Rachitsky: A psychedelic trip gave him confidence to launch his newsletter
Lenny Rachitsky · A behind-the-scenes interview with Lenny Rachitsky on building his newsletter and podcast · Mar 12, 2026 · at 14:30
Lenny Rachitsky, creator of Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast, speaks with his wife Michelle Rial about an untold personal experience that motivated him to begin writing publicly.
0:00 / 0:41exact quote · 41.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“There was psychedelics involved on this trip, and I just remember, so we went to Joshua Tree, I just sat down on this rock on a substance of some sort and this was as I was starting the newsletter, and I just remember sitting there for probably three hours in this one spot, and I was just having this deep breathing happening, and this, like, Phrase of I have wisdom to share coming through me over and over and over. And I was just watching this crazy visualization of some kind of sitting Buddha thing. And it's just like, I have wisdom to share. And that was for three hours.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Lenny Rachitsky
Rachitsky: X is making billions of dollars and becoming really profitable
“I just saw a story that they're, like, making billions of dollars. Like, he's actually turned it around. It's actually becoming a really profitable company.”
Rachitsky: Anthropic is the fastest-growing company in history
“Anthropic being the fastest growing company of all time, just like absurd, breaking all records is a public benefits corporation should make you feel okay about doing this.”
Rachitsky: OpenClaw is the fastest-growing open-source project in history
“It's the fastest growing open source project in history. If you look at the chart, it's just like absurd, like more than Linux.”
Rachitsky: AI will soon write 100 percent of all software code
“And now it's a hundred percent of code will be soon written by AI.”
Rachitsky: Jason Lemkin replaced a 10-person sales team with 20 AI agents
“I just had Jason Lemkin on the podcast. He's very smart on sales, go to market, run Saster, and he replaced his whole sales team with agents. He had 10 salespeople. Now he has 1.2 and 20 agents.”
Natural language conversation is the new abstraction layer above code
“What's the layer that we are adding on top of code where people don't need to worry about code anymore. And at that point, it was like a year ago that we chatted, and it feels like this is the layer Is the agent conversation of what it is, what it's thinking a…”