Benedict Evans

speaker

1,906 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 4 Jun

Benedict Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · A rational conversation on where AI is actually going | Benedict Evans · 31 May 2026 podcast

I think a lot of people are just presuming that the situation today will continue or that, of course, they will.

So I think that's maybe a question that not enough people ask.

I think the question I posed towards the end of my presentation, which we talked about earlier, is like...

What's the task and what's the job?

What is just the thing that becomes a button or makes goo versus what are people actually hiring you for?

Is that kind of a useful way of thinking about this?

And clearly there are going to be some jobs where no, that is just a task and that job gets sort of measured away.

But there's a bunch where that kind of isn't the question.

The way I actually pulled that together at the end of the deck was a chart of a global recorded music revenue.

which, as you may know, is kind of a U-shaped curve, more or less.

So it's dropped by about half from 2000 to 2015 or so, and since then has come back to about 75% of the peak, adjusted for inflation.

And the way that I look at this is to say, and that's driven by streaming,

And I kind of looked at this and said, well, the first half of this chart is saying, what happens if I don't have to pay $15 to get a CD to get that track?

And the second half of the chart is saying, what happens if $15 a month gets you all the music that there is?

So it's kind of a completely different sort of question.

And you could, you know, that's the way that you could look at Uber, the way you could look at Airbnb, all these kinds of companies.

Is it to begin with you do the old thing, but more?

With every new technology, you do the old thing, but more of it on the new place.

So, you know, you put Flickr on mobile, you print out your emails, and then you make new things that are only possible with a new thing.

And then maybe you go a bit further and you kind of completely redefine the question and you make something that isn't that at all.

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