mean? When people say hallucinate? What does that mean?

[Max Mullen]

It means it makes stuff up. It will confidently state facts that it has no idea if they're true or not. And this is obviously a bug and not a feature. And so the AI labs went about doing what they call reinforcement learning. They went and gave it a bunch of examples of it doing this, and it gave it a bunch of examples of better responses. And they sort of worked this problem out of the system. And so in most cases, for most of the normal things you'd ask an AI to do, it rarely hallucinates today. And I think this is an interesting point, Molly, because people may have tried AI some amount of time ago and it didn't work for their use case, or it did something egregious, something that you'd fire an employee for if they did it and lied to you, but they haven't tried it for that same thing again recently. And I have this thing I call the six week rule, which is that if you tried to do something with AI more than six weeks ago and it didn't work, forget about that, you have to try it again. Because every day, every month, the models are getting better and the features and apps that you're using AI through are getting better. And the thing that you couldn't do six weeks ago, I'm pretty sure is probably possible today. And if it doesn't work today, you should try again in six weeks. And AI is moving so quickly, we might have to reduce this to the six day rule. Again, things are happening so rapidly. In a week or two, some of the things we'll say on this podcast will be wrong because the new features have come out and new things are possible.

[Molly Graham]

I love that rule. First of all, I think it's such a good, I guess, like an indicator of how fast this technology is growing and changing and getting better. But it's also kind of exhausting. Like, as a normal person to be like, I have to keep trying. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's. I feel like a lot of people try, to your point, like a Lot of people tried it a year ago and then, like, wrote it off because it couldn't do what they wanted it to do. Why should I keep trying?

[Max Mullen]

Well, I think there's a couple reasons. I mean, it can be really useful and save you a bunch of time in your personal life or in your job. I mean, it can. It can do all of the mundane things that you are doing that take up time. It can do them usually instantly. You could send it an email that you got from your school and say, you know, help me put these things on my calendar. You could have it write a performance review of somebody that's really thoughtful and kind from just a few bullet points. You can really save time by using AI. And so that's one reason to use it. And the other thing that I'd give you as a reason why I think the average person can really get up to speed quickly is that all of us are learning on the fly. You and I are maybe one or two days of playing with AI away from being experts. And the half life of that expertise is very short because again, there'll be new paradigms and new models that are coming out every month. And so it is a little bit exhausting to keep up. But there's very little work that you have to do to become an expert. Like, the best experts at using AI, they learned a month or two ago. So nobody's too far ahead of you.

[Molly Graham]

That is really interesting to me because I also think that, you know, you talked about sort of like the history of computing and like, that obviously didn't

used to be true, right?

To become, like, to get a computer to do something complicated, you used to have to study for four years and get a CS degree. I mean, part of what you're saying is that both the ability to talk to a computer is more accessible and to get it to do things you want, but also that the expertise is more accessible.

[Max Mullen]

Well, yeah, and one of the things that has changed in the last couple years is that some people, people like me, or even people who are less of an early adopter, have used ChatGPT or their preferred AI assistant enough times that it's collected this memory of what you need help with and who you are and what you do for a living. And now it has this context, right? And when you ask it a question, you no longer need to brief it on all the details. You just ask it a very simple question and it gives you a much better answer because it knows you. And so I would, you know, I would encourage most people to Pick one of these, these platforms and just stick with it and then it'll get to know you over time and that'll make, you know, the process of prompting it and getting a great answer much easier.

[Molly Graham]

It's interesting because, like when you, I know that, like, I'm thinking of my mom here. Hi, mom. Like you say, I give it my data and it remembers things about me and it gets to, to know me. And she says that sounds scary. And I don't want it to.

I don't want a computer to have

all this information about me. Like, I'm curious, like, do you have a reaction to that kind of hesitancy?

[Max Mullen]

I totally understand that. And I started off skeptical and hesitant as well. But I started to build a little bit of trust with, particularly with ChatGPT. And I'll give you, you know, a personal use case. I got a bunch of labs back from my doctor and there's lots of numbers in different ranges and different units that they measure things in. And I wanted it interpreted. And so I uploaded it to ChatGPT. This was a moment of trust. I said, well, here we go, it's now going to know my blood work. And I asked it to just give me advice as though it was a medical professional and it was able to kind of clearly break things down. And it didn't obviously prescribe me any medications or tell me me I was healthy or not healthy, but it gave me the questions that I should ask my doctor. And so then it made the, you know, phone call I had with my doctor much more productive so that we were sort of both looking at the same, at the same sort of hypothesis of what was going on.

[Molly Graham]

You know what, pause there for a second. Let's just list like, if you, if somebody was like hesitant or reluctant, what are like the three places you would be like, Start by trying this, like, like you said the six week rule. So it's like you kind of have to pick one or two places to start. What are like a couple of the places that you like commonly recommend people starting? Probably not your health data.

[Max Mullen]

I think you could start with something really simple like here's an email that I wrote. How could I have stated this in a clearer way? Or here's a performance review that I just got. What are three things I could do tomorrow to become a better employee and get a better performance rating next time? And then I would even throw in one more entertaining one, which is, it's really fun to use AI with your kids. So I would always start by saying, I'm with my 8 year old son, he has a science question and then I'll let him ask the question and then we're going to get an answer that's appropriate for an 8 year old. And then if we turn around and say, okay, now I want you to give me the adult answer, we'll go ahead and do that. So it's very flexible, very personalized, and you just have to ask it for what you want and it'll generally be able to do it.

[Molly Graham]

So he talks to the robots sometimes

[Max Mullen]

when we let him, you know, and we haven't even gotten into the idea of vibe coding, Molly. But this idea that you can talk to a computer and it can build you a whole app customized for you. And so my 8 year old, who again can't spell, but basically just has an iPad, he can, using the dictation feature on the iPad, he can dictate what he wants his website to look like. And then an AI tool built him an entire website. And I essentially just sat there and showed him how to push the publish button. And now he has a website.

[Molly Graham]

He has a website. What's his website about?

[Max Mullen]

He's built a website where he has a couple of videos that he's made, which we put out there. And then he made a couple of different games, like you can play tic tac toe against him. And we realized the tic tac toe game was too easy. And so my son told the AI to change it to let you win the first game, but to beat you every game after that.

[Molly Graham]

You know what's so funny? My exam in college for my CS course that I did really bad at was to make a tic tac toe game. This is like possibly a great example because of your point about the accessibility of expertise.

Right.

I had to take a whole CS course in college, six months or whatever, and I was still bad at making a tic tac toe game. But vibe coding, what? What the hell is Vive coding, Max?

[Max Mullen]

Well, Vive coding is this interesting concept that has really started to get a lot of attention in the last year or so. When you're computer programming, you're writing code and you're running code and you're making sure that it works and you're pretty thoughtfully executing a plan. And Vive coding is sort of this idea that the computer is sort of coding and you're just approving things. You're just approving things that it's doing. And then at a certain point you're pushing the code onto a server and running it and making sure it works and sort of like a little bit lazy. But the power of it is that somebody that isn't professionally trained in engineering can create an application very, very quickly. And we're starting to get to the point where the models that do coding for you don't make a lot of mistakes and they also work very, very quickly. So in like five minutes, literally in five or 10 minutes, you could make a website, you could make a game, you could make an application that you might use at work to solve some problem that your company doesn't have a tool for yet. You can make very powerful things. And you really don't have to know how to code, do you?

[Molly Graham]

Really not?

Because I feel like you just used a lot of words like push server and pushing code. Can I literally do this and make something good just using words?

[Max Mullen]

You. You really can. My kid doesn't know how to spell and has a really great website that has a very entertaining series of games on it, including Tic Tac Toe and it took 20 minutes.

[Molly Graham]

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There's sort of a feeling of all this hype around AI and all this and I think employers are really pushing people to like send your Saturday learning Claude code or Claude cowork or whatever the newest, you know, model is that came out and that can feel just honestly exhausting. But like, part of what I hear you saying is that might be worth it.

[Max Mullen]

I think a great company should be having you do this on your Monday and training you and giving you the tools. That's certainly our position at Instacart. We want people to be AI native and really have a lot of leverage through giving them great access to tools and then also encouraging them to use those tools and giving them great training. But yeah, I mean, if you really want to go deep and you want to spend personal time on it, I think that's fine. But again, you don't need to spend that much time to become pretty much an expert user of these, of these AI tools. You really have to only think of a problem you want solved and just really be able to articulate all the parameters of what a good solution would look like. I want you to book me a trip to Japan that's eight days long. I want arrive in Tokyo and I want to leave through Osaka. I want to take the bullet train to get from here to there. And every day I want you to plan one fun activity that an 8 and a 5 year old would enjoy and then recommend me a bunch of restaurants. And that's a task that AI now can do 99% of.

[Molly Graham]

So I'm curious, there's sort of this narrative out in the world, like AI is going to change everything. Where is that statement overreacting and where is it underreacting? Like what do you think people are being overly dramatic about? And what do you think they're being sort of like not dramatic enough about?

[Max Mullen]

I think it can simultaneously be true that the technology of AI is going to advance at a really rapid rate, like maybe exponentially advance. We might look back at this conversation at the end of this year and say, wow, we had no idea that it could do these other hundred things. And I think that may happen. And at the same time, the rate at which people change their own behavior or companies change their processes or their org charts could be slow, could be lagging. And I think there's a consensus view these days that like just the technology we already have from AI could permeate through companies and through people's workflows for like another couple years. Right. We have plenty of capabilities in front of us to use. We're just not using them. We're not leveraging them fast enough because behavior change is hard.

[Molly Graham]

Yeah.

[Max Mullen]

So I think the technology will continue to, to develop really rapidly, but people may take, take a little bit of extra time to adapt.

[Molly Graham]

Yeah. I think there's reluctance. I think there's also fear. You know, there's a lot of like, people are like, I hear robots are going to be able to do everything for me and I hear you replacing your travel agent with a robot. What would you say to people that just actually have a lot of fear about and like, like are trying to think about how do I add value in a world where like robots and automation seem to be the, the main thing that doesn't sound very human. What would you say to people?

[Max Mullen]

I think there will be a role for, for human taste in everything that we do with AI. I think it's not yet at the point where it can kind of put the final touch on a piece of writing, where it can kind of generate an image and have that be perfect. Right. There's still this, this role for humans to curate to first of all think of ideas to build in the first place and then to curate the output of an AI assistant and then to kind of do that last 5% of work manually. I still have not gotten my AI tools to fully write something that I don't have to edit at all. I'm still sitting there and editing it for the last hour.

[Molly Graham]

Same. I totally agree with you on that.

Last mile. Still being human, is that. What else. I mean, what else to you, that someone that's. I mean, you.

You built a company, Instacart, that created a lot of jobs. You created a whole. You were part of creating a whole economy. Like, now we're talking about a world where it feels. I think a lot of people are

afraid their jobs are going to go away.

[Max Mullen]

I think that the thing to do in that situation, when a piece of technology is difficult to understand and difficult to predict where it's going to go, is to learn a lot about it. That's what I always advocate people to do, is to spend time with it and try to understand it. I think a couple things happen then, first of all, you become more valuable in your job because you're the one that can help answer the questions of how are we going to wield this new technology? And then secondly, you start to get to know its flaws and you realize this isn't superhuman. Right? It makes mistakes. It really requires human oversight. And I think that's the way it's going to be for some time. And you really have to think about different tasks as well. Right. There's things we do in our jobs that are mundane and repetitive, and we want to automate those things, whether that's using a spreadsheet instead of a calculator or. Or whether that's using an AI agent instead of a spreadsheet. You don't want to do that boring work, right? You want to do the strategic work, the human work, the thinking work, and you kind of want to outsource the other work. And so I think both can be true. We can embrace AI. It can help us a lot. It can give us lots of leverage. And you could still imagine a company having tons and tons of productive employees that are now even more productive as a result of embracing this technology. So I don't subscribe to this idea that AI is just going to ruin every job. I don't think that's going to happen.

[Molly Graham]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Max, last question. I'm curious, and this may date us or whatever, but what do you think is never going to change?

[Max Mullen]

I think that there's some. There's some things we love to consume from other humans because they're human. Like, I want to buy pottery that's handmade, and I want to meet the person who made it. I want to understand the story behind an artist and why they painted a painting. These are just not things that even though robots can do them better or faster or cheaper, they're just not things I want to be done by robots. And so I think art and certain crafts, carpentry, these are things that are bespoke and human in their nature. That's one category of things that I don't think will change very much. And then I think there's other things where you really just want a human involved. I want to be coached by a human. I want to be coached by an empathetic person that understands me, not really by an AI. I want a personal trainer that's able to look at my forum and spot me on heavier weights and really understand me and meet me and hold me accountable. AI and robots are just not really going to do that anytime soon. So I think there's a bunch of interesting ways where being human is actually more valuable than being faster or better, being computerized.

[Molly Graham]

I love it. Max, thank you so much for this. I learned a ton today, as I always do when I talk to you.

[Max Mullen]

Thanks for having me, Molly.

[Molly Graham]

Okay. That was such a fun conversation with Max. I'm glad you got to meet him. And I thought there were a few really great takeaways from that. And, you know, I do just want to say again, like, all this talk around AI can be tiring. But I think, you know, part of what I heard Max say is, number one, this technology is getting better so fast. It is important to keep giving it a try. So his six week rule of just like every six weeks, it's like you're playing with a different product. Like, it's like a. Almost like they launched a new, a whole new thing to play with. I think if you treat it as if it is changing that fast, it means that if you tried it and it failed at that, it's worth trying again. And I mean, the most powerful point that he made, I think, is that this expertise is just not that far off that the. The thing that differentiates the people that are experts at AI from the people that are new and beginners is actually just the playing around. The people that are willing to give, you know, these tools multiple chances that are playing with it every six weeks, that are treating it as a relationship, as a conversation around, what can you do for me today? What can you do for me this month that you couldn't do last month? And that idea of like, you could be an expert if you just made some time to play around with it is really cool. I've never actually heard anyone say it

quite that way before.

And it really does actually resonate with my own experience. Like, I was such a skeptic for so long. I think I was so burnt out from previous hype cycles. But it pretty quickly, once I found a use case that I could get, like, that just clicked for me. Then I found the next use case and the next use case because so it kind of like became easier to imagine what it could do for me. But also I found myself teaching other people who were sort of more stuck in the why would I do this? So anyway, I loved, I really loved that point that, like, actually becoming an expert is a few hours away or a few weeks away from you, just playing around, you know. And the last thing I'll just say that I really took away from this conversation is, you know, I think a lot of folks, friends of mine, relatives of mine, find this whole thing overwhelming and find it exhausting and are sort of like, why? And is that really worth my time? And I heard Max say, for sure it's worth your time. Like, I also heard him say, though, I mean, sure, you can spend your Saturday on it, but actually it's worth your Monday. Do you know what I mean? Like, this is a critical part of our jobs. Whether your employer is pushing it on you or not, it actually should be worth hours of your week, not your weekend. This isn't a hobby. This is a part of, like, our lives. And that it can be a really invaluable companion, you know, that it can unlock things for you that previously were inaccessible. And that's. That's really cool. That's exciting to imagine that we can create things that we previously couldn't have done. And to imagine all that creativity out in the world that maybe we'll get to see and experience, that's exciting to me. I know it's also scary and hard, but there's exciting things. Every. Everything has two sides, right? It has the scary and hard side, but it also has the possibilities. Work Life is a production of Ted and Pushkin Industries.

This episode was produced by Isaac Carter and Leah Rose. Mixing by Hansdale she ted's executive producer is Daniela Ballarezzo. Constanza Gallardo is the executive producer for Pushkin. Special thanks to Roxanne. Hi Lasch, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tansika Sungmanivong and Ashley Murphy. If you like the show and want more, come join the discussion on my substack lessons.

I'm Molly Graham. Thanks for listening.

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[Katie Milkman]

This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Hosted by Katie Milkman, an award winning behavioral scientist and author of best selling book how to Change, Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to Choiceology at schwab. Com Podcast or wherever you listen.