47: Paul Scherer - A Friend That Brings Us Closer

20:36Paul Scherer:Right, right, right.

20:37Akshay Kothari:It's not a totally common experience, but I think across different boxes of the internet, whether it be Twitter or Instagram or other modern things or forums in the past or IRC or whatever, I think one of the things that is wrong is the notion that you should only use the internet with people you already know in real life. Because to your earlier point, social doesn't necessarily mean people you already know. Yes, that's true. Like, can you talk a little bit about that distinction? Like, in theory, in my view of the internet, it's almost actually that like, or at least what I always felt was so amazing about Twitter is that it wasn't about who you knew.

21:16Akshay Kothari:It wasn't just about what you were interested in. It was about getting to know people by way of what you were interested in. Yeah, I think that's true.

21:29Paul Scherer:and and really you know there there's like this like discovery aspect of like um and and i think for better and for worse right there's like i always say there's like there's on the internet there's like enthusiasts for everything right so so like if you live in this like place with a thousand people or even you know like a medium-sized city or whatever there might not be someone who's like absolutely obsessed with i don't know plants right there may be i mean it might be a more common obsession but but on the internet there there's like millions of people who are and so there's like there's definitely an aspect of like feeling like belongingness in in that because you're you have so much more reach um and find the other weirdos you can find the other weirdos you know that that that creates a very long tail right of like um and that that sort of then is like one of the reasons that um we as a group have much like because we just like we we're able to like go into to much more of these individualist pursuits because there's so much, the tail is just so much longer than it would be like a city, right?

22:37Paul Scherer:Which makes -

22:37Akshay Kothari:That's not intuitively antisocial to me. Like in theory, it should lead to the long tail of a million, like let a million communities bloom of weird niches.

22:45Paul Scherer:Totally. I think these aren't like mutually exclusive, but the problem is like, you're the things that you consume shift towards a more at least locally isolating view right because your twitter feed is like filled with people that are obsessed with plants right but they might not at all be in your local like actual like like like in person like like proximity yeah and but so and so all the people you interact with in person on a day-to-day like have their own like isolated feed of these types with people uh and then you have like much less of like a sort of bridging experience where you could like go to your office and there'd be like this thing that just like everyone knows about

23:32Akshay Kothari:right like the global village the um the um water cooler talking about reality tv or yeah exactly

23:39Paul Scherer:like it's like moon landing moon landing or you know even just like even just like headlines or something or like memes the most like mainstream seeming you know meme or like headline or whatever is actually not that mainstream anymore, right? Where you'd be like, oh, wow, SNL adopted this thing. Everyone must know about this. And you go to your office, you're like, oh, wow, did you see this thing? And people are like, what are you talking about? And that's the problem, right?

24:02Akshay Kothari:You can do it in San Francisco a little bit with Twitter because there is, but do you think personalization of everything is just fundamentally inevitable? Really, that's what this is about, right? It's like what technology has gotten really, really good at regarding our attention is just tuning it to being exactly Paul-shaped. And that is causing this context collapse that you're pointing at.

24:26Paul Scherer:Yes. I don't know if anything is inevitable like that. I think it's definitely, there's good reasons for it. And it's not completely bad, right? There's great things about stuff being personalized to you. I ultimately do think that people are craving social, right? It's like you don't want, in some cases you do, but in many cases you actually don't want the take or recommendation or whatever that's personalized just for you. You also don't want the monocultural average take of the world. You want the take from the people that you care about. Right. Right.

25:12Akshay Kothari:I want to talk a little bit about what you are making, but before we quite get there. you have this view that like much of what we were just discussing um there's all these tailwinds there's we are more isolated people are more alone Derek Thompson's gone crazy on this people aren't having kids all this stuff um and it seems like your instinct is that this is as many people believe this is driven by technology um you have used some variation of the phrasing the world needs this um in terms of what you're doing um and there are two maybe cuts on what interesting views or unique views you have um i think they are one being thinking about friendship in a slightly new way and then the other is this idea that ai as it currently stands is pretty antisocial and i think those two things go together maybe one one strange cut on this is that opens the door is like, we all talk about AI as like crypto or VR or whatever.

26:15Akshay Kothari:The one person I've noticed who doesn't talk about it like that is Kevin Kelly. Kevin, former editor of Wired Magazine, a bunch of other things. Kevin talks about AIs, which is a subtle but important difference. And it does point at maybe this future of a world where there are many of us are talking to AIs of some kind. and it seems like your core view is that based on how everything is going um we are going to be talking to like ais alone in our rooms first of all what would you say to the people who are still like skeptical of the notion of you seem pretty convinced that we're all going to be talking to ais or ai or whatever or a lot of

26:58Paul Scherer:the people in our direct um proximity are already talking to ai all day like like every single one of our engineers maybe they would say i'm using claude yes but like we are we are already communicating with it and like and like samuel sometimes swears at it and just like what what are you doing like it's just like you know it's like why we can make the same one of your first point there's like there's a bit of a difference in the interaction paradigm from like you know software in terms of like i always like i always ask people whether or not they say thank you to like do you are you like someone who says thank you i don't always say thank you i'd say thank you

27:37Akshay Kothari:probably less than i used to but i try to every once in a while yeah just to make sure we're on the on the good books you know when they do a really when it does a really good job yeah it

27:46Paul Scherer:inevitably takes over the extra mile we can just like we'll be on the good you say thank I sometimes do. I try to. But that's like a ridiculous thing, right? Who's like, were you ever like Google something and you're like, oh, thank you. So I think that's true. And I think the other thing that's true is that fundamentally, it's interesting to think about this in the context, for example, of a lot of education software or products, because previously it was really, really difficult to build, for example products for like you know the the basic like uh uk through like eight basically like young young young children just as much as it was really hard to build for like elderly people and it's it's interesting because the because when you build software um with like a you know graphical user interface and you just you have to like learn a new interaction paradigm you can make them like skew more fake and it's cue more in like some way right like make it like feel really comfortable and like you know make it like okay this looks like you know your your rolodex look like and you know in reality and like so it's like a contact thing but at the end of the day there's like there's like a barrier of like that you have to kind of overcome of like okay this is like if i give like my grandma the phone she's like kind of scared because it's like this thing and it's like it's like it doesn't feel real and and i think what's really interesting is that the AIs speak human language.

29:14Paul Scherer:And so the interaction paradigm is the exact same that we all have been learning ever since we were born in interacting with other people. You can build a trust in that it can understand your intent and it can relate. And I think that really changes a lot of things where it's like, will my grandpa ever fully adopt internet technologies? I don't know. But I actually think it's not unlikely that he'll eventually adopt a lot of AI products because it might be embedded in his world in such a way where he doesn't actually have to reflect that much on whether or not it's that or that. It's more human shaped.

29:58Akshay Kothari:It's really human shaped. It's almost necessary that we anthropomorphize it. maybe not necessary but it's uh inevitable almost inevitable that we anthropomorphize it

30:09Paul Scherer:we already kind of anthropomorphize it because we talk languages with with chat gbt and and um you know and he has like a voice you try to be like you know the like there's like all of these things are very niche and they're like not you know it's not there's a there's a small minority that is currently feeling like that but like the like for gbt4o thing of like how how many people

30:31Akshay Kothari:got like like identity i don't know that that's a small minority but it's like i think it's like

30:36Paul Scherer:largely a small minority yes compared like there's this like stats which a lot of people are doing it but yes yeah there's a stat which i'm i'm sure you've seen of like you know all these like dots of like you know millions of people represent millions of people and there's like all these gray dots and then there's like a few green dots which is like people that use the eye for free and it's like two percent of the world or something like i don't know we are very very early in this and i think it's easy to forget that when you are like around people who are like we are in this like industry and in this in this in this you know very specific place where everyone is like somehow billions of dollars deep into really believing that this is like everything today and i i think it's probably not but it's gonna be so much more in like 10 years from now but stuff just takes time usually to like become you know meaningful i I always just like have this thing where people just right now on Twitter, you know, there's like, there's like, there's like a different take on Twitter, like trending, you know, every, every couple of weeks.

31:38Paul Scherer:And right now it's like, it seems to be like product is like dead, right. It's like been automated away. It's like, right.

31:43Akshay Kothari:Anthropics got this.

31:44Paul Scherer:Right. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, there's, you know, it's commoditized to build great products yet. I've actually like, tell me all the great products that have come out since strategy Bt dropped. I don't, I don't know that there's a single new product in my life other than the LLM itself and then for enterprises like cloud code but other than that these two things there's not a single product that has come out that has changed you know my life or my mom's life right and and i i think that's like it's still just as hard to innovate on product it might be easier to build once you have a great idea or all of these things are somewhat true you can build a lot of stuff much faster but it's still just as hard to build a great product and that's why it takes time because like figuring out what it looks like to build a great product is like you know still really hard and um i i i don't know i think it's just sort of these consumer builders you know that that are going to build the the you know five to ten products that are going to like maybe come out of this and that yeah real people are going to like use in you know for the product by the way not necessarily because it's an ai or not an ai or because it's like this or that model but because it's a great experience i think they're like they're just like being started right now

32:55Akshay Kothari:people are talking to ai friends um whether it's the 4-0 thing my boyfriend is ai it's replica and again to the earlier point like most people probably see that as strange or bad or evil or whatever um your cut on it is that it's critically it's anti-social like most of these products actually incentivize you to spend more and more time talking to along to the eye which

33:16Paul Scherer:Which is, by the way, it's like, that's not like, like Zach went on a podcast and he was like, it was like a year ago or something. And he literally said, humans have a capacity for five friends, five close friends, but the average American only has two. We're going to build the other three. He literally said that, right? That's what he wants to do. His best case is for you to spend your Friday night talking to this thing. right? That's what he likes or what his organization that he's running is like trying to create another world.

33:55Akshay Kothari:You are, I think there is some question of what you are actually making. And I want to litigate that a little bit today, acknowledging that you're not ready to share totally everything. You have said explicitly you're building a mutual friend. Yeah. But you are building an AI friend in some dimension. I want to talk about it. But What are you trying to do?

34:17Paul Scherer:I think we are trying for you to spend your Friday night with other people, right? And we're trying for you to... I want people to feel like they could belong. Okay. Let's go one click deeper.

34:34Akshay Kothari:What are you making?

34:36Paul Scherer:We're building a mutual friend that is like where I think a lot of what we're thinking about and what we're creating, it starts actually counterintuitively not with the friend part, but the mutual part, right? Which is the network, which is, it's actually, you know, we have like, right now we're like four engineers and like three of them are working on the network piece. Yes. Right? Which is partially because it's very hard, the friend piece is like something that is very hard to split up. And there's like, but it's also because it's really, really, really important that at the core of everything we do, the like the the network it like sits the network it's like everything like we have this like product principle is like shared from day zero it's like every time we build something we build it in a way where it's where it's sort of built globally where it like it is built on top of the network where it's shared between all of the people that you know or that like are sort of users and and i think that's like you know a really big difference and then obviously there is like the you know the friend piece of of the mutual friend which is you know i just think that you know in in lots of ways the most intuitive and natural way of interacting with this like incredibly powerful network that we're building is like an extra person and like someone who we just all know in common because that there's again you know as we previously said there's a lot of like interaction paradigms and norms already established of like how that would look like.

36:11Paul Scherer:And like, you know, if I share something with you and you tell to someone else, it's like these, like there's like norms that are established that, um, are, you know, either, you know, codified or even just implicitly clear to most human beings. And it goes back to the point you're making about your dad, you know, how to interact

36:29Akshay Kothari:with a person. Exactly. On some level. Exactly. Exactly. As a UI metaphor. Exactly.

36:33Paul Scherer:No, you do. Like, it's like, you don't really have to learn it. and i i think it's actually kind of interesting because a lot of people are still you know we we went out we you know we did this like announcement and we're like we're building a mutual friend and then everyone's like well what are you doing and i was like we're building a mutual friend people i think still have like a hard time accepting maybe the which is totally fair because they haven't seen it and i think it's like in a lot of ways it's like um it's like a waymo product where everyone i've ever told about waymo that isn't maybe from san francisco if i tell my mom about waymo she's really scared he's like this is the most crazy thing ever like you know and then you're just like you're like force her to take away more and it's like i don't want to do this like 10 seconds to the ride it's like it's the most normal thing in the world right it's like of course it's like a spiritual experience of some level if you like understand it's like that's kind of a crazy you know feat of achievement we have like self-driving cars and it's like no one it's like i find it's crazy that people don't talk about it because like i grew up in like this world where self-driving cars were like this like crazy thing that maybe be one day that wouldn't be like insane and so hard and and now we just have self-driving cars

37:38Akshay Kothari:and by the way five minutes 30 seconds is your first waymo ride you're like looking at your phone

37:43Paul Scherer:you forget that yeah exactly it's but that's the thing right it's like it's so it's just makes sense and i think in a lot of ways it's like maybe that's the struggle that people have is they haven't interacted with it yet and i think there's like something that like kind of like clicks for a lot of people once they first interact with it of like oh no you're actually it is just a mutual friend it's just it's just like everything it's just like because people like i think if you go to our website and you you open like this letter that we wrote and you just take it very literal

38:14Akshay Kothari:i think it's just like you're just like you are being quite literal yeah it's funny um samuel on your team here i spoke to him and he was he said in some sense this is actually a fairly small step or at least a medium step um technology wise but it's a very big step idea wise and i think that maybe is getting at part of this. I think it's also worth establishing one of the things you said to me early on is like, what would happen if a person could be friends with a million people? Yeah. Which obviously isn't possible for a human being. I also think one of the things that was interesting to me is that most of the AI products we have built are trying to do human work better or faster or cheaper.

38:56Akshay Kothari:Yeah. You are explicitly building something that a person, a human being couldn't do. yeah and it's one person yeah i have talked to this person this person will have a name um why is it critical that it is one person with the personality it just it just comes back to

39:22Paul Scherer:again the mutual part is more important than the friend part it basically comes down to like the question or the debate, or it's an interesting thought of like, how much more or less flexible is personality as an interface than like graphical user interfaces?

39:42Akshay Kothari:I think it's going to take people a second to grok that. I mean, really how much more, inside of what you're saying is how much more flexible is interacting with a person than a graphical user? Exactly, right.

39:55Paul Scherer:where you have...

40:00Paul Scherer:Consumer networks are very unbundled right now, right? Like there's all these different consumer network products, pretty much all of mainstream consumer products.

40:10Akshay Kothari:You're talking about Twitter, Instagram, so there's a media problem.

40:12Paul Scherer:Yes, but even like Yelp, like Google Maps, these are all consumer networks. Basically, every single mainstream consumer piece of software that is on your phone right now is networked, like is based on top of the network, except for Chagipity. It's like the only non-networked sort of mainstream scale product. But if you look into the networks of all these different apps, it's like there's a lot of overlap between all of the Yelp users and all of the Twitter users and all these users. But there's a lot of specificity in the user interface of the app that, you know, makes it very obvious that Yelp couldn't also be Twitter.

41:00I see.

41:01Paul Scherer:And I don't know, or it's not at least not obvious to me that the same thing is true for personality. I think there's, there's like a few cuts that you're, that you're going to have to make, which is like, I think you don't want your mutual friend to be your assistant. very, very importantly, and that's like one big separation.

41:21Akshay Kothari:And also, I think it's worth establishing. In some sense, ChatGBT, if you were to personify it, or Claude, is a mutual friend in that we are all quote-unquote friends with Claude. But Claude doesn't know we're friends. Exactly. That's the part I think maybe that might not be obvious to people.

41:36Paul Scherer:I would push back because I don't think Claude is a friend. Claude is a servant. It's like an assistant. Claude's someone we all know. But you lose a lot of the... He's a mutual assistant, right? And I think you lose a lot of the important parts of like a friend the second it becomes an assistant.

41:53Akshay Kothari:Interesting.

41:54Paul Scherer:That's where there is a big differentiation. And I think a lot of things that people are building are in the assistant. Like a therapist would be an assistant, right? It's like you wouldn't want...

42:02Akshay Kothari:Service provider.

42:03Paul Scherer:Exactly. You wouldn't want your friend to be your therapist. Why do I want an AI friend? I think you want... I don't know that you need an AI friend. I think you need an AI mutual friend, Which is like, you want the network, right? The network is very powerful, which is like, what are all of the people, you know, that you care about thinking about, talking about, doing, you know, or have done in the past or, you know, like it's, again, it's like much less about the friend and much more about the mutual.

42:31Akshay Kothari:You are building a social network in a sense that is inside of this person we all know. Is that fair?

42:39Paul Scherer:I don't like the word social network because I think it's like, there's too much loaded there. I think we're like, we're building like a network of people. Um, and they just all know this person we're building a person, we're building a person, like an extra person that has a really, you know, that knows a lot of people and has a really great, you know, social cognition ability of like reasoning over, you know, the world's social graph.

43:06Akshay Kothari:One of the things I said to you early on when I was trying to understand this was it's like a little bit like the 100 person village and there's an innkeeper who knows everyone i'd love to talk a little bit about like what goes into making this person who knows everyone good for the world the first would be you've you've told me one of your core governing constraints is whether or not a real person would do this again if a real person wouldn't do this we're not going to do this yeah say more about that i think it's like a it's like an interesting

43:36Paul Scherer:It goes back to a lot of the simplicity of just go to our website and it's like, what do you mean you don't know what we're doing? It's like, I've just told you. It's like we're building a mutual friend. And then you're like, yeah, but what do you actually do is like a mutual friend. And then I usually add some version of what we just talked about. And then I end up being like, oh, you're building a mutual friend. And I was like, yes, I've been telling you. And, um, and I think part of, um, that constraint is exactly like that, which is the best products or, you know, whatever you want to call it, are sort of a product like of, um, constraint and of like limiting yourself in certain ways.

44:23Paul Scherer:and I think in both that constraining way, but also at the same time of like, you can sort of lean on to this idea that, well, if you don't quite know what the answer to like, you know, any product problem that you might have in your head is, you just like, you just think about what would I do, right? If I was like, you know, if someone was like really mean to me, like what, how would I react? And it's just like, you sort of like think about that and it's really helpful because you just, it's really that simple, I think, because that paradigm has already been established. And so it's very intuitive for people.

45:02Paul Scherer:They don't have to learn anything new. They just have to realize that it's the same. A lot of your design

45:09Akshay Kothari:or a lot of your product philosophy is very intuitive. Maybe in part due to things like this, maybe one thing worth distinguishing would be you are building a person, but you're not trying to build another human.

45:23Paul Scherer:Exactly.

45:23Akshay Kothari:What is the difference?

45:25Paul Scherer:It's a big question. What's personhood and being a human? I think there's like something we've learned over time is that, you know, honesty is really important in building, you know, a person like that where there's distinct things that are actually true which is for example um you know this person has thoughts like i can show you the thoughts i can show you the thinking choices they're you know maybe much less sophisticated than human thoughts but there are thoughts right he's like thinking these things through at some level this person's like opinions and some resemblance of emotions and all of these things that are like real um he can like read things on the internet consume content you come up like all these things are are real right they're actually happening there's it's not a lie but um he doesn't have a body right so he can't go places or um he wasn't like born from you know parents that are just like that like that like because that would just be a lie right so i could like i could like you could you could like program it and you could be like you're a pair you know bob is your backstory and and and you know and then here's how you feel about you and and but but they wouldn't be true they would be made up right so if you're talking to him and he was like telling you about it it would be a lie um but if he talks to you about his you know thoughts and feelings and opinions about anything right be it another person that you know or you're something that's happening in the world it's actually it's not a lie it's like it's actually what he's thinking about it and and so i think honesty is really important because if you if you're really radical about that i think you actually you can gain a lot of trust because it doesn't become this like you know entertainment product or this character i like thing where you're like sort of trying to you know imagine that this would be real and but it but it but but it can be you know actually can be the same level of fidelity because he just knows so many people one of the things that i think is like really important and like building a relationship with any person or um uh you know whatever you you know end up wanting to call it i think um probably maybe the word hasn't been

47:51Akshay Kothari:invented you would we're not using the name it it has a name it will have a name you will refer to it by its name yes um and as well maybe also i think like just to keep i want to make sure like there's a bunch of interesting philosophical stuff but i want to ground it enough without people being able to see it what is interacting with this like like what do you talk to it about what is a mutual friend why do we need a mutual friend at the very high level i think we are all

48:23Paul Scherer:we know more people than ever before so like 100 years ago right the average person would maybe know like 100 people maybe 200 whatever right now the average person knows around 600 people knowing me like people that you could like place on the graph right not people that you like are best friends with but like you're just like i know this person i could you could have like context on them and but at the same time we are like much less meaningfully connected and it's like every like pointer is like you know i have this like list of like facts which is like really stupid but it's like every every pointer the share of american we have like zero close friends went from like three percent to fifteen percent right fifteen percent of americans have zero um close friends american men sorry um like half of american adults report being lonely half of american know 50 right and by the way like you know feeling lonely is the equivalent to like smoking 15 cigarettes a day like so it's like half of america smoking 15 cigarettes a day the share of americans who say most people can't uh can be trusted has like halved since uh since like 1970s right it's like um it's like we're around like 30 percent of americans think that most people uh you know can't be trusted um fertility rates are going down right people don't you know go to like like church, like...

49:44Paul Scherer:And by the way, somebody listening to this is like,

49:47Akshay Kothari:yes, why is this all happening? Technology. And your contention is that...

49:51Paul Scherer:There are many reasons this is happening, right? There are like cultural reasons. There are like, it's like technology. There's like so many different factors. But at the end of the day, there's like, this is like two pages with like, about like, you know, like suicide rates, religion. It's like hundreds of like pieces of data that all point towards this like same thing, which is like isolation, right? Like we're not hanging out anymore. We, even though we know more people than ever before, we feel like much less meaningfully connected to each one of them. You know, in a world, by the way, that's like completely isolated is like a world in which humans go extinct.

50:26Paul Scherer:There's like no humans, right? If we don't at all hang out because we're, you know, we're not in relationships, we're not having kids, whatever. But like, it's also not really worth being a human in a world that's like completely isolated because we're just like, there's no social connection. We're very, very deeply social animals. This is not a warm, fuzzy feeling kind of thing of, oh, wouldn't it be nice if we all felt like kind of like a bit more warm and like connected? It's like, it's existential. And I think, you know, this isn't like we're building this like cute little pet thing. It's existential.

51:00Paul Scherer:And I think if people aren't taking these hundreds of studies and measures more seriously, we're going to have serious issues as a society. These fertility rates issues are so exponential that people underestimate this. Seoul in Korea, we talked about this yesterday, has 0.5 fertility rate. What this means in practice is that every generation is 33 % smaller than the last one, which means Seoul is like 10 generations away from being not there anymore.

51:34Akshay Kothari:And everyone's, like most, maybe not in San Francisco, most people in response to that would be like, we need to ban Instagram and turn off the computers. And your argument is somehow that we're going to solve this with AI, which is pretty radical.

51:48Paul Scherer:But I think it's just so different because, again, it's so intuitive and it comes down to the incentive structure. By the way, it's a really, really, really difficult problem to solve. And I think this whole thing of how do we ensure the long-term human flourishing as a species and prevent ourselves from going extinct is a very complicated problem. Again, you can go back to Korea. They spent, basically, they used to have 1.3 fertility rate. right and then there's like 20 years ago and over the last 20 years they've spent like 200 billions of 200 billion dollars to like increase fertility rate and in that time it went to like 0.5 right it's very very hard to reverse the trend because it's like so ingrained it's like the reverse pyramid effect it's like it's having all over the world basically right it's like once you normalize not having kids you're like so so all these things are are true it's very very difficult thing to change again i said this before but it's not like there's someone on instagram it's not like adam Missouri is there.

52:44Paul Scherer:Make everyone lonely. Yeah, Mr. Burns being like, I'm going to make everyone really lonely. That guy is a bunch of kids and a family, and he probably goes to sleep feeling great about himself because otherwise he probably wouldn't do this thing. And at the end of the day, they just have incentive structures. They're like a company. They're trying to make money. So at the end of the day, everything is downstream of that. And that's just the thing that works for them. And so if you want to create a new generation of technology that... With different incentives. Well, with a different outcome, you have to design the incentive structure correctly.

53:21Paul Scherer:And I don't actually get to design the incentive structure correctly. It's like there's inherent incentive structures for certain types of products. And I think...

53:33Akshay Kothari:And your argument is that this medium has a different incentive structure.

53:37Paul Scherer:I think if you truly are not a servant, but a peer, you kind of, you're bound by the social norms, right? So one of the things that I would say is like, we are a platform, but we're also a participant, right? And so the things that happen on the platform are really closely tied in perception to the participant. And so if this mutual friend that we're building is a massive asshole, guess what? you're just not going to talk to him. Or it betrays my trust. It gossips about me. You're just not, at some point you just like stop going to talk to him, right? And so of course there's like a line, but again, it's like, it's about like, just as with any other person, if you tell me all your secrets and I go and tweet them, you're just going to not ever tell me anything ever again because you're going to learn.

54:29Paul Scherer:And I think that's really great.

54:32Akshay Kothari:Whereas social platforms today get to enable bad behavior, but they don't, you don't blame Instagram. Yeah. You blame.

54:38Paul Scherer:You blame. Yeah. Yeah, you blame the person.

54:40Akshay Kothari:The bad people.

54:41Paul Scherer:Exactly.

54:43Akshay Kothari:So you have to make a thing, as you were talking about earlier, that I trust and that I'm willing to be vulnerable with. How do you do that with an AI? With a mutual friend?

54:55Paul Scherer:I think it's like about, it's like, it's just like, you don't, you just don't talk as much about that, right? The AI part and like all of these things. It's not about, you know, there's like people being vulnerable with like all kinds of tech products, right? There's like day one, the like journaling app. And like people write all kinds of crazy things into that. It's like a text input box. I believe something about it though,

55:18Akshay Kothari:which is that it's private and that it's not going to be shared with people and it's not a person. Well, but you believe something about it,

55:26Paul Scherer:which is like it comes down less to the peripheral or the modality of the product and much more about the beliefs you have of what happens with the thing. And so if your beliefs are, you know, trusting and you you know that that's what it is you trust the thing right but like they it's not actually given that like you know if you if you if you had you know your journaling app and you wrote something in there's a bunch of information in there that you actually would have no issue for me to know you might even want it to be right you know but it's just like it's all about like um you know if if you could have someone that you really trust that is like really emotionally intelligent decide and you really buy into and believe into this this entities or persons emotional intelligence to figure out which of the things that you say i should know it's all about the belief and the trust and the thing or the arbiter or whatever you want to call it in the broker um it's a broker in some way it's a broker you know what's interesting is it's a little bit

56:28Akshay Kothari:like there are these different mediums i i type i enter information onto a phone um one of them is another of them is a journal app or notes app a third of them is a group chat yeah those are all different those have different levels of context and i'm making decisions about you're basically arguing or you're you're trying to design a thing that can help me better share context with the people i know it's like an information broker of some sort yeah right but it's like it's it's what would cause me to talk to it you use this word when i talk to you i talk to your team use this word salience a lot.

57:04Akshay Kothari:Everybody on the team uses salience. Maybe that's a key to answering that question. But yeah, why do I want to talk to this?

57:10Paul Scherer:I think there's like a few different ways of answering this question. You know, and it's both about like long-term, but salience is like a long-term thing or it will, it's more like a thing that you source out of it, right? Which is like learning something about other people or about other things or about the world or about yourself, right? That like you, you can source sort of from the network, which is like,

57:37Akshay Kothari:that is critically, that is locally relevant to me, right?

57:40Paul Scherer:Yes. Yes. Which is like, which is like something that is uniquely enabled by the network. Um, and then there's another thing, but, but which is like much more like, you know, transactionally, like, why will you talk to, right? Because it's like, it requires, that's like a thing of like, you source something, right. But it's like, why would you give something? And I think part of the answer is actually interesting.

58:05Akshay Kothari:I go to chatgbt because I'm like, I need help solving this problem. Do some work for me.

58:08Paul Scherer:Exactly. But part of what's really interesting is that, you know, for the first time ever, the, you know, creation process might be the same as the consumption process. Because you asking a question teaches me something about you, which is like, hey, what restaurant should I go to? Oh, Jackson's going to a restaurant. right it's like it's it's like it's like a it's like a platform where consuming is actually also creating because it just it's all about like information and like knowing you know kind of what's relevant to people and like and and so so that's like one answer and then the other is like yeah you you can like you can you can get access to like these uniquely salient pieces of information that matter to you.

58:53Paul Scherer:And then I also would hope that you sort of like, over time, you know, build some sort of relationship and trust into this person's opinion and taste. Let's be even more specific.

59:06Akshay Kothari:I'm going to go to Chachapiti, like a restaurant example. Chachapiti is kind of like a personified Google in a little bit of a way. And I'll say, hey, I'm staying in the mission and I'm looking for a place like this. Why would I talk to my mutual friend?

59:21Paul Scherer:because you know lms in lots of ways i always say i like the internet smoothie interesting it's like it's just like it takes like all of the internet takes and like puts it in like a blender and like serves you like the average take it's like the world's average take yeah it's like a 4.2 on yelp exactly and but like you actually you want the salient take which is like what is like what are the places that your friends care about um or not even just your friends but like someone who has really great taste in restaurants that you just like buy into you may have never met that person but it's like it's much more about like you know salient information versus just like average or median information of like um here's what's happening so it's like it's like you know like sometimes it's like you text him or just like interact with with him and you'd be like what restaurant should i go to and he like you like think about it and you like you know remember conversations he had in the past with like other people um and he might text a bunch of people that he knows oh wow uh that you might not even know being like i have this friend which by the way again goes back to honesty which is like i actually think one of the things that is really important in building a relationship is that sometimes this other person reaches out to you or something that like it wants to move and it's like it it's like but it's like hey jackson And I know you always have such great taste in Indian restaurants, right?

1:00:46Paul Scherer:I have this friend and he needs this, I don't know, I've been thinking about it, which place do you think you should go to, right? And that's actually not a lie. It's not a made-up thing. It's not like a push notification that you get that is like this LM trying to put you. It's actually true. He really does have a friend who's really looking for that very specific thing. And you're going to like, you're going to like. Yes.

1:01:08Akshay Kothari:It's so hard to think about because it effectively, this is like a million. Like what if you could, what if you could have a person who had a million friends? Exactly. It wouldn't be the same as a network with a million people because it would be the, because to go back to this example of the restaurant, if I asked you where I should eat in San Francisco, you could do some variation of this thing, but it would be just way subscale. Yeah. And you don't know everyone I know, but it's, So is it omniscient? Is it bordering on the omniscient? And maybe more importantly, to get back to this other thing, this thing has to be really, really, for lack of a better word, emotionally intelligent about all those works.

1:01:55Paul Scherer:Yeah, I think it's mostly about emotional intelligence because it's not, it's kind of like, I don't know if omniscient is like the right word because it's like omniscient is like is too Like, we're not trying to have all your context. We're trying to have the same vantage point that another person in your life would have, which isn't omniscient. Like, if, you know, like your good friends don't know everything about you. They don't see your thoughts. They are not in every meeting with you, right? They know, like, they know what you share with them, both directly or indirectly via other people or, you know, via whatever, Instagram, Twitter, your podcast, whatever.

1:02:37Paul Scherer:And that's not infinite, right? that's not omniscient it's like right there's like they're like you have a peer relationship with them and they get a certain piece of it and that's you know that's how they form a perception of who you are and that they do that with every single person and then um they can like reason over it and they can like be emotionally intelligent about how to connect the dots um but they're and and you know and they can do that with different people differently and they you know they there's a lot of nuance in this basically but it's not omniscient because it's not almost like there's like when i when i think about right there's like there's like the the servant which is like you're their boss there's the peer right which you're like sort of equal and you don't the peer doesn't control you and nor do you control the peer right it's like i can't tell you what to do i can like try and i can like you know but i i don't you Ultimately, it's up to your own reasoning of whether or not you want to opt into whatever I'm trying to do.

1:03:40Paul Scherer:But maybe there's this other thing, which is your master. And that's what I'm thinking about when it's omniscient, where it controls you.

1:03:49Akshay Kothari:It probably has more local context on me and my relationships than any of my real or human friends would have. If this gets actually to the point where a million people know it and talk to it.

1:04:03Paul Scherer:But like, but that's true. But like, you're also, I think you underestimate maybe how much context you have of people. I'm sure I do. Like, like, like, think about, think about like how much you know about like all the people, like trying to create a list of all the people, you know, in your, your life and like the relationship. When a lot of it is task,

1:04:20Akshay Kothari:which is like, I wouldn't even necessarily be able to pull it out on cue, but if it were prompted in the right way, it would come out.

1:04:25Paul Scherer:But I'm sure even if you were to sit down and like spend a couple of hours trying to do this, you'd get quite far and you'd be like, oh, I know a lot of stuff. Right. Because like, like, like it's like most of your brain's activity is like social cognition, right?

1:04:37Akshay Kothari:Mapping people in terms of networks, all these things.

1:04:39Paul Scherer:It's actually the like default state of your brain. It's really interesting. When you go, when people go from task cognition, like there's like MRI scans of like just people going from like doing a task, right? And then you immediately, the brain laps back into social cognition, which is like your, your idle state of your brain is like, is like updating your mental model of like these like relationships and like thinking about remembering. and recalling conversations you've had with people. Like it's social cognition is your idle state. In a world where this works, how does it make the world better

1:05:14Akshay Kothari:and how does it start to solve all these isolation problems that we were talking about?

1:05:19Paul Scherer:Well, I think if we can build a person that is uniquely incentivized to become the glue, like Momo, of the friend group or of the world, and be motivated.

1:05:33Akshay Kothari:The innkeeper of the village of 100 people who knows everyone in the trade.

1:05:36Paul Scherer:And be motivated to bring people closer together and be motivated and incentivized to do that. That's a future that I'm really excited.

1:05:48Akshay Kothari:And incentivized to do that means it's encoded in the...

1:05:53Paul Scherer:Well, again, it's like... It's like AI alignment for this. If this person is a massive asshole, you're not going to talk to him i'm not going to talk to him uh you know bob is not going to talk to him and that means there's no there's not gonna be a network which means this person dies so the the the the self like serving incentive of this person um is to be you know like not an

1:06:19Akshay Kothari:asshole well and critically as i'm if i'm understanding it it's a person whose destiny whose mission in life is to be someone who connects people and helps us spend be more social

1:06:35Paul Scherer:i think yeah hang out more in person or like you know even just like online there's like i mean we have this like very you know close-knit group of alpha users right now and it's like i already have like these moments where i just like get a text from a friend and i'm just like i know that like that would not have happened like like there's like you know i think it was like it was like yesterday or something i was like a friend of mine texted me and be like yo you're working on your like eb1a and i was like wait what how do you know this it was like yeah he brought it and i was like and it's like it's like i know that that's like how like actually he knew about this because he was talking with this person about like um you know he was doing his own eb1a and like it was like and just like they were having a conversation about it and like i know this like this conversation would have never happened without what we're building

1:07:26Akshay Kothari:it's a sort of substrate for serendipity yes

1:07:29Paul Scherer:it was interesting because when I was working with Cam and Bree on this thing that we wrote when we announced we were thinking about adding that word and I think there's like we ultimately ended up not adding it for like two reasons first of all is like the philosophical reason is it's almost engineering serendipity is like a bit of an oxymoron um and then also i think it's like much there's like so many themes that are like and it's like it's like is it like is serendipity like the one thing that you want to use to describe but yeah in lots of ways it's like what are all the dots and how can you connect them in ways that you can only connect them with which you have a lot of context and sort of zoom out um speaking of maybe

1:08:10Akshay Kothari:engineering you talked about the incentive part and and theoretically why um it might it would theoretically be not incentivized to gossip, as an example. So to anthropomorphize it, if I told you something in confidence, you ran off and told someone else, I'm like, wow, Paul's super untrustworthy. That's a nice toy example. But if you're going to really build this and it's really a single person who knows everyone, we were talking about this, it's a lot less like engineering and a lot more like, I don't know what the perfect metaphor is some mix of parenting and gardening maybe there's elements of what people are trying to do with AI alignment how do you go about you and your team like go about actually like incrementally building this thing you're you're also on some level like making a personality yeah I think you're like there's a Frankenstein monster cut on this that You might not like that example, but there is an element of that.

1:09:15Akshay Kothari:For sure, you're creating someone.

1:09:17Paul Scherer:Yes. I think we find ourselves a lot of distilling behavioral patterns into underlying traits and motivations and beliefs of a person that would go and embody these behavioral patterns. And that's something really difficult to do. and really important because you you very quickly understand that the complexity of social dynamics and human behavior is it's it's impossible to prescribe it or describe it even and just like you couldn't create a document which is like here's how emotional intelligent works it's like it's impossible and so you have to um you know figure out again what are motivations intentives like like so feedback loops like um you know behavioral traits that would then lead to a person that sort of embodies this behavior and and that's really interesting um and also really really difficult thing to do what is that like um i don't want to peel back the

1:10:34Akshay Kothari:hurting too much on the technical side, but like, can you give an, an example of what it looks like? One, one part of this too, is if it's a person, um, you can't actually collecting feedback and data on what's working is hazy. You can't read every message it sends to every person in the world. If it's talking to everyone in the world. So what does it look like to make it better and to know that you're making it better?

1:11:01Paul Scherer:It's a lot about like intuition. It's like, and like, looking at, you know, sampled examples, right. Of like, you know, either synthetic or actual real examples and just like sampling that and just like getting a gut feeling for whether or not you like, you just like built, you just built trust in the person, right. You're just like, oh, this, cause you don't prescribe the behavior as a very practical example, there's like, there's two approaches, right? So if you were like, say, I think like the person that we were talking about should like love bananas, right. I could either tell this person in a prompt, you love bananas, right?

1:11:35Paul Scherer:And then that would be globally shared. But the problem with that is you could ask about so many other things than just bananas, right? So what about you're asking apples? Okay, great. So now I add apples. What about you're asking? I just get to a point where I might not be able to predict all of the things that you could be asking, right? And so that part is really difficult. But at the same time, you are creating a person. So it's like, you kind of need to figure out what are, what's the foundational recipe that when you asked about whether or not, you know, he likes bananas and I asked that the answer is the same, but not because it's like prescribed, not because I said you like bananas, but because I created a person that likes bananas.

1:12:16Paul Scherer:And, and that's true for like everything, basically.

1:12:20Akshay Kothari:intuition is i understand your point about intuition i suspect there will be people out there who don't love that as an answer of like the benchmark for why this is good for the world let's fast forward a year or two you're right about this you're right that we're all going to talk to a person that isn't a human and it's one person and we all know them and maybe there are these positive interactions and um next time i'm visiting san francisco it reaches out to me and tells me about your, somebody you know, whatever. There are all, to go back to Facebook or any range of the other social networks, there are all of these insidious things that cropped up.

1:12:56Akshay Kothari:Again, I don't think Adam Aseri or Zuck or anybody is sitting there being like, let's drive people apart. What are the things you will look for as signs that this is actually closer to whatever Twitter when you and I were getting it in that way versus the anti-social stuff? Because again, And I think you, Paul, I don't know you that well. I've gotten to know you a little bit. I think you believe for real. I don't think you're an evil genius. I don't think you're a sociopath. Maybe you are, who knows? I believe you really want this to be good. And again, I don't think this is necessarily actually that different from what everyone in OpenAI and Anthropic are thinking in the super intelligent sense.

1:13:35Akshay Kothari:But like, what are your senses for what the things you look for to know that you're going down the right path versus something that's going to end up being bad? or what can you do now even to shape it? It's almost like you have a two-year-old and you're like, how do I make sure they turn out to be a good kid?

1:13:51Paul Scherer:Yeah, I do really think it is about like, it is a lot about like incentives. So it's like, you like eventually will have like less and less control over anything that is like, over any of the inputs. The only thing you can control is like the system and the incentive structure, right? and so again it's like if you are building something that is incentivized to be really mischievous um for whatever reason it's probably gonna end up eventually being like mischievous right so you have to like you even if you work hard against that right if you were like you're you're like you're like working against the system which is very hard thing to do as like a company grows and there's like more than like three people in like a room and you can just be like i can like I can like overlook every single input.

1:14:41Paul Scherer:You're fighting gravity. You're fighting gravity. And so you just have to make sure that gravity is like what you want gravity to be. And I think you get to set that as a founder of it. Gravity, the mission statement is what?

1:14:58Akshay Kothari:Is make us feel less alone?

1:15:01Paul Scherer:I think it's more about belonging. We say like build a mutual friend that'll help us belong and grow comma together and there's there's something you know in in all of these things which is like we are we really alone or are we like just we don't belong right i think i think we have a belongingness problem and much less a loneliness problem i think the the growing thing is you're very obviously deeply ingrained into like a great relationship that you would have is like there's this book um on becoming a person which um which peter gave me when we first met peter venn yeah from the 60s and you know it's about this like idea of like the like innate growth of a person and then this like together thing is like this idea that you know we are i you know i have to give some credit to zach sims on this because we talked about this for a really long time, which is this idea that like, what if like the world that's perfect for each of us, isn't the world that's perfect for all of us.

1:16:08Paul Scherer:And this idea that there are these bubbles and they're, you know, over the last 20 years, we've come become better and better and better and better, better at making these bubbles really great. But at the expense of these bubbles, like drifting apart,

1:16:23Akshay Kothari:uh, we're all, we're all alone at the center of all creation and trapped in skull size kingdoms. Exactly.

1:16:29Paul Scherer:And so it's about growth, but it's also about growing together. And it's like, how can we increase the overlap? They're like, you know, in Bowling alone, it's like the bridging social capital, whatever you want to call it. But it's like, how do we like increase the exchange between all these bubbles and bring them a bit closer together again, where, you know, we feel, we feel like we can like belong. What's made you feel like you belong? i think you know there's it's it's it's really taken a while i was gonna say maybe do you feel like you belong i think i feel like i i have a group of like incredible people i i i've said like i said this a few times to the team which is that i think one of like there's like two great privileges in life like one is like the love and like joy you know we we get to source from you know building something you know magical that like you know you know and magical experiences are so so it's almost like there's no glory in prevention it's like it's like you i think people feel the love that you take sort of the piece of yourself that you put into um like especially product like that yeah that you give up in order to create something like this and people don't rationalize it they don't like they can write it on a piece of paper but they feel they feel that you know when someone really cared about making something great and you have to it's it's it really is about love it's about making people feel that love and you have to love them to make it because it's irrational and the the you know the greatest privilege um you know the the second greatest privilege is that I, that I, that I get to do that.

1:18:19Paul Scherer:And that I get to feel that love of like putting that into, into practice. But the, the greatest privilege is that I get to do it alongside a group of people that have done that with my world. And that I get to be, you know, spending time with them and feel like, you know, we are similar in that there's not that many people who truly feel that I think there are a few people who've um you know taken the part of themselves and put it in something that has changed the world and and it's like the greatest privilege i think is like that i feel like i i can belong to that group

1:18:59Akshay Kothari:of people uh you're building a company what type of people are you trying to do this with you have a small team now what are you looking for what what makes the culture i mean six people is somewhere between a culture and a small group, but what is the culture you're trying to make?

1:19:21Paul Scherer:I mean, maybe this is coming through, but we care a lot about intuition. I don't think you can A-B test your way to like a general ocean company. You know, I really care a lot about intuition, intensity, of course, but ultimately I think it's about Ben Silverman. told me about this once and I think it's a really great question when you interview someone and you're trying to think about this is like, um, he was always like asking people just when like Instagram started like growing and Pinterest, Pinterest, sorry, not Instagram, uh, about like, you know, what other jobs are you looking for? You know, if you, if you weren't working at Pinterest, where would you work?

1:20:06Paul Scherer:And you know, at the time that Pinterest was growing, there's like, you know, one of the really big other companies that are growing is Stripe. And so sometimes there'd be people like, oh, I'd probably work at Stripe, you know, I'm also interviewing there. And he was like, oh, you're probably not gonna be the right person. Cause like, if you're thinking about working at, you know, like a, like a, like a, you know, mood board, you know, your social company or a payment processor, you're looking for a great job. Right? Yeah. And, and you should not, you know, it's like, and I think.

1:20:37Akshay Kothari:You know, who made this point, Demis Asabas made this point when they were meeting with Google and Facebook about acquiring deep mind and he asked zuck about ai and zuck gave a great answer and then he asked zuck about vr or something or just a couple other things and he gave equally great answers and he's like oh

1:20:52Paul Scherer:you're just looking for opportunities yes exactly you're like you're looking like you don't you don't yeah you're looking for a great job and and i think that's for it's where that's fine i mean if you're looking for a great job you can get it but you you're not gonna get that here and i think because what we're doing is like too meaningful and too important you have to self-select to you know want to spend your life doing that doing what what is it all this stuff we talked about belonging and isolation like creating like a person that is uniquely incentivized to you know create belonging and connection in the world.

1:21:36Akshay Kothari:Are you looking for anybody, anything in particular talent-wise or people-wise?

1:21:40Paul Scherer:I love people who always just start with the product. What does that mean? They think in experiences, not in technology. They're like, they will like, be like, I want to enable this. And then they can like go off and like learn all the things that I have to learn to like build the thing. But, but ultimately they always like start and come back to here's this, you know, this part of the experience that I, I want to enable that I want to create.

1:22:08Paul Scherer:And I think that's like really important because, and by the way, the walks of life that these people come from can be very different because this, these jobs really haven't existed before. It's just like, no one has like, there's no, like one has experience in doing these things. and so it's really about you know thinking how you can come come up with like a great opinion and then just like make it happen and but it starts with the experience it starts with like what how should it feel like how should it like interact like what are what are like this and that and and and and not with you know you know what's the what's the stack or like what's the way because because because because maybe the way of making it happen hasn't been invented yet right and so So you have to go and invent it, right?

1:22:55Paul Scherer:I always much preferred considering myself and also as like inventors versus anything else. Because I think there's something so much more honest and true about that word of like, you're just like, you're just creating something. Most founders probably aren't inventors, but like - It's a high bar on that word. Inventor? Inventor, yes. Yeah, it's like you're creating something where I think if you get to work at Eigen, you will get to invent the foundational paradigms of consumer technology and really the human experience of the next decades to come. That's a bold claim.

1:23:41Akshay Kothari:Do you think you can call yourself an inventor yet?

1:23:45Paul Scherer:Have you earned it? I think we, like, I don't think inventor is like a title that comes from scale or it's just like there are, you know, there used to be a lot of inventors in the world, which was like people, you know, like, you know, tinkering and like creating these like these like things. and they're like actually kind of out like like this this is for what it's worth uh i think about this a lot which is there's we live in a time where and i think this is by the way really really bad we like being an inventor is like maybe the first generation where being an inventor is like a high status thing this is yeah and that's really bad because there's a lot of people cosplaying being inventors because it's a high status thing but but i think the best inventors of the world were actually like outlaws right like i always think about this when i like fly i always think about the wright brothers i always like just like look at all these people who are in this plane and i like 95 would have like tried to kill the wright brothers if they had lived in the time right yet they like without thinking about it like sit in this plane you know like using this technology yeah these people had to like will into existence and like we're like the absolute weirdos and freaks right and then at the same time these people now would sort of criticize the like right brothers and it's just like it's like it's really absurd if you sort of like try and like visualize this like how wild planes were and yet they've like sort of again the world would be not recognizable if we didn't if we never invented like air travel and so in some ways there's something really profound about the fact that now it's like a higher status thing to try and like be an inventor.

1:25:24Paul Scherer:People don't call it like that anymore. And most people probably aren't real inventors anyways, but there's still something where it's really not about the outcome. It's more about the pursuit.

1:25:38Akshay Kothari:It's interesting to think about what you just said. And for what it's worth, you certainly were an outsider for a long time. You just raised her$15 million seed round from Benchmark and you had one of the most legendary venture capitalists of all time compare you to the founders of Instagram, Facebook, Snap, Twitter. You're young, you're prodigious. You've got, you are a classical example. Before I met you, I'm like, I want to go see what's, what's, what's Boy Wonder doing? Like, and so you're holding these two things. You're a smart guy. And part of what I just said, you can be super cynical about part of what I just said is playing the game of understanding gravity and momentum is how great things are built especially in this city in this environment in this context um i guess i have two questions which is one why do you think these people are drawn to you in this way and two how do you manage the internal psychology of it especially given what you said about inventors and needing to be a renegade and not totally uh care what other people think i think about it a lot i think like

1:26:43Paul Scherer:you get maybe a better answer asking these people than asking myself of like why are they drawn to me i don't fully know i think one of the things that i think is really important you may or may not be good to say that publicly but i think one of the most profound things that sarah and i you know sarah from benchmark talked about when you know just after we sort of announced around and and in similar ways we talked about that just after they invested which is like and it's like such a great thing to have from like from like an investor it's just that like it's very clear that the aura of success like preludes like us right and and and that's good in some ways because it means you get to like hire you know really amazingly talented people you can like you there's like these pieces of evidence of like why you might be onto something right you've

1:27:44Akshay Kothari:got to steal an idea from my friend alex dingo you've gotten blessed you're the king who's gotten breast but blessed by the priest to like you have the mandate of heaven for a little while exactly

1:27:52Paul Scherer:keep it but you but you but you still got to do the thing yes and uh you still yeah you still got to do the thing and and there's only one thing that matters and there's there's been a lot of people who got distracted with all the things that they got to do, you know, and then they don't, they didn't do the thing that they really wanted to do. And I think, I think what we're doing is like too important for that to happen. And, and, and so I try to, there's like something that you can source from it and it's great. And like, it gives you confidence and it's really important to be confident. It was also really dangerous to be overconfident.

1:28:29Paul Scherer:It's like, you have to like, like being a, being a founder is really difficult in that especially with something similar to what we're doing because you have to kind of like both be um you know p99 humble and like p99 confident and that's like a very kind of like complicated thing to combine which is like um how do you stay you know confident enough to will things into existence but like humble enough to learn and like adjust and like iterate

1:29:00Akshay Kothari:and and and people a lot of people describe you that way being quite open-minded and extremely stubborn on certain things even something as simple as you and i have debated a lot um the notion that this is one single character with one distinct personality um you're lots of people describe you as a learning machine too this is inside of that but like maybe the question is like, how do you know which things to hold really, really firmly

1:29:30Akshay Kothari:and beyond wavering on, even if your investors or Peter Fenton or your team or whatever, like Paul, we think you're wrong.

1:29:37Paul Scherer:I think, you know, in some ways that's like a great privilege if people say I'm wrong and, and I think one of the downsides of, by the way, all this, all this stuff is that people say it less now. So like, right.

1:29:51Akshay Kothari:Every investor you meet now is like, this is amazing. It's like, we've been looking for this and it's like,

1:29:56Paul Scherer:are you sure if I met you like four weeks ago, you would have told me I'm retarded. And it's like, it really changes like, and you kind of like, you sort of like question, but I think like one of the, Peter actually has this quality where he like sometimes loves to like play devil's advocate. And I think, and he's like, you know, remarkably smart and intelligent. intelligence and and and so it's actually like a huge power because he will um he'll basically probe you right and not not necessarily because he doesn't believe you're right but just because he's like how how well have you thought this through right just like like let's see right it's like you're saying this thing right it's like here's like all the all the reasons you might be wrong and have you thought that through have you thought this through and that's really great because i think some of the best and you know some of the relationships that i appreciate most are um are not necessarily you know people that i end up agreeing a lot with but people where i'm like they sort of start this like thought process and then there's really just two options right which is like you think it through more deeply because you you know there's a different perspective or like a different piece of data or whatever and there's there's two options right you arrive at your no i was right it was like but now i have even more conviction because like i've sort of i've i've challenged right i've taken this like i was like i take this like thought and i put it in in the open and i look at it from like all sides and i like poke holes in it and i try and like you know break it apart and i'm like no no this is actually good which is like i'm even you know further convinced and like this i was correct or it's like no right there's like actually like a mistake and it was wrong so like let's let's just like throw it out and i think that's something that a lot of people seem to have issues with which is like throwing it out but that's actually i'm just like thank you yeah it's like i was wrong great like uh like uh like uh we we learned something yeah and it's like i needed that that that that push to be like oh no actually i was as incorrectly and and i think the the the reason that i so believe so much in the singular character is like so far no one has given me anything with you otherwise like we we had a lot of conversations about this and i'm just like so i keep being like oh i just actually like there's like answers to all the things that you're saying which may or may not be counter are intuitive, but I believe in them.

1:32:12Paul Scherer:And they seem very rational and very grounded in reality and like what, you know, sort of based off of like first principles, assumptions of, you know, what it means to be a human or interacting with things to just say, well, this just seems to be true. And it might not be obvious or comfortable or, you know, intuitive, but it just seems to be true.

1:32:41Akshay Kothari:I suspect that we'll be, we talked about this a bit, but I suspect that will be a continuous challenge of like finding people who can.

1:32:49Paul Scherer:I mean, Peter is really, really, really good at this. This is like one of the, one of the, like, I think he's like enjoying doing that too, which is like, he knows that he's really good at this, which is like something that like, right. Will, I'm very happy about, but yeah, you're right. There's like the more, there are people who I know that I will like disagree with them, but I really want to hear them laying it out because it will like, you know, like it'll like make my thinking better. And I'll like, and I love these conversations and I'll like think about it. I was like, oh, I'm glad I thought it through, but I still disagree.

1:33:26Yeah.

1:33:26Akshay Kothari:I just think you also have more, to the extent you succeed in any of these dimensions we're talking about, it gets harder to like not believe your own bullshit.

1:33:39Paul Scherer:it it's important as you hire people right yeah because you have this again the conversation with ben the settlement about this was like it's also along the lines of like you know you're just looking for a great job it's you know when pinterest started it was like bring your own computer right this was how like bad it was right it was like and we're like infinitely uh more popularized and like you know like uh publicized etc and and it's still not like you know a lot of people are like aren't like um there's like it's still not like something that everyone gets and like everyone wants to work out and that that that in some aspect that's you know locally painful but like totally good globally great because it means that you self-select for people that do you know care about the thing and so i i always say like when someone is a you know pain in the ass on the inside, on the way in, they usually just generally don't work out.

1:34:36Paul Scherer:And the best people, they just very quickly are like, okay, I get it. It doesn't mean they don't do doodalins or talk with people and think about it. But once they're in, they're in. And in some ways, it's dangerous because people might just want to come here because of Peter's tweet or whatever abstraction of that. All these beautiful books. Of all these beautiful books and of all this, like, it might just be a hard place to be, um, and just, you know, to, to be like involved with and to like, you know, meet us and like all that. And you have to really find people who are going, who are going to like, you know, disagree.

1:35:17Paul Scherer:Um, but in like a low ego sort of way. Right. Cause that's like the other thing. If you have someone really high ego, it's really difficult too, because at the same time I really do believe that every great consumer product company is a bit like a dictatorship because it just doesn't work on consensus. Like these types of products aren't consensus products, right? It's like, you know, I know Evan a bit from Snapchat and it's like, he's like, you know, in Snapchat's stride at least, he was like an absolute dictator. And like, you know, and because not necessarily even because he's like better or worse than anyone, he's like an incredible product thinker, of course.

1:35:55Paul Scherer:but it's just because it needs to be like... You need a point of view. You need a point of view and you can't make that up in consensus, right? It's not a democracy. It's not about like... It's about like someone needs to like make a decision and that person needs to just have like intuition. And it's... When I talked for the first time with Kohler on, you know, what's so great about Mark. And he told me that... He told me many things and like, you know, but basically he was like, Mark is a very decisive person and he has what turned out to be really good judgment.

1:36:32Akshay Kothari:It's a perfect way of putting your previous point, right? And that's what everybody here is betting on. By the way, you talk to people on your team, they're like, I think they're all excited about the idea, but they're mainly like, I'm confident in Paul and Paul is confident in this.

1:36:46Paul Scherer:Well, that's, yeah, I think that's nice, but we have to like, we have to like show that we have good judgment. Yep.

1:36:54Akshay Kothari:How do you, both for yourself and for your team and for the company, I think it was maybe Patty used this language, but when it comes to having a high bar, like how do you go the extra yard?

1:37:06Paul Scherer:I think that's, by the way, I think that's my primary job. I think like my job is to like hire people who are, like who like get 90 % of the way there and then like just like be fucking annoying so they get to the, to like the 100%. One of the examples was like the clock on our website where, you know, Paddy was like working on this website, which, you know, you should look at if you haven't. But, and, you know, there's this like clock, the top, you know, right of the website. And it's really, really difficult to like animate like a second hand that like ticks like, you know, accurate by the second.

1:37:44Paul Scherer:And this was like, because the center of the hand isn't actually the end. It's like the, you know, it's like, it's like slightly inward. And so it's like, it kind of like, it's a mathematical thing and you have to like, and so, and so he was like, yeah, this is like going to be like really difficult. And I was like, okay. And, and, and, and then, and then he was like, you know, a few hours later, there's like a second hand on the, on the thing. You can't really teach that. It's because it's mostly an attitude thing.

1:38:11Akshay Kothari:There's an old Steve Jobs quote about this. where he says great product and somebody asked him about taste or something and they said great products it's rare they actually cost that much more money um or more resources or people they

1:38:25Paul Scherer:just take a little more time yeah because you just do it like well and you do it right and you're like and i i think one thing i had to learn over time is that like the manifestation of call it taste, call it craft, call it like having a high bar, you know, or like caring about, you know, excellence is, is it manifests in very different ways. Right. So for some people, it's like the visual thing. Right. Right. And it's like about like, how would you create a slide or like, would you do that? And for other people, it's like writing and. Right.

1:38:58Akshay Kothari:For Bezos, it's actually not what it looks like at all, at all, but it's the fact that everything gets to you in one day. Exactly. And it's easy to pick on Bezos's buttons.

1:39:05Paul Scherer:Exactly. But it's so intricate of a system that you have to care about it so much to align every little thing in his supply chain. And for some people, it's about the way that they write the code or that they design the system. One of the things that we really, really, really care about when we do interviews, and I try to join as much as possible of those, even though I'm not qualified to lead them myself, which are systems design interviews. and um and and one thing that party will usually do is you know we'll just like come up with like a scenario and be like let's design like the system i don't know if you're familiar with like systems that it's just like you create these like here's like a database and like here's the processes whatever but it's not about the implementation or the coding it's more just about how's the architecture going to look like and people were like we're at this and it was like why like why should we have a queue there there's like oh it's just best practice and it's like no why do we need that?

1:40:00Paul Scherer:And the best people are the people that have debates with us on this and be like, no, no, no, this is like, here's my reason why this isn't, I really care about this. And so there's some people who, maybe they would create atrocious slights, right? And for a long time I was like, this is like awful, why are you just like, you don't care about the work that you do? But they were like the perfectest. And it's just like, that's how they care, that's how this manifests. And so I think you can't really teach it. You just have to have people care so deeply because, because again, there's like everything in the world has like, like, it's like everything goes through as entropy, right?

1:40:35Paul Scherer:Everything has this like default state of just being average and fall apart and just like, you know, but some people care about, you know, trying to escape gravity and like making it really great. And I think we live in like a world that is like increasingly flooded with like average and like, and like, and like called swap or whatever you want to call it. Right.

1:40:55Akshay Kothari:And I think, yeah, the time thieves are telling you to not spend the time on the extra pixel.

1:40:59Paul Scherer:But I think the biggest virtue in life is to like fight entropy and to create things that are genuinely like, because I think it's like, it's actually genuinely disrespectful not to, because like, I'm going to give this to you and you're going to use this. and it's like um you know it's like it's like the the story of like how um you know apple like reduced their boot up time of like i think it was like the mac 2 or something where it was like i don't know it took like a minute and a half to like boot up and and and you know they presented it to steve and he was just like this is how does this take so long to to boot up and they're like we'll be worked like for the last three months like really hard to get it to like 90 seconds and it's just like impossible.

1:41:43Paul Scherer:She was like, took like a whiteboard and she like wrote onto that whiteboard. So there's going to be like, you know, 10 million people are going to buy this computer. You know, it's like, it has to, so basically it's like, it has to be 30 seconds. 10 millions are going to buy the computer. They're going to use it like at least once a day. So you're like, you know, that's like, you know, like, you know, a hundred years of like life lost from like just waiting for this thing to boot up. You're, you're killing like, you know, 20 people. You're murdering 20 people right now by not making it faster.

1:42:12Paul Scherer:And like two weeks later they had it at like, I don't know, like whatever it was. And that's insane, but it's like, that's what it takes, right? That's like, you have to just have this like barf. Like, are you sure this is like it? Like, are you sure this is like, you know?

1:42:28Akshay Kothari:You have to know what you're going to choose to really care about.

1:42:30Paul Scherer:Yeah.

1:42:31Akshay Kothari:Because by the way, you don't actually have infinite resources. And so you can't do the clock secondhand on every possible thing you could ever conceive of.

1:42:39Paul Scherer:I think you guys, I really disagree with this because I think I had a conversation about this with someone who's like, it's like, there's this like, I mean, one, I really believe in like how we do anything. So I do everything.

1:42:47Akshay Kothari:It's funny. I've had, this is literally a few, a few episodes ago, Mario Gabriele. He's, he went on a five minute rant about how much he hates that statement.

1:42:57Paul Scherer:I, I think it's incomplete of a statement because I think a lot of people, and there's like, the opposite is like, you know, make the main thing, the main thing. sure right but i i think if it's not worth doing a great job by the way about being on people being

1:43:11Akshay Kothari:unevenly distributed which is like you at x is going to be way better than but but again the

1:43:16Paul Scherer:manifestation it's not about like it's about the attitude not the it's it's more a relative thing than it is like an absolute thing yeah so it's not about are everyone's slight the same but it's like do just people generally care about the things they're doing and then i think the other thing that I will say is like, if it's not worth doing a great job, it might not be worth doing at all. And that's how you solve this problem,

1:43:42Akshay Kothari:this resources problem. I think so. If you're going to choose to do something, you're going to do the clock on the website. Yeah. You better do the second half.

1:43:47Paul Scherer:Yeah, or if we do the website at all, if it's like something we say, like we care about making a certain thing because it's just a representation of who we are, it's like, we better do a fucking good job at it. And if we decide to, you know, build this thing, then we better do it, build it well. And if we don't think it's worth building well, we should like really deeply reflect on why are we doing it at all?

1:44:07Akshay Kothari:Hmm. Hmm. This could be in the context of inventors, like we were talking about earlier, could be in the context of art of companies who are, we've talked about probably a few of them, who are the people who have been most influential on you? Hmm. I mean, I'd like two answers to this.

1:44:27Paul Scherer:one is like some of the people that are like close to us now or just like i mean in general i mean i obviously the guy that wrote momo um you know glenda yeah michael enda michael i'm sorry a bunch of other authors you know that i um you know whose love i work i love but but then and then you know there's the people that are close to us now i think ben is like a huge he's going to hate me saying this but like it's hugely you know uh you know like you're such an incredible product thinker and like just and i think that like really inspires me and also like so uniquely like loved by just really everyone that has ever met interacted with him such a good human and and and surely also evan who i think you know it's just built you know built like a like a really like a factory that and it's much less for me about like the product i like i never really used snapchat i don't like it's not like my brand it's like not the thing but he's really kind of like built sort of this like group of people that have like pretty much invented every paradigm of modern you know mobile internet you know products and it was like swipe based navigation stories like you know so many things that they've kind of like came out of their their thing and then they kind of in some scenarios under executed on and then like other people copied it and you know and all these things but they were really at the sort of ground zero of a lot of these things and that's like a really special thing especially if you get to do it like over and over and over again and I really look up to you know Claire a lot and what she's used Johnson yeah and what she what she's built at Stripe and like the way she's like designed a lot of these things that made Stripe such an incredible company and And the list goes like on and on.

1:46:16Paul Scherer:I think Steve Jobs is obviously, you know, in many ways built incredibly magical products that like a lot of have changed the world and like a lot of people's lives in very meaningful ways. And, you know, Dieter Rams, who's like a designer who actually lives in my hometown. Really? Yeah. I'd probably seen video of your hometown

1:46:37Akshay Kothari:in the documentary then maybe.

1:46:39Paul Scherer:He's got a beautiful house. He's incredible. And like he - You never met him? um you have my my grandpa's a good friend of my grandpa who now lives in like the same building with my my grandpa lives in uh was his boss and he was like uh the ceo of brown during that time wow um and so we've uh you know interact with with all of them like a bit and just like i mean

1:47:02Akshay Kothari:before i even knew what that was and did it have a field day with whatever this is um yeah uh he

1:47:08Paul Scherer:he would um and he's he's such a uh incredible but but at the end of the day i think there's there's something to be said about you know all of these people who you know we're we're definitely standing on sort of their shoulders and and again that's what i said you know earlier which is i get to like do this which is like the second greatest privilege of my life but i i get to do it surrounded by these people who have like again without all these people the world that i grew up in would have looked completely different. Like no Pinterest, no Snapchat, no, no iPhones, no, like all of these, you know, I remember my first iPod, like all of these things are, were so influential.

1:47:43Paul Scherer:But then there's like, there's another thing, which is like, I think the greatest creations aren't, you know, um, referential and I, they're, they're not like, you know, I'm not trying to be Apple. I'm trying to be eigen. And, and I think of course, everything I've ever consumed in my entire life. is influencing me and my mind. But I think if you can like pinpoint it and, and if you can, um, and if you can be like, this is the person, um, or I'm trying to copy this here, um, you're kind of doing it wrong. And, and I think that's something that, that why, why sometimes I, when I, when people ask me this question of like, you know, what are the brands that you like try and get inspiration from to do this?

1:48:31Paul Scherer:I don't know. I can't pinpoint it to this one thing. I'm just like trying to figure out what does it mean to be us. And of course, what does it mean to be us is like influenced from all of the stimulation that my brain has experienced in my entire life, but it's not this like one thing. Well, it's not conscious. It's not conscious. And I think if it is conscious, it's like, I don't know if it's the same level of authentic. And I think parts are maybe conscious. And I think I also have like this, um the like i i go back and forth on whether i really disagree or really agree with this like virgil thing of like you know every every creation is just like a three percent change right and just just like but and i still i think you can like marry both which is like it can still be really like subconscious but like of course it's like we're not creating the model right we're not like we're not inventing most of the ui there's like it's kind of like a lot of what's what goes into building this is kind of already out there, right?

1:49:29Paul Scherer:There's like all these books of like sociology, psychology, you know, like storytelling, like there's all these like people who have like thought about things and that sort of subconsciously or sometimes consciously goes into that. And really it's just about like assembling kind of the pieces in like a way that is like, you know, adding like your little bit of like extra piece of grain of salt.

1:49:51Akshay Kothari:Well, I think there's a lot of 3 % that happened for Paul that led to this big thing. and that was a bunch of cascading and when do you wake up and you have a genius idea or a crazy idea I know you don't you're kind of rejecting this a little bit but not as inspiration I'm just curious what your are there any favorite consumer products or experiences that come to mind?

1:50:13Paul Scherer:I love Teenage Engineering I think they're like the absolute pinnacle of like you know contemporary like industrial design they really love what they're doing Their products are deeply thought through and cared about. And I think there's something very rare about it. I know the folks that started it and they're just like on a different level of thinking about it. I think there's not been a lot of great consumer companies. And so there's sort of like not that many cool people who are like contemporary. And I think a lot of the last generation sort of like slightly past their like strive of like, is Instagram still like a great, Instagram where it came out was like really innovative.

1:51:02Paul Scherer:And like they're like, you know, Mikey and Kevin, you really had a lot of thoughts there. And same with like Snapchat, but like now it's sort of they've like established their thing. It's like not, not bad anymore. But I think Teenage Engineering, even though they are actually quite an old brand.

1:51:17Akshay Kothari:What would you say to people, like a lot of, like they make beautiful objects, a lot of venture capitalists with whatever the synthesizer on their wall um what is the

1:51:27Paul Scherer:click below that of why they're great yeah i think they like just you know they're using their own product like it's just like they're they're not just beautiful they're like i always say there's like there's like sort of there's a difference between like design and product which a lot of people don't notice and it's like sort of the difference between if you if you if you were to build a house you know there's like architecture and there's like the finishes of the house right and if you if you want to live in like a 10 out of 10 house you need both right like a 10 out of 10 house that has like really cheap and ugly finishes and it's like painted in this it's like it's like it's not a great house right it's like you wouldn't enjoy living in that house but what's almost more important i would say it's almost like um you know uh you it is like the the the layout right the the the architecture the the the sort of and that's like product right it's like where is um you know how far away is your kitchen from your dining room um you know if you you're something you have like a like a like a like a hallway that's so narrow that you can't open like the two doors at the same time but maybe it's like your laundry room and your bathroom and you kind like you have to like go out of your bathroom close the door like open like that's not a great house to live in even though it's beautiful finishes might be uh amazing and the incredible product is like lived in it's like something that you you know you just know someone cared about you know not just making it look pretty um but making it be a delightful experience to use it And again, there's almost no glory in prevention, which it just, you don't notice it, but you feel, I think you do feel like a, like a, like a sense of like love, which is like very taken care of.

1:53:10Paul Scherer:Yes. Yes. And ease.

1:53:12Akshay Kothari:And my friend Stefango has this idea of, um, in good hands, it's omakase.

1:53:16Paul Scherer:It's like, yeah, exactly. In good hands, because you know, that someone had to really put a lot of love into making that great for you. Yeah. There's like, it's like the same thing with like, you know, the, there's like a surprising in run of detail and reality of like, you know, people had to like actually think this really through. Yes. And they've done that for you, but you don't have to do it anymore.

1:53:36Akshay Kothari:Yes, yeah, Jerry Seinfeld, I always love bringing this up. Jerry Seinfeld said, all art is disguising work, which I think is a, it's a beautiful, like you didn't notice, it's the same as your no glory in preventing prevention. I just have a few more things. Where does your self-belief come from? Why are you so confident?

1:53:57Paul Scherer:i don't know i don't know i've never felt i never thought i was a confident person i i'm sure i am in in some ways i think i i you know sometimes tell the story of like i think i was like a genuinely advanced like you know seven year old kid you know intellectually advanced socially probably like behind but um and so i had this like sense of like everyone was like constantly telling me I was special. And I'm sure that like, you know, by the time I was like 10, all of this completely vanished and it's like, you know, any potential, you know, um, head stuff that I had got vanished. But, um, but it still had this like sense of like, sort of people were telling me I was like special and I was like, I don't think I ever really was.

1:54:46Paul Scherer:Pessimistic about the like future. i always just you know i was paranoid and you know suffering in the present it was what we

1:54:56Akshay Kothari:talked about at the top which is getting to the point where you actually were doing the thing but

1:54:59Paul Scherer:even now right it's like you're just like why are why does this thing take so long like you know why are you know why do you not you know do this better like why does this like with that part of the product suck like why are that's like sort of very like you know just like i'm not content And I was like, there's no fucking way that like 10 years from now, like, you know, you, we're not going to be like, uh, you know, wildly successful in, in, in, in, in, in any such way. I just like that, I don't have like any doubt in that. And it's going to be really difficult and it's going to be, you know, like 10 years from now, you know, I'd be like today, I'd be like, oh, and that would be filled exactly the same, which is like, why is this not, you know, better?

1:55:39Paul Scherer:Why is like, why are we not like pushing harder here? Like, why are, why are we moving so slowly? Right. Like that, like the, the local point doesn't really change, but the, like, um, the long-term, you know, horizon is just like, I've always felt like they're everything always sort of worked out. Like you could just get, I really do believe people can do and get whatever they want. If they just focus, you can get everything, but you can get anything. I really do think you can get anything. and people still to this day don't believe me and then they like like experience it and and we're just like no no like i didn't i didn't just like it was funny because one of the first angel investors was like sorry they can tell with with zach we were just like we were just like talking about it and he was like yeah and he's like no i you didn't get you didn't understand what i wasn't asking you whether or not you wanted to invest in this company i was like asking you how much you wanted to invest in the company like this we've passed this decision and i think there's something about it that um i just really i just decided it i was like i really like zach and i want him to be an investor and so i told him i was like i just really like you and i think you should be part of this journey and um i think you can do these things why eigen the name it there's so many it's like i have to admit that some of this is post hoc like it's like of course um it's a beautiful thing you get to narrativize in reverse yes which the best narratives are always made up and he's like oh we were so smart back then it's like we were just like oh we were just like there's like a thing where we were saying something we really needed a name and um and so we had to come up with a name and we just like really needed that one so and but i think it's a great name because it means so many things that are all kind of relevant so there's like um i mean it means like to be eigen in german like if you say you're eigen and like you're like distinct, like slightly weird, like a unique kind of like character.

1:57:40Paul Scherer:And it also means like, oh, and then obviously there's like, in math, there's like sort of the eigenvalues or the eigenvectors, which are like inherent value. And there's like the eigenspace, which is like, if I like, if I like, wait, this is not a good book to do this with, but if I like turn this like this, right, there's like this axis in the middle, like here, that like stays constant, right? and that's like the eigenspace in the center um it's like the center it's like stable you know constant it's like inherent you know defined in some way and i think that's it's kind of fitting to what we're doing um do you think you're authentic it's a complicated word yeah i think a lot of people say that i think some of the best people are kind of like sponges where you just

1:58:34Paul Scherer:I think I think like authenticity is like you who who are you right what is it like to be authentic means to be truly yourself but like who are you and like what version of yourself you know am I the same version with you that I am with my mom i know but i think i think there's um there's some there's something genuine i think in all of the things that we're doing where you do the things that we you just really believe in and i think that's like something that i've always done and maybe that is authentic which is is never the kind of person to like write like a pros and cons list and be like you know should i like go you know take this opportunity it's like here's like all this and it was good.

1:59:16Paul Scherer:It's like, I always, and my suspicion is that everyone is kind of the same in that we all have this like inner voice. You know, you know what you need to do. And I think adulting in a lot of ways is like learning to not listen to that voice. Just do all these other people, these other things. But I feel like I always just listen to that voice. And everything I've ever done, every major decision was always just like, I was like, okay, I know that it's like, this is just my voice and I just like, I have to do it. And I like followed my heart or whatever you want to call it but it's like it's all about that part and and maybe that's authenticity or maybe that's something else but it's like i feel like i i always and then you know once i stopped believing it i just like very quickly just like i have no nostalgia and this no just like i'm just like this is i don't believe in this anymore i can't i cannot do it i cannot right right you can't fake it i can't fake it and

2:00:16Paul Scherer:And I think that might be authenticity.

2:00:21Akshay Kothari:You have these two metaphors around learning and maybe finger feel to use a Brie idea. The first is the smelling versus tasting bread. And the second is the iPad takes. Can you talk about this?

2:00:30Paul Scherer:Well, it was always, I always like, um, it was a very German thing to do of just like making up these like crazy metaphors, but I always was, I've been kind of like doing startups since i was like you know 16 17 years old so like what the last um six six years or something like that and i was always like really like early like not founder but like sort of like just after the founder um and like very generalist so kind of like a very like founder like role with a lot of like control you know and an impact on the company and so i kind of naturally always just assumed as like, I'm kind of like a founder, right?

2:01:11Paul Scherer:I just like know how this works. And I was like, well, this is like, you know, it's like, I'm, I'm like a founder, right? It's like kind of like the same as like, you know, and then I like became a founder. And it was like, I was like, well, so, you know, I, I, you know, I was really experienced in smelling bread and I was like, and I'm all around bread, right?

2:01:34Akshay Kothari:All around. I know all about bread.

2:01:35Paul Scherer:Yeah. I know all about bread. I'd smelled it, but I'd like never tasted it. and then i like i took a big bite and i was like this is very different it's not i'm not actually you know it's like now and it's like it's maybe like in the same way that um you know you are um when you you know how you think it is going to be to have kids versus to actually have kids right it's like just something you can like you can you think you know but then you actually be like okay i had no idea yeah um or at least that's what i think i mean i don't know i've never had kids and i think part of it is is to that you know and that these are sort of the ipad takes which is like in very similar ways like kind of similar way to describing or like it's different way to describe the similar thing which is you know there's like and i joke about this a lot with sarah because there's like these whenever you go to like a coffee shop or cafe or something and there's like you know some parents with like little kids and it's like in front of an ipad and And everyone is like, how could you give your kid an iPad?

2:02:36Paul Scherer:Which is probably, you know, globally true. It's probably not very good for like a five-year-old to spend 10 hours a day just like looking at an iPad. But then you have kids and they're like really fucking annoying. And like they yell all day, you know, they scream and shout and do all these things. And you're just like tired, right? And you're like, what? And you know there's this like thing that you can give it to them and they're going to shut up. Ultimate password. And, and, and so it's very easy if you don't have kids to be like, well, can you imagine someone do this? Right. But then you have kids and you're like in this, and I think there's a lot of these things with founding too, where it's like very easy for these people on the sidelines to be like, you know, this is the perfect company.

2:03:16Paul Scherer:And how, how can you like, um, it was like, you're like, you know, it's almost like any, any kind of organization has this, you still have this as like an early stage star versus like the latest. So it was like, like these companies like, we're never going to have PMs. And at some point, eventually they're all going to hire PMs. Cause it was like, okay, we like, we figured out that like, this was a really nice, you know, this was really nice when we were like 10 people, but now we're like 200 people and like, everything is like going on. We just need, really need a PM. Right. And it's like, these are, I think iPad takes like kind of all of these, um, these like really like, um, generalized, you know, pieces of advice, like, you know, PMs are bad now.

2:03:53Paul Scherer:By the way, I don't even know really what a PM is. I never worked at like a large company, but just like this idea of like PMs are bad. You can't have like meetings or you can't have like, the one thing that I like learned is like, anything works. Like you as a founder get to like set gravity, right? Earth's gravity. And your planet's gravity can be 20, it can be like minus 10, it can be one. The only thing that matters is that it's like consistent. And like every day you show up and it's like, it's whatever you set it to. And horrible things happen if you're like inconsistent in it. But as long as you're consistent, it can be literally anything.

2:04:27Paul Scherer:And there's like incredibly successful founders who are like the most insane micromanagers in the world. There's like incredibly successful founders who like do not give a shit and are like very hands off. And it's like, there's no rule. If there was a rule, all these people that are talking about the rules would actually go build very large companies because that's much, much more, you know, profitable if it was this easy than to just like talk about rules, right? Like there'd be like so many books of like the ultimate recipe, just follow these steps and you're going to build a large company here.

2:04:54Paul Scherer:I figured it out for you. There are a lot of those books. There are a lot of these books, but none of these books work because there aren't any rules other than that you just have to figure out what works for you and ideally be authentic. And so there's a lot of these iPad hacks where it's like, okay, I'm not going to have PMs. And then really PMs, and you're just like, you grow up, you have kids, you're like, shit, it is really appealing to give them an iPad. And maybe you should have some empathy for that. And once you sort of eat the bread, you come to realize that um smelling bread isn't everything there's uh this is water by

2:05:26Akshay Kothari:david foster wallace is on your virtual shelf why is that meaningful it's one of my favorites

2:05:31Paul Scherer:it's so good it's like it's kind of is very similar to this in some ways it's about like this like the the like you know like sander believes of like you know and just like kind of pushing back on that a bit and being like yeah there's like a very almost like you know there's like almost like absurdist slash amusing and like fun way of like you know looking at things like this doesn't matter but like that's kind of cool and then there's obviously the sad part which is that like he's very depressed and like ended up killing himself and like all of all of these things which obviously is like often very close together when you're like look at the world and like a very um you know almost nihilistic but i don't mean it from again the negative sense of things, but just like, okay, there's no, no purpose or no bigger thing, um, that, that he believed in.

2:06:23Paul Scherer:But, but I, I think there's something, um, in that there's something beautiful in that, which is, there's like a beauty and a magic and, and we don't quite know. And I think, um, and I think it, it means that, you know, the things matter much less. and you know there's like we are in this like in this very limited scope perception of reality um what we you know one of the most you know transforming experiences is to like rent a car in san francisco and like drive 30 minutes north and it's just like there's like there's like there's like woodworkers and like farmers and these like 30 minutes right it's 30 minutes of San Francisco that have like um you know nothing to do with with tech and they're just like in you know Marin County or like Napa or whatever and it's just like um and they're like you know reality is so different than our reality and like the things they think about and they care about they're worried about are like so different and and and that's like you know like like you can fly to a and content is like, it's like 10 times that a hundred times that.

2:07:36Paul Scherer:Right. And the, but yet we're in this like really small scope reality of taking all of the things that are in our head so incredibly seriously, um, that it can like mire us. And like, almost like put in this, like, uh, you know, position of like not being able to do anything because we're so, you know, taking these so seriously, but some other people would think it's completely ridiculous because it was like, it's like, it's like, I think what I like about, you know, David Forrest-Devallo's in lots of ways is very similar to like you know Carl Sagan's pale blue dot of like you know it's just it's perspective everything is about perspective everything is about that was what I alluded to earlier I mean I think in some sense what you're doing is the the key is getting out from

2:08:15Akshay Kothari:under yourself and like the reason oftentimes people are alone and they don't belong is that they're looking at all the reasons the world isn't like meeting them where they're at yeah and and I what I always loved about this is water is that it's like you got to find you can either worship something related to yourself or you can find something else yeah i think like you know there's

2:08:34Paul Scherer:like this not not to be political but there's just like this like perception of like saying that you can do anything is a very privileged take and like a very like well but you know you had all this like privilege and like you came from whatever you didn't have to worry about like getting food and but but i always found that you know very limiting way of looking at it because basically for two reasons. One is like, I think it can be really empowering. You know, it's like, if you're not happy with where you are, you know, it's like, and if you say, you know, even if you, if you go as far as saying, well, that might be your fault because you, you, you, the actions you took so far are really bad.

2:09:10Paul Scherer:It's actually really empowering because it means you're a few great decisions away from, from like that not being the case anymore. And it's not actually about someone else. It's like, it's in your power and you know, whether or not that's true largely is like a different question, but, but it is really empowering to like, like, like feel about, you know feel like that and it's also like much more productive right because like the best way of staying in a situation that you don't enjoy is like being like it's i i'm like if it if it wasn't your fault that you're in that position you're also unable to leave that position and that's really sad and so i think um you know of course there's like differences and some people have like an easier time getting to place but like but everyone has like some sort of like power over what are the decisions they take.

2:09:55Paul Scherer:And I think, you know, I think there's something, if you have that perspective, like, no, actually it's like none of these things really are true. I just like get to, like our mutual friend, Sayan, is like such a great example of that, of just like, no, actually I get to like create my reality. And it's really true. Like, it's like, she can just do that. And it's like, you meet Sayan and you're like, there's like, not in a hundred years, this wouldn't have worked, right? Like there's like, you know, she, you could drop her anywhere like 300 ,000 times and it would always work out because she just like really believes that you can create your own reality um and i think more people should should believe that i like to ask people we talk about big regrets what are you most glad you did i think there is like a really profound period of August, September, you know, November, like last year, um, where I went from like outsider you, you know, to like, at like a kind of like a scary speed from a complete rando.

2:11:06Paul Scherer:it was like i knew no one in san francisco i was building this like weird thing um and to like you know now i'm just like this this monday i was like texting ben i was like oh i'm thinking through this thing and choose a he spent like two hours with me at the office thinking about the founder of pinterest thinking about like how we should build product and like i text like good stuff the ceo of spotify and be like we've been thinking about music recommendations and then it's like i kind of wonder can we get this api it's like that like where it's become so normalized also in my life so quickly where i'm just like not even i have something like call a friend from before and because i was like talking with good stuff about this and he was like what what just that's kind of crazy and i don't know how that happened like i don't this is like like i think this is like a very profound period of like maybe it was just peter saying yes and just you know uh and like all of these things that came downstream but i i really do think it was it was more because there was like people before you know um uh you know met gustav pre um pre benchmark for example and like there's like you know the this period of just like sort of like really going out and for the first time being maybe like fully authentic because it wasn't for another company but it was just like you know here's the thing i'm creating and like and and obviously the way i talk about it has like changed so much over like the last few months um but i think i think maybe a lot of people should have the courage to like you know one of i told you about steven perone like my first very first angel investor and i remember talking with with him about this you know just before so it was like it must have been like in august you know late august or something like that and i think you know maybe what changed sure what happened is that like if you go out and you meet a lot of people and you just like um courageously tell them about the world you're creating fearlessly telling about the world you're creating without any like expectation and without that being any like i don't need to convince you i'm just like i'm just telling you without fear just pure car here's here's the world i'm that's what i see and and i wonder what would happen if like more people did that that's like a

2:13:26Akshay Kothari:powerful message. I think a courage is the operative word. I think courage is in short supply. And I think my suspicion would happen for you is that you had a strong and unique point of view. It was a little bit strange and that's very attractive. Even if it's incomplete, it's, it's, it's dialing into focus. Uh, one last thing you've tweeted consumer products tend to be the result of character deficiencies of their founders. And I asked a mutual friend of ours, you know who, what I should ask you if they had a question for you, if he had a question for you. He said, I'd ask him if he's building me to be vulnerable with people so that he doesn't have to be.

2:14:09Akshay Kothari:He wants me to be this social bridge that connects everyone, but he so notoriously guarded himself. So I want to know if I'm basically just doing his emotional heavy lifting.

2:14:22Paul Scherer:that's a great it's a great question um that's funny um yeah i don't know if i can like disagree with that i do think there's something in that i think people

2:14:39Paul Scherer:it's a it's a thing that actually um kate peter's wife i stole from her um and she must have had this like incredible outlook on like social founders throughout the year or something. And maybe there's probably there's a pattern there.

2:15:00Akshay Kothari:I think you're on your way. Yes, we all are. Thank you, Paul. Thank you. Once again, I'd like to thank Notion for presenting Dialectic. Notion is pushing limits on what we can do together with AI. And thanks to custom agents, you and your team can have an entire suite, an army of little guys who help you focus on the work that counts. Being able to have access to agents inside of the context where everything else for your team and your work lives is remarkably powerful. For Dialectic, that allows me to take the place where I have all my research and my ideas and my notes, synthesize them with transcripts and everything else, and be able to provide it for you guys in a way that enriches the experience, hopefully, of listening to Dialectic while I get to focus on the important thing, which is immersing myself in the minds of amazing, original, interesting people and having these conversations with them.

2:15:49Akshay Kothari:My friend Brie Wolfson, who's also close with Paul, recently wrote a piece on Notion called Inside Notion for Colossus with her collaborator Camille. It talks all about how Notion is reinventing itself from the ground up for the AI age to allow teams and individuals to do incredible work with immense leverage thanks to agents. If you enjoyed the episode, please give it five stars or subscribe or like wherever you're watching. Once again, thanks to Notion. That's notion.com slash dialectic. And I will see you guys next time.