YouSaid · the spoken record

Tony Fadell

lines on the record: 115
first: 2026-06-07
most recent: 2026-06-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Rebuild and apply it. I think that's the most thing is read build, read other things like that, and really hone your craft, make better products, make a better world because the world only gets better by the things we make and what we bring. And so that, to me, that's the most important way to help me is by making other cool products like Flighty or other things that are like, I love this thing. So make great stuff, people, and don't think the AI is well. You know, use them for the tools that they can help with, but don't have cognitive surrender. Don't allow your machine. We can use the machines, but don't cognitively surrender and make better stuff. Make better stuff than myself or any of the teams that we back can make because we do have better tools now. So please do.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great. Well, let's see. Well, thanks again. This was a fun interview. I really enjoyed it. I think if you want to interact with us, we're at buildc.com. So build collective, but we're buildc.com. You can go and see the companies we invest in and you can find ways to contact us there. And how can viewers help me or help us? I think learn about the companies. See if you can model whatever you're doing in some of the learn from insights. You know, there's a lot of websites that we help to create. A lot of the marketing we created for Deep Tech through those investments we made so you can see some well done marketing. I hope you like our website for build seed to show you how what we think is a really great website that doesn't sell things necessarily. You know what I mean? Point and click and purchase. But I.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can put in junk food, or you can put in good food. And even if you put in good food, you could go to the good food every five seconds, right? You have a refrigerator in your kitchen. You can put good food or bad food. You could open it all the time and keep consuming. We need to learn habits. We need to teach habits. We need to put in regulations. We need information. We need tools to help us monitor and manage that stuff. And they need to be supplied. And just like we have rules around who can buy something when they're 21 or under 21, we need all those kinds of things. And it needs to happen because why? Sure, you could have a short-term game and have customers, but if you make your customers unhealthy, Not going to have customers”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stimulated in a way that consume more, consume more of physical food, right? And now the same thing's happening in digital food, but we have digital food that doesn't have the nutrition labels, doesn't have the warnings, doesn't have the regulation that it needs to have just like we do with our physical food. Because, oh, we can't, you can't let innovation, you know, whatever, you know, be slowed down. I think there's, I'm not saying, again, being a nanny and all that other stuff, but we got to have some balance. And it's just swung too far. And I still think that the platform companies like Google and Apple could be doing a lot more around digital consumption tools and information to help people make better decisions for themselves, for their families and what have you because, you know, you could go to the refrigerator, iPhone's just a refrigerator.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the first thing is the iPhone wasn't set out to be that. There's unintended consequences and the unintended consequence was social media happened. And social media, Apple's not a social media company, right? But it does distribute the apps or make available those apps, right? And so the way I think about it is, you know, we have lots of junk food and we have an obese nation or obese world because of all the junk food and it takes us to regulate our consumption to do that and get healthy tools. And there's nutritional elements.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Devolve, you know, social interaction to the point where I'm going to have a perfect interaction with this thing because the world is so messy. It's like we're losing humanity with that and we're just for gain. So I wish that the other product designers out there really take it to heart. Not saying you got to be Lily White and being in a church every weekend and Bible banging. I'm not saying that out. I'm not MAGA. I'm not any of that stuff. Just saying, hey, think about it.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you start normalizing those things and you start telling other generations that's a value and you start, and I understand that everyone has their own what's right and what's wrong and here I am the old guy, you know, again, I think we can go a little too far. I'm for individual rights and for everyone to be a thing. But when major companies are doing this in the guise of certain kinds of behaviors, they're trying to achieve. You know, when we're selling, we're turning Personal connection into a product with AI chatbots and making them really.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course Steve was like. What is that the kind of world you want your kids to grow up in? And Apple is related with that, and Apple's about is that what we want to do? And it was very clear, it was shut down. And we need leaders like that. We need leaders who are very clear as opposed to, I'm going to make a huge service for everyone. And they're all sex chat bots for everyone. I just think, you know.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up, you know, I'm an individual and I want what I want. You really need to start thinking systemically about how the benefit that you're bringing to society as a whole, not just to the business that you're in and trying to bring in whatever revenue you're trying to do. Because at the end of the day, users will feel that. And then I think and will reward that as we see with Apple, with privacy, right? And people say, oh, they're behind because they're so private and there's this. But it's a double-edged sword. You know, I remember when we had a very pointed discussion when the iTunes music store and when it was turning into video was being specified and when we were thinking about it. And everyone's like, oh, this is going to be great. We're going to do movies. We're going to do TV shows. That's going to all be great. We're going to make a lot of money with this in the studios. Everybody's behind it. And then somebody goes, yeah, we should have porn.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You really need to be well grounded and have real principles when you're designing something and don't let those things go astray. Just like you wouldn't go astray with a bad user interface or something like that. Make sure you're not trying to addict your users. And if anybody is, there's always other jobs and there's always other better companies. And don't chase the money for tearing apart what it is, the fabric of this society that we built. Obviously, there's going to be innovation and there's going to be change. But when you're really doing it and you can see that you're doing it and you're like trying to get people hooked or you're like, oh, I get more dopamine or what have you. That's when, you know, you have to start really looking at things. And a lot of times people are young and they think, oh, that's great. That's what I want. But when you start to have kids and you start to have families and you start to see the, and you're not just about you, you're not trying to just get out of your family when you were growing.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should really just talk about. Ethics and morals and your Point of view on that As a product manager, as a product designer, you need to really consider these things. I understand we have lots of big questions about AI and is it going to be a disaster for the next generation and for societies and all that stuff? But I think that”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Residence at MIT. So I just finished up my first year there with the MIT Media Lab and architecture and design and help to give lectures and work with students, amazing, amazing, smart students with the great technology, but help them with the customer journey. Like try to make sure that they see this stuff early on in their career, not after 10 years and then they finally understand, oh, wait a second, what am I really building? Who is it for? Not just what is am I building, but why am I building it and for who? And so trying to get that into some of the later undergraduate and graduate students so we can watch them change the world more quickly.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have a really good idea, but they don't necessarily know how to form the product around it or form the marketing around the product they're building or help the marketing to inform the product and vice versa. And so we try to encapsulate that and really bring that to bear so they don't hit it on the fourth version. They try to get very close to the first or second version so they can get on that three version cycle to get to a great company. And so that's what we do. So we get to have a lot of fun. We get to play in all these different spaces, health, medicine, drugs, robotics, you know, chips, these kinds of things. So that's just what's wonderful to us. And we get to just be kids in the candy store and work with all these incredible smart entrepreneurs and everything. So that's one thing I do. The other thing I do is I'm a designer.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so at build, what we do is we invest in those technology companies that can be that seed that can unseat things. And maybe they go the distance or maybe they are the key enabling tech that allows another startup to go to the”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the first thing to know is that we invest in deep technology. So that could be hardware, it could be software, software plus hardware, it could be chemical, it could be all kinds of different stuff. But remember, we talked earlier about what's the pain? And is there new technology that comes out to solve that pain in a new way? And so what we do is I've learned that I invest in the deep technologies that are going to unseat the incumbents because it's going to change the market or the product in such a dramatic way that customers will choose this. So we're not just feature competing on features or better marketing or whatever. We're fundamentally a different product. Now it might take longer to get the market to shift to it, but it's fundamentally different. Just like I brought up Grock and Cerebras and these kinds of things. It's fundamentally different.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same thing happened to General Magic, right? General Magic iPhone 2 early, and then I just kept added and added, then doing the iPhone. So it's just you stick with it. Like there's too many people who chase their tail and chase whatever the hottest thing is. When it's already hot, it's already too late to be in it.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Already nine digits or 10 digits, and you think you're going to get a small portfolio that's got like, uh-uh, that's not the kind of game I want to play. So I'm glad that we have well positioned in all these companies that have real good product market fit that came in the right valuations that we can really help and make big change and deliver painkillers. And we'll let everybody else over there play. So that's what's exciting to me.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're almost all Atoms plus software in some way. And so it's just nice to be sitting here and knowing that we made these bets a long time ago and we're doing it. Now we're not necessarily, you know, I was early on in Grock that, you know, right? Because I was like, and it was cheap then. And it was like, yeah, that's the right way to go. And my friends were in cerebrus and I got into that. And then, you know, it's like, but these are long-term plays and they're finally coming to fruition. But we did invest it not when it was hyped and it's, you know, we were doing it back when unicorn's valuations were billions of dollars. Today, if you don't have a $5 billion round raised, you're not anything. It's like, okay, well, that doesn't work from a venture perspective, like with those kinds of, you never get their venture returns. You can't invest in things when devaluations are all.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scoped correctly with this solving real problems every day as opposed to pipe dream AGI, you know, okay, you can go solve that. I'm going to go and build all these businesses that really matter right now. And we're finally getting traction because people are like, a lot of AI and we're robotics and now all of a sudden we're in vogue and we've been here really working on our product market fit, working on our marketing, working on version 3.0 of the device and everything. And people are adopting them. And that's what's wonderful to see. So I'm excited by all that. We have another one like AI infusion, you know, and doing that or finally doing tons of software with chemical reactions and now we have an agricultural clean agricultural fuel and oils company that is cleaning up farms all around Central America. So like”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like most textiles, weaving errors and color errors and defects and things like that. And so people still make all of these products, but then they have to incinerate them because they're not perfect at the end because they don't catch the quality problems early enough in the product. And we're doing AI plus cameras to spot all this stuff. And again, another thing. And we're doing this. We've been doing AI and drug drug design now for 10 years at Orianis, and that's taking off. And it's like, so I'm really interested in not just these frontier models and this whole thing is really good AI that you can trust.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been doing this AI plus hardware thing now, not just at Nest, but in many of the startup companies that we funded at Build. And so company like Simbi Robotics, it's Simbi Robotics. We were doing robotics way back now as not a humanoid, but it does inventory of retail stores. And we've been at it, I don't know, eight years now, seven years. And now it's just taking off, right? And it does have AI and it has a robotic platform. And it's like, and it really solves real pain points for the retailers of inventory. And the workers hate doing inventory, counting everything on every shelf and all that stuff. So it really works. And like, I love seeing that stuff. You know, we're doing the same thing at Gray Parrot with AI and recycling. Like it's literally figuring out what things should go in this recycling bin versus that and doing it really fast with cameras and all this stuff. It's like, and we've been at that for a few years. And we have AI plus textiles.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just very interesting. Everything old is new again. And, you know, I've been in this game 35, 40 years. You just see it. You're like, okay, I was there at 99 when the bottom fell out and, you know, AI is different, but there's a lot of similarities. And, you know, we're going to have the Gen 1 companies, the Gen 2 companies. And, you know, when people really understand product instead of selling technology platforms that people have to figure out for themselves. So, you know, it's fun to watch. It's a game.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they bring new features that you could have never had if you just did software only because you need, especially, let's say in robotics, I mean, you need new sensors and you knew this and knew that, what have you, right? Look at Waymo, you know, it's like it's an electric car, you know, electric car with tons of sensors and everything. It's a hardware platform. Maybe it doesn't look as streamlined as maybe a smartphone, but it's an incredible hardware platform with an incredible software platform. And that is something that we're going to be able to innovate on. And it'll become a platform for something else, I'm sure, delivery or this or whatever else.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're a SaaS company or if you're a software only company, your software companies worthless because anyone can vibe code it into the thing. And then they're like, we're only funding companies that have atoms in their business plan with software. I'm like, duh. Like, where have you guys been? So it's just funny to watch these cycles go and happen. And it's like, okay, all right, you guys can go chase your tails. I'm going to just keep.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely, like you got to have the mobile network and the mobile network software for the mobile network to work. You had to have the MP3 player and the MP3 format bits to make that work. We're seeing with AI, we got to have AI plus all the data centers and edge compute to make that work. And then over time, the hardware becomes less, it becomes more mundane like, okay, it doesn't change as much. all the software starts to then you know so i've always just been continually going through the things that i love to do and doing the things that the the full stack level because that's where i know is innovation that's where we had to do it nest we had innovated the software level the hardware level the network level to get the first thermostat out then the nest protect and all that stuff if we look now going on people are like”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I was building hardware when it wasn't in vogue in 1995 and 96. Everyone's like, Tony, and this was in the valley. Tony, you're crazy. It's all about the internet. We don't need any hardware. And then iPod comes like, and I was pitching new businesses in 99 and 2000. They're like, well, that's the stupidest idea ever. Then the iPod comes out. Tony, you want to leave Apple and start that business you wanted to do with hardware? You know, and then it was like, okay. And then it was all software mobile stuff again. Like, okay, we don't need anything, but we can't get to the next level of software if we don't make the next level of hardware. And it has to, the revolution has to happen.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and like I said, you fold it up, you put it in your thing, and it rolls out, or whatever else. But I still think there's going to be that thing. If you look at her, if you remember the movie Her, they had glass”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you're like, oh, it's like the hologram projections of Star Wars or something. You're like, yeah, that's cool, but you still need a screen or something to project on. So it is a screen at the end of the day. You kind of still project it onto something.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How are you going to look at a map if you want to look at a map? You're going to listen, put on the voice stuff in your car and never look at the map on your car and say, oh, turn left in 200 feet. Turn left in 100 feet. You're like, shut up. I can't hear you anymore. Like, I just want to glance over. So I don't buy it. Like unless you have a jack in your brain or into your eye or some other way it's getting into your cortex.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, people are like, yeah, I'm going to try ChatGPT or whatever. It's $20 a month or $200 a month. That is unsustainable if you think consumers are going to pay that. There's just no way unless it's incredible. But they're not going to, you know what I mean? Like they tried it and now they're getting kind of their seri. A lot of them are getting their Siri 1.0 with this. Like I paid for it, but it's really not all that yet. And it's like full self-driving. I pay for full self-driving. It's 15 years later. I've still waiting for full self-driving. So I think we, again, understand what we think we want, but where the technology is and the social adoption and the social trust that needs to be created around that is going to take a lot of time and it's going to take a lot of iterations to get there, especially if you're going to have to pay for it.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coding agents and everything else, you know, oh, they deleted my source code. And again, I'm not trying to be an old guy saying it's not going to work. Sure, it's going to work in certain things. I'm saying for consumers every day in the things they want. It's cheap enough so it doesn't cost him a lot.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can start to use that much more specifically and then deprecate those other things. But we've always have to have them there as a crutch. Voice because voice has never been able to deliver. So that's the long term thing. So it'll have some kind of display, but it's going to be much more voice primary and then you're going to have the other things as secondary and tertiary. In the middle now, or sometime soon, it's going to look much, much like the smartphone is because we're not going to get away from the all-app interface anytime soon. We're not going to get, you know, we're going to move some things, but we don't trust it yet. It's going to take a while till we trust it. And we are literally turning over a lot to this trusted thing, right? Because tapping and swipe, we know what that is for the most part. We know that we can trust ourselves when we're tapping and keyboarding or whatever. This other thing we don't know. And so it's going to take a lot of time. It reminds me of kind of general magic in a way for us to be able to get en masse to trust it. And we're already seeing this with.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then we have keyboard if necessary, and then we have tapping and swiping. Okay. It should go exactly the opposite. And the problem why we most of us don't go around talking to our phones and everything. And we saw this also happen with cars. There was tactile buttons. And then there was the touchscreens. And then they also added the voice in. But nobody really uses voice in the car unless it's some accessibility thing, right? Because voice was always added at the end because it was always like, well, it's sort of works. And it's a gizmo, but it's, you know, it's like Alexa was for version 1.0 or Siri was whatever. But when we actually have really good voice input with not just, understand us like whisper flow or something, because that's great. What I'm saying is the intelligence behind it with memory and everything else. So then we can start to say, and”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many things you don't need a display for, but a lot of things you still do, right? Because you might not be tapping and swiping and all this stuff. So I am of the opinion that long term, if you look at how a device is layered today, and this is many, many devices and iPhone specifically started this, which was, you know, tapping and swiping. That was the first thing you use your finger. Then after that, Keyboard. And then after that, the tertiary thing. Was a voice input. We need to flip it, we need to absolutely flip it, and we have to say, and this is what I always wanted to do at Nest, which is I want to remove displays and we need to have voice as the number one primary feature and you build around voice.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, there's the What it could look like long term. There's what it could look like soon. And so a lot of people like, okay, there's the long-term thing. And when we can trust the models and when they have memory and when they do this stuff, then we're still going to need a display because, sorry people, unless we're plugging it into our brain like a BCI brain computer or there's some laser thing going into our retina, we're going to need a display. Barring those kinds of technologies, we're going to need a display. And so the best display that we have is a smartphone-like thing, okay? Not going to be this tiny thing. We saw what happened with Humane, all that other stuff. So you're going to have some kind of, because the best way to visualize visual information is with a display, right? So we're going to have some kind of small slab. Maybe it's foldable like we see today, whatever, so that you can access it.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The emotional techniques to get there, and then dial it back and go, okay, I'm going to do that, but with truth. And that's when things start to go pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Or at least that's what I've seen. And so I always use that as another metric. And it's not just telling the story over and over. It's what story you are telling. And so I try to think of that as well. But not obviously clowny and cheesy and everything else. But it is a caricature of doing good marketing.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those ones that drag on for a half an hour, an hour at late night TV, you know, on some random every channel now, right? And they just sit there and they tell you the story from all the different directions. They give you the virus of doubt. They're like, oh, here's this cheese grater. And you know, when you have this bad cheese grater and your knuckles bleed, you know, whatever. And it's hard to clean. And they over-exaggerate everything. And they show you all the pain points of it. And then they show how wonderful, easy it is to use in this whatever they're selling. And then it's easy to buy. And then it's easy to return. And it's overly dramatic. And we all know, you know, it's like wrestling. It's all an act and whatever. It's not, you know, there's probably no real this there. But it is storytelling in a way. And not that you should do that because they overhyped the expectations, but look at the techniques that are used, the psychological techniques.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, oh, absolutely, because telling it to other people who don't, who's to see if it resonates. I remember the number of times I told the nest story before, Ness came out because I was like, this is crazy, this thermostat thing. You know, I'm like, okay, let me set up the virus of doubt, which was, do you know how much you spend on your energy bill, every year for your heating and cooling? Don't you hate your thing? Now, there's another way, there's another way to look at the storytell. And this is, I put this in the book. Oh, no, I didn't put this in the book. We all have seen infomercials.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to take a journey of why it matters to you. If you're talking about the what, you're just talking to another geek. Love geeks, no problem. I'm one of them. And we can relate on that level, but general most people who are not in the technology world, they want a story and they want something that touches them in some way.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had done it a hundred thousand times, or at least 10,000 times, right? And he knew it like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It just came off. And so I watched and I learned from that. And that's what we did for like the next learning thermostat. That's what we learned, you know, we did for each of those things. It was just that same storytelling over and over, what does it matter? Why does it matter? Why does it matter? And because too many times when we're technology led, we talk about the what. We don't talk about the why. And the why is where the storytelling is.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was honing the story of the iPhone every day. He didn't give it to marketing. He knew what that thing was and what those key features were, like we talked about and micromanage those features because he knew those were the things the world's going to take notice to. And he would refine the story and then tell other people who were unwashed by like friends who were really smart and say I'm going to give you the pitch and give you the pitch. And he would refine, refine, refine. And so when you saw him come on stage. It was just.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what they want. And so to get better at it, I've learned it because I watch my dad. He was in sales, right? So I watched how he would sell Levi's. And I would watch and he would be like, and he was an always selling to sell. Sometimes he was convincing them not to buy something because that wasn't the best product they had. Buy this one instead. And actually go to my competitor down the street because he was building a relationship and storytelling because these people loved what it was. So it sometimes is not just setting expectations and telling a story, but it's also saying, hey, maybe I'm not for you. And that's truth. That's also truth. And so like Steve always said, the best marketing just tells the truth. Now, might put nice words around it, nice creative and everything, but it's telling the truth. And so when I watched Steve prepare for, and like I said, when we did the two and a half years with the iPhone,”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And great storytelling through the product design, that's even better, right? Because it wasn't just perfuming this pig and you put some, you know, on this bad product and you say, oh, yeah, try it. And you're like, oh, and then”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's something in our nature, human nature. You know, we were told stories when we were a kid. We read the same or watched the same movies a hundred times when we were a kid. There's something about being taken on that journey that we love. And people love to be educated that way, right? Your best college professors, high school, teachers, whatever. They taught you why you should love, you know, certain math or certain physics or whatever and took you a journey or why it mattered. And then you're like, oh, now I get it. You know, you can learn all the basics of, you know, how to do something. But that doesn't really tie it into something that's meaningful. And so when you tie it to something that's human, right, that's when it becomes inaccessible for humans and it's relatable. That's when it goes. And it can be for anything. And that's when great marketing, great sales happen.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Storytelling, that's how we've passed information down or got people to commit to doing something. Stories are so who we are. We go to the movies for stories. We have books. We have all this stuff. It's just so essential to who we are because we like to be taken on a journey. We like to, you know, and hopefully when you're buying a product or licensing one or whatever it is, you're subscribing. You're taking on a journey that meets your expectations or out, you know, is better than what the expectations were set. It's outsized that. And so. Dave Chappelle, he just, when it comes to comedy and storytelling, the way he weaves it, he can weave a story for 20 minutes to get to the punchline and you're just in it, right? I just love his comedy as opposed to the punchline guys who just are extremely short ones.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you get the word of mouth, and you know things take up because there has been that level of care and craft to it. And yeah, maybe a lot of the subfunctions of Flighty could be built and whatever from. Claude Code or whatever, but the whole thing and the architecture and everything, I don't think so.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can feel it, right? And you go, oh my God. And, you know, I'm like one of the biggest proponents of, I'm like telling Flighty, flighty, because all the people in my sphere, they're all flying all the time. I'm like, can you?”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe now that flighty exists, you could You could do version two of Flighty, maybe vibe coding because you say, Look at Flighty, but the original Flighty, like that's to me, that's luxury software. It was understood how the pixels are done. So you got to remember is it version one or is it version two, three, four? Because an opinion-based thing on highly innovative, differentiated stuff, it doesn't have a model for that. There's not that stuff in there. You gotta still need the reversion one to be done. So maybe you can prototype with these things. So it just, you know, I could go on for hours, but whatever. That's just one old guy's point of view.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because at the end of the day, if you're building it for yourself, whatever, go have fun. But if you're going to build it and you want to sell it and like, you know, and you only need three key features to sell it to someone, like it's going to have to be boiled down. It's going to have to be figured out because you're still selling it to a human who needs to understand it. Now, do you think you could vibe Code Flighty?”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, like it's called fast fashion. We got fast software, but software, if you're going to build a real company, can't be throwaway. Maybe it can, but I don't think it can be if you're really going to do this because you get just technical debt and you've got to start over again. So you've got to really understand how you're using these tools. And a lot of these things that these AI coders can do, agent coders can do, can make you incredible prototypes. Do more prototypes. Do more of those things to help you get that informed gut to say we're going this direction, architect that in, and then work on the subsegments below it and all the expert systems that you need in each of those domains.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source