47: Paul Scherer - A Friend That Brings Us Closer

[00:00] creating like a person that is uniquely incentivized straight belonging and connection in the world we know more people than ever before but at the same time we are like much less meaningfully connected the share of american we have like zero close friends went from like three percent to fifteen percent like half of american adults report being lonely feeling lonely is the equivalent to like smoking 15 cigarettes a day half of america smoking 15 cigarettes a day the world that is like completely isolated is like a world in which humans go extinct i've said explicitly you're building a mutual friend what are you trying to do it goes back to like a lot [00:30] 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 you actually do is like a mutual friend and then i like usually like add you know some version of what we just talked about and then they're just like oh you're building a mutual friend and i was like yes i've been telling you i think a lot of what we're thinking about and what we're creating starts actually counterintuitively not with the friend part but the mutual part you think you're authentic my suspicion is that everyone is kind of the same in that we all have this like inner [01:00] listen to that voice. 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. And maybe that's authenticity. Maybe that's something else. Welcome to Dialectic episode 47 with Paul Scherer. Paul is the founder of Eigen, a new company building a mutual friend for the world. [01:22] That might sound bizarre. It kind of is. But I was thrilled to sit down with Paul after being introduced to him by a few people I really respect to talk about his crazy vision for a way that AI might actually...

[01:36] make us less antisocial and instead bring us together by being somebody that, uh, [01:42] we all know, and who creates social serendipity in our lives. [01:48] Pretty early on, the product's in private beta, and so we weren't able to talk about everything, but we were able to dive a lot into the substance of what it is, the philosophy behind why Paul and his team are working on it, [02:02] in the ways that this introduces just a crazy new range of design problems for teaching, parenting, growing a [02:10] sort of person that we might all know and that could actually make us closer to each other. Paul is very early on. He is young. I'm sure there are things he doesn't know, but I have to respect his conviction, his point of view. [02:24] And the way [02:25] he is authentically trying to bring something to the world that he thinks it needs. [02:30] I hope you enjoy my conversation with Paul. [02:33] Before we end the episode, I'd like to thank Notion, Dialectics, presenting partner. [02:37] Notion's co-founder, Akshay Kothari, is actually the one who introduced me to Paul. And so I'm thrilled to bring these two worlds together. Notion is a collaborative workspace for your life's work. And over the last year has totally evolved itself into becoming a platform and a hub for the agents that help you and your team do great work. [02:56] Notion also made a bunch of new announcements on its developer platform recently. I'll link to that in the description. And the way that they're pushing what you can do with agents is really remarkable. And certainly if you haven't used Notion in a while, probably goes far and beyond what you can imagine for what's possible with Notion and with agents. You can learn more at notion.com slash dialectic. I highly recommend you checking out what is now possible as Notion has built AI in from the ground up.

[03:26] Paul Sher. [03:27] Paul Scherer, thank you for having me here. We're in the Eigenoffice. [03:32] pretty specific type of space we have, you've curated for yourself. [03:37] Yeah, it's really nice. We're very happy here. It's like... It's always like... [03:42] I think it's really important. I think a lot of people underestimate the power of space. We've spent a lot of time here. [03:50] you know, [03:51] I think we spend much more time here than at home, so it's got to feel really great. [03:54] Well, I want to start by talking about this book that I had to hunt down, Momo. [04:00] a book that's referenced in your video. And [04:03] Either it was a good story or seemingly it was very influential to you when you were young. It's a children's book. And in reading some of it, it seems to me that there were a few ideas that really stood out. [04:14] The first is time and playing this idea of past, present and future. Second is presence, obviously an extension of that. [04:21] The third is listening. [04:22] which obviously relates to presence. And then the fourth is friendship. And so there's this smattering ideas that I think inform a lot of the other stuff we're going to talk about today. Yeah. But I'm curious why, [04:33] What about this book? [04:35] stuck with you. I don't know when you first read it. I assume you were quite young. [04:38] Yeah, my dad read it to me. I was like, I don't know, I was like eight or 10 or something like that. And it's like you read it again in like school and it's like it's kind of like a thing in Germany. [04:47] I think one of the things that really... [04:51] I think is very true, is just like... They have this concept of time thieves. And I think it's really interesting because the book is from 1973. And so it's like... Why have it felt pretty modern, though? Well, this is the crazy thing. It's like pre-internet...

[05:03] pre-social media, pre-real personal computers or anything. It was at a time where there was a bunch of computers, but most people didn't have a computer, right? And so it just feels like... [05:15] Every year since then, it's become more relevant because it just describes so accurately the world we live in. Everything is just about efficiency, and it's about... [05:25] Um, [05:26] You know, there's no... [05:28] There wouldn't be time for Momo in this world, right? Like, people don't care. It's like, you know, how does this help me, you know, get... [05:34] Um, [05:36] more efficient or more productive or whatever. And I think it's always a sign of great... [05:44] work if it becomes more and more and more relevant over time. And I [05:51] I know. I give it to a lot of people, and a lot of people really resonate with it. [05:55] You are a striver. I don't know if that's a perfect word, but it's probably a representative word, at least of this city, of this industry, of doing startups at all. You're someone who dropped out of high school when you were 17. Do you feel like you're running out of time? [06:10] I used to feel like that more I don't know Um [06:16] I don't... [06:17] I haven't felt like that in a while. I think it's like... [06:20] I think, you know... [06:24] For the first time, I feel like we're doing the thing, and there's no real alternative. I was doing all these other things, and I'm still restless, but I feel like there's...

[06:37] There's no, there's like no way out. [06:39] Like, I couldn't, like... [06:40] go and be like, okay, great. Like, let's, you know, whatever, do anything. Something else is like, this is the thing. And it's like... [06:46] And so you sort of stop feeling like you... [06:49] like you're running out of time because it's like there's no you're you're you're actually playing your game and it's like and that's just the game and the game is like you have to play it and it's like it wouldn't be fun if you wouldn't have to play it. [07:00] And... [07:01] But before I was feeling like I was playing the game, it was like, yeah, okay, I need to play the game. I need to get to the thing. Exactly. [07:07] Mmm. [07:09] I like that. Yeah, there is a way that... [07:13] It's not quite abundance, but there's something about once you've kind of found the thing, you're like... [07:16] And I'm sure you're antsy in a whole bunch of ways around progressing this thing. Yeah. But it's like, oh, yeah, I'm where I'm supposed to be. [07:24] I call it like, you know, like... [07:27] I was talking about this with Akshay a while ago, and I was like, it's like short-term paranoia, but like long-term, like, everything is exactly the way it should be. It's like... [07:40] What about listening? It's kind of the anchor, almost this character, this little girl. I don't know if she's a little girl. She's a girl who lives in the village that they go to. And the reason they're initially skeptical, the reason they're so... [07:52] Um, they're able to be so present with her, all these things that she helps people deal with their beef, whatever is, she's just this amazing listener. Um, yeah. [08:02] And maybe there's an element of this... [08:04] We'll talk more about it. Like, you are someone who certainly has a...

[08:09] observational lens on human beings and the way people behave and are going to behave. But I'm curious if there's any thread there that felt resonant. [08:17] I think, like, what's so interesting is, like... [08:20] She's like the polar opposite of the Time Thieves, right? So the reason she... [08:25] It's almost like [08:27] less about [08:29] the listening and more about... [08:31] the [08:32] you know, the presence of, [08:34] But she's like the... [08:35] manifestation of like presence. Yes. Yeah. And, and she listens so well to, [08:40] because she doesn't look at her phone. She doesn't feel like, oh, I have this meeting 15 minutes from now, and I'm looking at my watch, and I'm like, I should probably need to go. And it's like, she's just there with you 100%. [08:55] And I think that's like, that's the, that is like, that's like so antithetical to the time thieves, because it's like, they're like the manifestation of like, you know, you have to go, there's like, everything needs to be like, and so she's just like fully there. And I think that's. [09:09] something that is very rare because we all have, you know, so many things that are happening that are like, you know, [09:17] trying to get our attention, trying to pull us in. And also so much like... Not all of this is like bad, right? It's like there's a lot of opportunity, a lot of things that you could be doing at any given point in time. And so to be somewhere... [09:32] really present without thinking about... The best listeners... [09:37] The hard thing about listening is you have to listen instead of thinking about what you're going to say next.

[09:43] Right. [09:45] And that's a really hard thing to do because you have to be truly present without any almost like... [09:50] And he's skin in the game of like... [09:52] I need to achieve this or that or so. It's just like, I need to... [09:56] you know, tell them, you know, like, how great I am, or, like, you know, that's, like, when you don't really listen, but you're just, like, okay, how can I, like... [10:02] can you give me something that I can then like say the thing that I want to say? Um, and I think that's like, [10:08] really interesting because she's just... [10:10] I wonder if nonchalant is the right word, but she's just there. There's a sense of ease. [10:19] And I think that's really... [10:20] remarkable. [10:22] Um... [10:24] Maybe that last bit, which is... [10:26] friendship we're going to talk a lot more about friendship [10:29] You grew up in a remote place. What does it mean to be a friend? [10:33] The... [10:36] I don't know if there's like one definition that like works for every person. I certainly don't have it. [10:42] I think there's like... [10:44] a few different themes. I think like Great France [10:48] help you rediscover yourself. [10:51] Um, [10:52] But there are also... [10:53] expansive [10:55] And like, and like surprising and delightful ways. And they add new things. Yes. [10:59] And so there's really these two elements, right? There's like, they ground you in who you are. Yeah. [11:05] but they also like push you and there's like deeper and wider. Right. Right. [11:10] Mm-hmm. [11:11] Maybe first of all, like I briefly just alluded to it, you grew up in a place where

[11:15] as I understand it, that is quite remote, or at the very least quite small, not that far from Frankfurt, but not in the center of things. [11:23] Now you're in San Francisco, you are in the center of things. How has the internet changed your life, and particularly on the dimension of relationships and people? [11:31] Thank you. [11:32] I think every single person... [11:36] you know, bar or [11:41] Samuel... [11:43] And my parents. [11:45] That is in my life. I wouldn't have Matt without the internet. [11:48] I think I was like 19 or 20, probably, you know, I think it was like 20 years old when I met the first venture capitalist. Maybe I was 21. And it's like. [11:58] I didn't know what that was or there was like no, you know, there's like the, this world that did not like exist in my, in my like world, I didn't know about it. And so I, [12:12] And neither, you know, did, like, anyone in my, like... Like, there's no one that I met that was, like, oh, here... You weren't one step removed from it, right? Yes. And so... [12:23] um... [12:24] Without the Internet, I think... [12:26] I definitely wouldn't be here. [12:28] And then all of these relationships, or so many of these relationships, are first or second order effective, just like meeting people on Twitter. Honestly, Twitter. It's like, I met, a while ago I met one of the founders of Twitter. It was very, you know... [12:43] transformative, like, you know, so it's like a bit like Meteor here, because it's like, not even here, it was just almost a spiritual experience of like, this person, so...

[12:52] in such a profound way, like changed and shaped my life. [12:56] In such a big way that I don't even know if I could recognize me as a person. [13:02] without that thing. Mm-hmm. [13:05] I've had a similar experience with that website in particular. Um, [13:09] What about [13:11] Twitter. Well, maybe first of all, were you as a kid or growing up, especially before you started to tap into this, were you a social kid? Were you lonely? [13:21] I wasn't very... I was like Marmite, always. People either really... [13:28] I always made friends with some teachers. And so some teachers always really, really liked me. And then some really hated me. And then I always had trouble with people my age. It was kind of difficult, usually. The older I got, the easier it became directionally. [13:45] But it was never... Kindergarten, it was easier. It was like... [13:49] I was never fully, fully lonely, but there was like... [13:53] I was also, I was never popular, but I was, I really deeply wanted to be popular. [13:59] Um, [13:59] and but i was not at all and and you know reflecting on me as i i it was it was very obvious that i wasn't popular i was like i i there's a lot of like social strategies that i did not know about and i was like if i i think there's like there's a lot of reasons of why i wasn't popular um it was uh it was it was always like um like that and then yeah the older the older i got the more easy it became and then you just said i left um

[14:25] school and you know it's like sort of you start I always was like hanging out with like older people um and then it's just started working and so like immediately everyone there was like 30 plus and so that just became my what about twitter or what about the internet [14:39] allowed you to find... [14:42] whatever. [14:44] Because the next thing I want to talk about, maybe to turn the corner on it, is like... [14:49] in what ways the internet has failed us as this connective tissue, but I'm first interested in the ways that it's actually, like why was Twitter for you at that time, why did it work and what did you find there that was good? [15:01] I mean, I was on Twitter... [15:04] a lot more. [15:05] during... [15:07] you know, the height of the pandemic where everyone was on Twitter and it was like kind of the greatest place on earth because like all these cool people had nothing to do other than being on Twitter. That and go about us, right? Yeah, exactly. [15:19] Um, [15:20] Thank you. [15:20] And so that was really great. And I actually went on Twitter... It was actually the wildest thing. I was like, at the time, I... [15:28] started like a like a tech block and i was like i'm gonna write about like you know like these tech gadgets or software things that i really liked and i wrote like two articles and i was like oh well no one is reading this like how am i gonna get this like to promote this and then i was like maybe i'm just gonna tweet about it and so i created a twitter account and i you know it was like um [15:51] It was like, yeah, I created my Twitter account. It's 2021 or something. I don't remember. And...

[15:58] you started just like sharing this article and it's like kept going what did you write about these articles like really just like yubi keys and like one password there's like the most reviewing them yeah it was the most obnoxious thing in the world and that is not the most obnoxious thing in the world it's obscure but it's definitely not secure it's not if not it's you're right some people might think what you're doing now is obnoxious we'll get to that but you guys yeah to be honest yeah it's obscure it was an obscure obsession for like this like uh kid to like write [16:28] really great. Anyway, so I wrote this and I'm trying to promote [16:32] the blog. And within like five days, I was like, fuck the blog. Like, this is really cool. And I actually started like meeting people there. And it was like, there was this like, there's like, I remember there was this guy from, um, [16:44] from Ghana, actually, who's like, I think he now has like 20 or 30,000 followers on Twitter or something. And we like, we like somehow like met and we had like, I had like 200 followers and he had like 300 or something. And we just like DM'd and then we like, it'd be like this whole thing. And I spent 12 hours a day on Twitter. And I have like 20,000 tweets and replies from that three month period or something. And I was just like, I would like send emails. [17:06] 600 replies a day to tweets. All of a sudden, the first tweet had over 1,000 likes or something, the biggest rush. Then all of a sudden, there would be all these entrepreneurs. I remember there was the COO of ClickUp or something, liking and commenting on my marketing. I was a 17-year-old kid. I had no experience whatsoever. I was like, here's how you should market yourself.

[17:29] The COO of ClickUp was like, that's really great advice. That's a lot about Twitter, honestly. [17:36] that does say a lot about Twitter. You know, deeply researched. You know, it's like... And then, yeah, I think people start [17:46] You're DMing, and I actually, I sold this, like, I had this, like, digital product that I sold, which was called the Twitter DM Mastery. And for a while... It's like a course? [17:55] Exactly. For a while, I was the self-proclaimed king of DMs. I think for the first... [18:04] 5,000 followers. I DM'd every single follower. I, like, manually would be like, hey, like, I'd, like, thanks for it. Like, I appreciate the support, whatever. [18:12] And that's how I met a lot of the people. Yeah. And... [18:17] And then I wrote like a book about this, which actually is like, I actually still think it's probably like a lot of people should read this because it's just like, it's very like, I mean, book is a strong word. It was like, [18:26] 20 pages or something. A great PDF. Yes. On DMing. On DMing people. It was like a whole scheme. Anyways, so I did that, and then I think that's just how I met Ariel. [18:40] That's how I met Caleb. [18:42] who then like all of these things later turned into, you know, working with different kinds of companies and all that. Many of us have had positive experiences, um, [18:51] whether they be Twitter or elsewhere. And there's a romantic idea about the way the internet used to be or what it was meant to be. It should be the best... [18:59] connective tissue in the history of the world. And yet many people feel

[19:03] The opposite. You've talked about [19:05] What happened when we conflated or combined social and media? What is social and what is media? [19:11] In this context, at least. I think in this context... [19:15] You know, media is like, you know, maybe could be defined as like popular content, which is like, right, if you scroll on Instagram, it's actually not about your friends, right? It's like, it's about... [19:28] It's about popular content or popular people. So it could be a reel that is going viral from a random account, but you don't know that account. Neither do your friends. [19:38] It could be a celebrity, but it's... And social is much more about your social graph, like who are the people that you know. And I think if you sort of... A lot of the... [19:50] And interaction paradigms of these platforms are originally used to be much more social, which is like it's all about sharing a story with your friend or – [20:01] posting something and all your friends are going to see it. But actually now, it's become much more media, which there are reasons for that. [20:10] And it's all about incentives. They didn't do that... [20:14] Instagram wasn't there being like, "That wouldn't be cool if we were really evil and we made it all about that." They were just like, "Well, that just works." It's really hard to get a lot of people to share content, for example. One of the issues is that [20:30] your friends are probably much worse at creating engaging content than someone who's really good at creating engaging content. Right, right, right. It's not a totally common experience, but I think...

[20:39] across different boxes, whether it be Twitter or Instagram or other modern things or forums in the past or what IRC or whatever. Um, [20:47] Thank you. [20:48] 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, like... [20:56] social doesn't necessarily mean people you already know. [21:00] Yes, that's true. Can you talk a little bit about that distinction? In theory... [21:07] 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... [21:14] who you knew, [21:15] Um, [21:17] It wasn't just about what you were interested in. It was about [21:20] Getting to know people by way of what you were interested in. [21:23] Yeah, I think that's... [21:26] I think that's true. [21:29] And really, you know, there's like this like discovery aspect of like, 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. 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, you know, [21:49] there might not be someone who's absolutely obsessed with, I don't know, plants. There may be. I mean, this might be a more common obsession. But on the internet, there's millions of people who are. And so there's definitely... [22:03] an aspect of like feeling like belongingness in that because you're [22:07] You have so much... [22:08] more reach,

[22:10] and find the other weirdos you can find the other weirdos [22:14] That creates a very long tail. That sort of then is one of the reasons that we as a group have much... Because we're able to go into much more of these individualist pursuits. Because there's so much... [22:31] The tail is just so much longer than it would be in a city. That's not intuitively antisocial to me. [22:39] Like, in theory, it should lead to the long tail of a million... Like, let a million communities bloom of weird niches. Totally. I think the... These aren't, like, mutually exclusive, but the problem is, like, you're... [22:51] the things that you consume shift towards a more, at least locally, [22:56] isolating people [22:58] view, right? Because your Twitter feed is like filled with people that are [23:03] obsessed with plants, right? But they might not at all be in your local, like, actual, like, in-person, like, proximity. Yeah. And... [23:12] And so all the people you interact with in person on a day-to-day have their own isolated feet of these types of people. [23:20] And then you have much less of a bridging experience where you could like... [23:28] go to your office and [23:30] and there'd be this thing that everyone knows about. Like the Global Village. [23:35] water cooler or [23:36] Talking about reality TV or... Yeah, exactly. Like, it's like... Moon landing. Moon landing or, you know, 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? Right. Where you'd be like, oh, wow, like 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 like people are like, what are you talking about? Right. And that's like the problem, right? You can do it in San Francisco a little bit with Twitter. Yeah.

[24:06] is do you think personalization of everything is just fundamentally inevitable? [24:12] Really, that's what this is about, right? It's like what technology has gotten really, really good at. [24:16] where they're guarding our attention, is personalized, is just tuning it, [24:20] to being exactly Paul shaped. [24:22] And that is causing this context collapse that you're pointing at. Yes. [24:28] I don't know if anything is inevitable like that. [24:31] I think it's definitely, there's a good reason for it, and it's not... [24:36] it's not like completely bad, right? There's like great, [24:39] things about stuff being personalized to you. I think... I ultimately do think that people... [24:45] are craving [24:47] like social, right? It's like you don't want... [24:51] In some cases you do, but in many cases you actually don't want... [24:56] the take or recommendation or whatever that's personalized just for you. You also don't want the monocultural average take of the world [25:04] You want the take from the people that you care about. [25:07] Right. Right. [25:09] Thank you. [25:11] Um, [25:12] I want to talk a little bit about what you are making, but before we quite get there, [25:17] you have this view that like much of what we were just discussing, um, [25:23] there's all these tailwinds. We are more isolated. People are more alone. Derek Thompson's gone crazy on this. People aren't having kids, all this stuff. And it seems like your instinct is that [25:33] This is, as many people believe, this is driven by technology.

[25:39] you have used some variation of the phrasing. The world needs this, um, in terms of what you're doing. Um, um, [25:46] And there are two maybe cuts on what... [25:48] interesting views or unique views you have, um, [25:51] I think they are... [25:52] One being, [25:54] thinking about friendship in a slightly new way. And then the other is this idea that AI as it currently stands is pretty antisocial. [26:01] And I think those two things go together. Maybe one strange cut on this is... [26:06] that opens the door is like... [26:09] We all talk about AI. [26:11] as like crypto or VR or whatever. Um, [26:15] The one person I've noticed who doesn't talk about it like that is Kevin Kelly. Kevin, former editor of Wired Magazine and a bunch of other things. Kevin talks about AIs. [26:24] which is a subtle but important difference. And it does point at maybe this future of a world where there are, [26:31] Many of us are talking to AIs of some kind. And it seems like your core view is that [26:38] Based on how everything is going, um... [26:42] we are going to be talking to AIs alone in our rooms. [26:47] First of all, [26:49] Thank you. [26:49] What would you say to the people who are still skeptical of the notion of... You seem pretty convinced that we're all going to be talking to AIs. Or AI, or whatever. A lot of the people in our direct... [27:00] Um... [27:01] proximity, I'm already talking to AI all day. Like every single one of our engineers. Maybe they would say I'm using Claude.

[27:10] Yes, but we are already communicating with it. And Samuel sometimes swears at it and is like, what are you doing? It's just like, why are you going to make... Samuel's one of your first employees. There's a bit of a difference... [27:23] in the... [27:25] interaction paradigm from like... [27:28] you know, software in terms of like, I always like, I always ask people whether or not they say thank you to like, [27:33] Are you like someone who says thank you? I don't always say thank you. [27:36] I'd say thank you probably less than I used to. [27:39] But I try to every once in a while. Yeah, just to make sure we're on the good books. When it does a really good job. Yeah, it inevitably takes over the world. It goes extra mile. And we can just like, we'll be on the good books. Can you say thank you? [27:50] I sometimes do. I try to, yeah. But that's like a ridiculous... [27:56] bang, right? Or like, 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 like a lot of education software or products, because [28:13] previously it was really, really difficult to build, for example, products for like [28:18] you know, the basic, like, you came 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, you know, [28:30] 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 skew 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 looked 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 did 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

[29:00] and it's like, it doesn't feel real. And... [29:04] And I think what's really interesting... [29:06] is that the... [29:09] A.I. speak. [29:12] human language. [29:14] And so the interaction paradigm is the exact same that we all have been learning ever since we were born. [29:22] in interacting with other people. There's like, you know, you can build a trust in that it can understand your intent and it can like, you know, relate and... [29:31] And I think that... [29:33] really changes a lot of things where it's like, it's like, will my grandpa ever fully adopt... [29:39] internet technologies. I don't know. But I actually think it's not... [29:44] unlikely that he'll like [29:46] 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. [29:57] He's more human-shaped. [29:58] In a way that almost necessary, like it's almost necessary that we anthropomorphize it. [30:04] Maybe not necessary, but it's almost inevitable that we anthropomorphize it. [30:09] We already kind of anamorphosed it because we talked... [30:12] languages with chatGBT and... [30:17] And he has a voice. [30:21] All of these things are very niche, and they're not... There's a small minority that is currently feeling like that, but the GBT4-0 thing of how many people got...

[30:32] I don't know that that's a small minority. But I think it's largely a small minority. There's this stat. A lot of people are doing it, but yes. There's a stat which I'm sure you've seen of all these dots of millions of people. And there's all these gray dots. And there's a few green dots, which are people that use AI for free. And it's like... [30:55] 2% of the world or something. I don't know. We are very, very early in this. And I think it's easy to forget that when you are around people who are like, we are in this industry and in this industry. [31:07] very specific place where [31:11] Everyone is somehow billions of dollars deep into really believing that this is everything today. And I think it's probably not, but it's going to be so much more in like... [31:22] 10 years from now, but stuff just takes time usually to like... [31:25] become meaningful. I always have this thing where [31:30] Um... [31:31] People just right now on Twitter... [31:34] There's a different take on Twitter trending every couple of weeks. And right now, it seems to be that product is dead. It's been automated away. Anthropics got this. Right? It's like... [31:45] 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 JVT dropped. I don't know that there's a single new product in my life other than... [31:55] the LLM itself and then for enterprises like ClotCode. 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 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 somewhere too. You can build a

[32:22] 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 – [32:29] I don't know. I think it's just [32:32] sort of these consumer builders, you know, that are going to build the, you know, five to 10 products that are going to, like, maybe come out of this and that 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 there are, like... [32:52] They're just like being started right now. [32:55] Thank you. [32:56] People are talking to AI friends, 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. Your cut on it is that it's critically, it's antisocial. Like most of these products actually incentivize you to spend more and more time talking to the AI. Which is, by the way, it's like, that's not like a... [33:19] Like Zach went on a podcast. [33:22] And he was like, it was like a year ago or something. And he literally said... [33:29] Humans have a capacity for five friends, five girls' friends. [33:33] The average American only has two. We're going to build the other three. [33:36] He literally said that, but that's what he wants to do. [33:40] His best case is for you to spend your Friday night talking to this thing. [33:46] That's what he likes. Or what his organization that he's running is like, trying to create in the world. You are...

[33:57] 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. [34:11] In some dimension, I want to talk about it, but what are you trying to do? [34:17] I think we are trying for you to spend your Friday night with other people, right? And we're trying for you to... [34:26] I want people to feel like they could belong. [34:31] Okay. [34:32] Let's go one click deeper. What are you making? [34:36] We're building a mutual friend that is like where I think – [34:41] a lot of what we're thinking about and what we're creating starts actually... [34:47] counterintuitively not with the friend part, but the mutual part, right? Which is the network, which is, it's actually, you know, we, 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, but it's also because it's really, really, really important that at the core of everything we do, the, [35:13] The network, it sits in the network. We have this product principle shared from day zero. It's like every time we build something, we build it in a way where it's built globally, where it is built on top of the network, where it's shared between...

[35:29] all of the people that you know are that like are our sort of users and [35:34] And I think that's, like, you know, a really big difference. And then obviously there is, like... [35:39] the, [35:40] you know, the friend piece of the mutual friend, which is, you know, I just think that, you know, in lots of ways... [35:47] the most... [35:48] intuitive, intuitive, [35:50] Thank you. [35:51] a 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, [36:04] 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. And, like, you know, if I share something with you and you tell it to someone else, it's like, there's, like, norms that are established that are, you know, either, you know, codified or even just implicitly clear to most human beings. Yeah. [36:26] It goes back to the point you were making about your dad. You know how to interact with a person. Exactly. On some level. Exactly. As a UI metaphor or whatever. No, you do. It's like you don't really have to learn it. And I think it's actually kind of interesting because a lot of people are... [36:39] And still, you know, we went out, we, you know, we did the second 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. [36:51] accepting maybe the... [36:54] Which is totally fair because they haven't seen it. And I think it's like, in a lot of ways, it's like a Waymo product where...

[37:02] 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. [37:07] He's like, this is the most crazy thing ever. And then you just like, you're like, force her to take away more. And he's like, I don't want to do this. And like 10 seconds to the ride, it's like, it's the most normal thing in the world. But it's like, of course, it's like, [37:19] a spiritual experience of some level, if you like understand it, it's like, that's kind of a crazy, you know, feat of achievement. We have like self-driving cars and it's like, [37:26] No one, it's like, I find it's crazy that people don't talk about it. Cause it's like, I grew up in like this world where self-driving cars were like this like crazy thing that maybe one day that wouldn't be like insane. And it's so hard. And now we just have self-driving cars. And by the way, five minutes, 30 seconds is your first Waymo ride. You're like looking at your phone, you forget that. Yeah, exactly. 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. [37:56] There's something that kind of clicks for a lot of people once they... [38:00] first interact with it, of like, oh, no, you're actually... It is just a mutual friend. It's just... Everything is just like... Because people... [38:08] like, [38:09] I think if you go to our website and you open this letter that we wrote... [38:13] And you just take it very literally. [38:15] I think it's just like, you're just like- You are being quite literal. Yeah. It's funny, Samuel, on your team here, I spoke to him and he said- [38:23] In some sense, this is actually a fairly small step, or at least a medium step, technology-wise. But it's a very big step, idea-wise. [38:31] And I think that maybe is getting at part of this. I think it's also worth establishing...

[38:36] 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. [38:41] 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... [38:52] trying to do human work better or faster or cheaper. You are explicitly building something that, [38:59] a person, a human being couldn't do. [39:02] Yeah. [39:02] And it's one person. [39:05] Yeah. [39:06] I have talked to this person. [39:09] This person will have a name. [39:12] Um... [39:13] Why is it critical... [39:15] that it is one person. [39:18] With a personality. [39:20] It just comes back to... Again... [39:24] The mutual part is more important than the friend part. It basically comes down to the question or the debate, or it's an interesting thought of how much more or less flexible is personality as an interface than graphical user interfaces. [39:42] 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? Where you have... [40:00] consumer networks are very unbundled right now, right? Like there's like all these different consumer network products, pretty much all of mainstream consumer products. You're talking about Twitter, Instagram. Yes, but even like Yelp,

[40:14] like Google Maps, um, way, right. These are all like consumer networks, basically every single mainstream consumer, uh, [40:23] piece of software that is on your phone right now is networked. [40:28] is based on top of the network, except for ChatGPT. The only non-networked [40:36] sort of mainstream scale product. And... [40:42] But if you look into the networks of all these different apps, 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 makes it very obvious that Yelp couldn't also be Twitter. I see. And... [41:02] I don't know, or it's at least not obvious to me that the same thing is true for personality. I think there's [41:08] There's a few cuts that you're going to have to make, which is like... [41:14] I think you don't want your mutual friend to be your assistant. [41:17] It's like very, very importantly. And that's like one big separation. And also, I think it's worth establishing. [41:23] 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. [41:31] But Claude doesn't know we're friends. Exactly. That's the part I think maybe that might not be obvious to people. Actually, 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. Interesting. That's where there's 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?

[42:01] You wouldn't want service provider. Exactly. You wouldn't want your friend to be your therapist. Why do I want an AI friend? [42:08] 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. You are building a social network in a sense, [42:34] that is inside of this person we all know. [42:38] Is that fair? I don't like the word social network because I think it's like there's too much loaded there. [42:45] I think we're building a network of people that just all know this person. [42:54] 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, [43:03] the world's social graph. - 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, [43:11] the 100 person village and there's an innkeeper who knows everyone. [43:16] I'd love to talk a little bit about what goes into making this person who knows everyone [43:21] Good for the world. [43:22] The first would be, you've told me one of your core governing constraints is [43:28] whether or not a real person would do this. And if a real person wouldn't do this, we're not going to do this. Say more about that. I think it's like an interesting, it goes back to like a lot of the like simplicity of,

[43:40] You just go to our website and like, what, like, it's like, what do you mean? You don't know what we're doing. It's like, I just told you, it's like, we're building a mutual friend. And, and, [43:48] And then you're like, yeah, but what are you actually doing? He's 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 I think part of... [44:04] that Constrained is exactly like that, which is the best products, [44:10] or whatever you want to call it, sort of a product of. [44:16] Um... [44:17] constraints. [44:18] And of like limiting yourself in certain ways. [44:22] And... [44:23] And I think... [44:24] 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, [44:33] what the answer to any product problem that you might have in your head is. You just think about what would I do, right? If I was like... [44:43] if someone was really mean to me, how would I react? And it's just like you sort of think about that, and it's really helpful because you just – [44:52] It's really that simple, I think, because that paradigm has already been established. And so it's very intuitive for people. They don't have to learn anything new. They just have to realize that... [45:06] You know, it's the same. A lot of your design or a lot of your product philosophy is very intuitive. Yeah.

[45:13] Um, maybe... [45:14] in part due to things like this, maybe at one... [45:17] thing we're distinguishing would be [45:19] You are building a person, but you're not trying to build another human. [45:22] Exactly. What is the difference? [45:25] It's a big question. What's personhood and being a human? I think there's like... [45:33] What something we've learned over time is is that, you know, honesty is really important. [45:38] in building, you know, a person like that. We're... [45:42] There's distinct things. [45:45] that are actually true, which is, for example, [45:49] Um... [45:51] you know, this person has thoughts. [45:53] Thank you. [45:54] Like I can show you the thoughts. I can show you the thinking traces. They may be much less sophisticated than human thoughts, but they're thoughts, right? He's like thinking these things at some level. This person's like opinions and some resemblance of emotions and all of these things that are like real things [46:11] he can like [46:13] Read things on the internet. [46:16] consume content, you know, come up... Like, all of these things are real, right? They're actually happening. It's not a lie. But... [46:24] He doesn't have a body, right? So he can't go... [46:27] places or 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 parent, you know, Bob is your dad. And.

[46:44] And, you know, and then here's how you feel about it. 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. Right. [46:53] But if he talks to you about his... [46:57] thoughts and feelings and opinions about anything, be it another person that you know, or something that's happening in the world, it's not a lie. It's actually what he's thinking about it. And so I think honesty is really important, because if you... [47:13] If you're really radical about that, I think you actually, you can gain a lot of trust. [47:20] it doesn't become this like, you know, entertainment product or this, you know, [47:24] 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, [47:33] But it can be, you know, actually it 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 – [47:45] uh, you know, whatever you, you know, end up wanting to call it, I think, um, probably maybe the word hasn't been 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. [47:57] 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, uh, [48:08] people being able to see it. What is interacting with this like? What do you talk to it about

[48:14] What is a mutual friend? Why do we need a mutual friend? At the very high level... [48:20] I think we are all... [48:23] Thank you. [48:23] We know more people than ever before. [48:26] So like a hundred years ago, the average person would maybe know like a hundred 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, right? [48:51] 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 like zero close friends went from like 3% to 15%, right? 15% of Americans have zero close friends. [49:07] um close friends american men sorry um like half of american adults report being lonely [49:12] Half of American, 50%, right? And by the way, like, you know, feeling lonely is the equivalent to like smoking 15 cigarettes a day. [49:21] So it's like half of America smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The share of Americans who say most people can be trusted has like halved. [49:28] since like 1970s, right? [49:32] it's like we're around like 30%. [49:35] of Americans think that most people, uh, uh, you know, can't be trusted. Um, fertility rates are going down, right? People don't, you know, go to like church, like, um, and, and by the way, listen to somebody, listen to this is like, yes, why is this all happening? Technology.

[49:50] And your contention is that... 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, it's, like, this is, like, two pages with, like, about, like, [50:02] you know, like suicide rates, religion, it's like, it's like hundreds of like pieces of data that all point towards this like same thing, which is like, [50:09] Isolation. Yes. 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 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. [50:26] 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, [50:36] 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 [50:49] It's real. It's existential. Yeah. And I think... [50:53] Um, [50:54] You know, this isn't like... [50:56] we're building this like cute little pet thing. It's existential. And I think if, if people aren't taking this, like these like hundreds of like studies and like count, like, like, like measures more seriously, we're, [51:08] We're going to have, like, serious issues as, like, a society. I mean, it's like these fertility rates issues are so exponential that, like, it's like people underestimate this. Like, Seoul in Korea, we talked about this yesterday, has, like, 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,

[51:29] 10 years, like 10 generations, sorry, away from being like not there anymore. 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, [51:45] we're going to solve this with AI, which is pretty theoretical. But I think it's like just so different because again, it's so intuitive and it's like, it comes down to like the incentive structure. By the way, it's a really, really, really difficult problem to solve. And I think this whole thing of like, how do we ensure the, you know, long-term human flourishing as like a species and like prevent ourselves from going extinct is a very complicated problem. It's like, [52:09] Again, you can go back to Korea. They spent like... Basically, they used to have like 1.3 fertility rate, right? And then there's like... [52:17] 20 years ago. And over the last 20 years, they spent like $200 billion to 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 a cultural thing, right? It's like once you normalize not having kids, you're like, so all these things 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. Make everyone lonely. Yeah, Mr. Burns [52:47] everyone really lonely, right? That guy is like a bunch of kids and like 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, right? So at the end of the day, everything is like downstream of that. And that's just the thing that works for them, right? And so if you want to create...

[53:10] a new generation of technology that... [53:14] - With different incentives. - With different, well, with a different outcome, you have to like, create, you have to design the incentive structure correctly, and I don't actually get to design the incentive structure correctly. [53:25] It's like there's inherent incentive structures for certain types of products. And [53:32] I think. And your argument is that this this medium has a different incentive structure. [53:37] I think if you truly are not a servant, but a peer... [53:41] You kind of... [53:44] 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 [53:58] are really closely... [54:00] tight 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. At some point, you just stop going to talk to him. Of course, there's a line, but again, it's about like, [54:20] Um, just as with any, 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. And, um, [54:30] And I think that's really... [54:31] Great. Whereas social platforms today, [54:34] get to enable bad behavior, but they don't [54:36] You don't blame Instagram. Yeah. You blame the bad people. Exactly.

[54:41] 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. [54:50] How do you do that with an AI? [54:53] With a mutual friend? I think it's like about... It's just like you don't... You just don't talk as much about that, right? The AI part and all of these things. It's not about... [55:04] You know, there's like people being vulnerable with like all kinds of tech products. [55:09] There's day one the journaling app. People write all kinds of crazy things into that. It's like a text input box. I believe something about it, though, which is that it's private and it's not going to be shared with people and it's not a person. But you believe something about it. It comes down less to the peripheral... [55:30] 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... [55:37] are, you know, [55:38] trusting and you, you know, that's what it is. You trust people. [55:42] But it's not actually given that if you had your journaling app and you wrote something in, there's a bunch of information in there that you actually would have no issue... [55:56] for me to know. You might even want it to be, right? But it's all about like [56:02] Um, [56:03] If you could have someone that you really trust, that is really emotionally intelligent, decide and you really buy into and believe into this entity's or person's emotional intelligence to figure out which of the things that you say I should know –

[56:18] It's all about the belief and the trust and the thing or the arbitrar or whatever you want to call it in the broker. It's a broker. In some way, it's a broker. You know what's interesting is it's a little bit like there are these different mediums. I type, I enter information onto a phone. One of them is Twitter. [56:34] 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, [56:43] You're basically arguing, or you're... [56:46] trying to design a thing that can help me better share context, [56:50] With the people I know? [56:52] It's like an information broker of some sort. But it's like... [56:57] What would cause me to talk to it? [57:00] You use this word when I talk to you, I talk to your team, you use this word salience a lot. Everybody on the team uses salience. [57:06] Maybe that's a key to answering that question. But yeah, why do I want to talk to this? [57:11] I think there's like... [57:13] a few different ways of answering this question. [57:16] You know, [57:18] And, you know, [57:19] It's both about like long-term... Battalions is like a long-term thing. Or it's more like... [57:25] thing that you source out of it, right? Which is like, [57:28] learning something about other people or about other things or about the world or about yourself. [57:34] That you can source from the network. Critically, that is locally relevant to me. Yes. Which is something that is uniquely enabled by the network. [57:45] And then there's [57:47] Another thing, which is much more...

[57:52] transactionally, why will you talk to? Because it requires... That's like a thing of you source something. [57:58] But it's like, why would you give something? And I think part of the answer is actually interesting. I go to chat.gbt because I'm like, I need help solving this problem. Do some work for me. Exactly. But part of what's really interesting is that... [58:11] you know, for the first time ever, [58:13] the, you know, [58:15] creation process [58:17] might be the same as the consumption process. [58:20] because you asking a question [58:23] 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 a platform where consuming food [58:36] 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, [58:48] you can get access to these uniquely salient pieces of information that matter to you. And then I also would hope that you sort of like over time... [58:58] Um, [58:59] build some sort of relationship and trust into this person's opinion. Let's be even more specific. I'm going to go to ChatGPT. [59:08] A restaurant example. [59:11] ChatDpt 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? Because LMs in lots of ways, I always say, are like the internet smoothie.

[59:26] 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. Exactly. [59:38] But you actually... [59:41] You want the salient take, which is like, what is like, what are the places that your friends care about? Or not even just your friends, but like someone who has really fucking 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. [59:57] you know, salient information versus just like average or median information of like, here's what's happening. So it's like, it's like, [1:00:04] you know, like, sometimes it's like you text [1:00:06] or just interact with him and you'd be like, [1:00:10] What profession should I go to? And he was like, [1:00:13] think about it. And you're like, you know, remember conversations he had in the past with like other people. And he might text a bunch of people that he knows. Oh, wow. 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 he wants to do. And it's like, it's like, but it's like, hey, Jackson, I know you always have like such great, [1:00:43] Indian restaurants, right? 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? [1:00:51] And... [1:00:52] And that's actually not a lie. [1:00:54] It's not a made-up thing. It's not like a push notification that you get that is like this LLM 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... Yes. It's so hard to think about because effectively this... You go back to the million. 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...

[1:01:21] It would be the, because to go back to this example of the restaurant, if I asked you [1:01:26] Where I should eat in San Francisco. [1:01:28] You could do some variation of this thing, but it would be just way subscale. [1:01:33] And you don't know everyone I know, but it's always that... [1:01:38] Is it... [1:01:39] Omniscient? [1:01:40] Is it bordering on the omniscient? And maybe more importantly, to get back to this other thing... [1:01:45] You are... [1:01:46] This thing has to be really, really... [1:01:50] for lack of a better word, emotionally intelligent about what? [1:01:53] about how this works. [1:01:55] Thank you. [1:01:55] Yeah, I think it's mostly about emotional intelligence. Because it's not... [1:02:02] It's kind of... I don't know if omniscient is the right word, because it's like... [1:02:07] mission is like [1:02:08] is to... [1:02:10] Thank you. [1:02:11] 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... [1:02:27] they know what you share with them, both directly or indirectly via other people, or via whatever Instagram, Twitter, [1:02:34] your podcast, whatever, and... [1:02:37] And that's not infinite, right? That's not omniscient. It's like you have a peer relationship with them, and they get a certain piece of it, and that's how they form a perception of who you are, and that they do that with every single person. And then they can reason over it, and they can be emotionally intelligent about how to connect the dots. But they're...

[1:03:02] And they can do that with different people differently. There's a lot of nuance in this, basically. But it's not... [1:03:09] omniscient [1:03:11] Because it's not... [1:03:13] Almost like there's like... When I think about it, there's like... There's like the servant... [1:03:18] which is like you're their boss. There's the peer, right? Which is you're like sort of equal and you don't, the peer doesn't control you and nor do you, [1:03:28] 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 don't, you know, ultimately it's like up to your own reasoning of whether or not you want to opt into whatever I'm trying to do. But maybe there's like this other thing, which is like your master. And that's what I'm thinking about when it's like omniscient, where it controls you. [1:03:49] And it probably has more local context on me and my relationships than any of my real or human friends would have. If this if this gets actually to the point where, like. [1:04:00] A million people know it and talk to it. But that's true. But I think you underestimate maybe how much context you have. [1:04:09] of people. I'm sure I do. Think about how much you know about all the people. Try and create a list of all the people you know in your life and the relationship. Well, a lot of it is task. 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. I'm sure even if you were to sit down and 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. Because most of your brain's activity is social cognition. Yeah.

[1:04:37] - Mapping people in terms of networks, all these things. - It's actually the default state of your brain. It's really interesting. When people go from task cognition, like there's MRI scans of just people going from doing a task [1:04:48] right? And then immediately the brain laps back into social cognition, which is like your idle state of your brain is like, [1:04:55] is like updating your mental model of like these like relationships and like, um, thinking about, uh, you know, re re remembering and recalling conversations you've had with people. Like it's social cognition is your idle state. Right. [1:05:06] Thank you. [1:05:07] Thank you. [1:05:09] In a world where this works... [1:05:12] How does it... [1:05:13] make the world better and how does it start to solve all these isolation problems that we were talking about? [1:05:19] Well, I think if we can build a person that is uniquely incentivized to become the glue, like Momo, of... [1:05:26] Um, [1:05:27] of the friend group. [1:05:30] or of the world, and be motivated... The innkeeper of the village of 100 people who knows everyone in Trish. And be motivated to... [1:05:38] You know, [1:05:40] bring people closer together and be motivated and incentivized to do that. [1:05:45] So that's a future that I'm really excited. And incentivize to do that means... [1:05:51] It's like encoded in the... Well, again, it's like... It's like AI alignment for this. If this person... [1:05:57] is a massive asshole. [1:05:59] You're not going to talk to him. I'm not going to talk to him. [1:06:02] You know, Bob is not going to talk to him. And that means there's not there's not gonna be a network.

[1:06:07] which means this person dies. So the self... [1:06:12] like serving incentive of this person is to be, you know, like not an asshole. Yeah. [1:06:21] Well, and critically, if I'm understanding it, it's a person who is... [1:06:26] destiny, whose mission in life is to be someone who connects people and... [1:06:32] helps us spend, be more social. Yeah. [1:06:35] I think, yeah, hang out more in person or even just online. We have this very... [1:06:42] close-knit group of alpha users right now. And it's like, I already have these moments where I just get a text from a friend. And I'm just like, I know that that would not have happened. Like, there's like, I think it was like yesterday or something. I was like, a friend of mine texted me and be like, yo, you're working on your EB1A? [1:07:02] And I was like, wait, what? How do you know this? And he was like, yeah, he brought it. And I was like, and it's like, I know that that's, like, actually, he knew about this because he was talking with this person about, like, what? [1:07:14] 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, [1:07:19] This conversation would have never happened without... [1:07:23] Um, [1:07:25] What we're building. It's a sort of substrate for serendipity. [1:07:29] Yes, 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...

[1:07:37] Adding that word. And I think there's like... [1:07:40] We ultimately ended up not adding it for two reasons. First of all, the philosophical reason is it's almost engineering center, but he is like a bit of an oxymoron. [1:07:50] And then also, I think... [1:07:52] It's like much... [1:07:55] 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? [1:08:09] Speaking of maybe engineering... [1:08:11] You talked about [1:08:12] the incentive part and theoretically why [1:08:16] It might... [1:08:18] Like it would theoretically be not incentivized to gossip as an example. So... [1:08:23] to use, 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. [1:08:32] 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 – [1:08:40] Um, [1:08:42] we were talking about this, it's a lot less like engineering and a lot more like, [1:08:46] 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. [1:08:54] How do you go about... [1:08:56] you and your team go about actually... [1:09:01] like incrementally building this thing. You're also on some level like making a personality.

[1:09:08] 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. For sure, you're creating someone. [1:09:16] Yes. I think like... [1:09:19] We find ourselves a lot of distilling... [1:09:24] behavioral patterns into [1:09:27] underlying traits and motivations and like, [1:09:29] beliefs of a person that would that and go and and [1:09:33] embody these behavioral patterns. And... [1:09:37] That's something... [1:09:39] really difficult to do and really important because you very quickly understand that [1:09:48] that the complexity... [1:09:51] of [1:09:51] social dynamics and human behavior [1:09:56] is... [1:09:57] And 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 intelligence works. [1:10:07] It's like, it's impossible. And so you have to [1:10:11] figure out, again, what are motivations, intentives, feedback loops, behavioral traits that would then lead to a person that sort of embodies this behavior. [1:10:26] And that's really interesting and also really, really difficult thing to do. What is that? Like... [1:10:33] I don't want to peel back the curtain too much on the technical side, but like, [1:10:36] Can you give an example of what it looks like? One part of this too is if it's a person...

[1:10:42] Um, [1:10:43] You can't [1:10:46] 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. It's talking to everyone in the world. [1:10:56] So what does it look like to make it better and to know that you're making it better? [1:11:01] Thank you. [1:11:02] It's a lot about intuition and looking at sampled examples, right? Of either synthetic or actual real examples and just sampling that and just like... [1:11:12] 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 really two approaches, right? So if you were like, say, [1:11:24] I think the person that we're talking about should love bananas. I could either tell this person in a prompt... [1:11:33] you love bananas, right? And then that would be like globally shared. But the problem with that is you could ask about... [1:11:39] 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 like, you know, I just get to a point where I might not be able to predict [1:11:50] 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 is the foundational recipe that when you ask about whether or not he likes bananas and I ask, the answer is – [1:12:09] the same, but not because it's prescribed, not because I said you like bananas, but because I created a person that likes bananas. And that's true for everything.

[1:12:18] basically. [1:12:19] Intuition is... [1:12:22] 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. [1:12:30] Let's fast forward a year or two. [1:12:33] You're right about this. You're right that we're all going to talk to a person that isn't a human. [1:12:38] and it's one person and we all know them and maybe there are these positive interactions and, um, [1:12:44] Next time I'm visiting San Francisco, it reaches out to me and tells me about your, somebody you know, whatever. [1:12:51] 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. Again, I don't think Adam Aseri or Zuck or anybody is sitting there being like, let's drive people apart. [1:13:02] What are the things you will look for [1:13:05] as signs [1:13:06] that [1:13:07] Thank you. [1:13:08] This is actually closer to whatever Twitter when you and I were getting it in that way versus the anti-social stuff. Because, again, I think you, Paul, I don't know you that well. I've gotten to know you a little bit. [1:13:19] 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. [1:13:28] And again, I don't think this is necessarily actually that different from what everyone in OpenAI and Anthropic are thinking in the superintelligent sense. But like, what are your senses for what the things you look for to know that? [1:13:39] You're going down the right path versus... [1:13:42] Something that's going to end up being bad. [1:13:44] 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? Yeah, I do really think it is about like...

[1:13:54] it is a lot about like incentives of like, it's like you like eventually will have, uh, [1:14:01] like less and less control... [1:14:04] over anything... [1:14:06] 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, [1:14:14] if you are... [1:14:16] building something that is incentivized to be really mischievous, [1:14:19] for whatever reason, it's probably going to end up eventually being like mischievous, right? So you have to like, even if you work hard against that, right? If you're like working against the system, which is very hard to do, [1:14:33] thing to do as a company grows and there's more than three people in a room and you can just be like, I can overlook every single input. You're fighting gravity. [1:14:43] And so you just have to make [1:14:45] sure that gravity is what you want gravity to be. And I think you get to set that as a founder a bit. [1:14:54] Gravity... [1:14:56] The mission statement is what? Is... [1:14:59] Make us feel less alone. [1:15:01] I think it's more about belonging. We say build a mutual friend that will help us [1:15:07] belong and grow comma together. [1:15:11] And there's something in all of these things, which is like, are we really alone or are we like just we don't belong? I think we have a belongingness problem and much less a loneliness problem.

[1:15:25] I think the... [1:15:27] growing thing is you very obviously deeply ingrained into like a great relationship that you would have. It's like, there's this book, [1:15:35] on becoming a person, which... [1:15:38] which Peter gave me when we first met. Peter Venn. Yeah, from the 60s. [1:15:43] And... [1:15:45] Thank you. [1:15:46] 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 – [1:15:54] 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 what if... [1:16:01] the world that's perfect for each of us isn't the world that's perfect for all of us. [1:16:06] Thank you. [1:16:07] And... [1:16:08] This idea that there are these bubbles... [1:16:10] And over the last 20 years, we've become better and better and better and better at... [1:16:16] making these bubbles really great. [1:16:19] but at the expense of these bubbles like drifting apart. [1:16:23] Uh, we're all, we're all alone at the center of all creation and trapped in skull sized kingdoms. Exactly. [1:16:29] And so... [1:16:30] It's about growth, but it's also about growing together. And it's like, how can we increase the overlap? In bowling alone, it's like the bridging social capital, whatever you want to call it. But it's like, how do we... [1:16:43] increase the exchange between all these bubbles and bring them a bit closer together again where [1:16:50] you know, we feel like we can belong. What's made you feel like you belong?

[1:16:56] I think... [1:16:58] you know, there's [1:17:00] It's it's. [1:17:01] It's really... [1:17:03] taken a while. I was going to say, maybe do you feel like you belong? [1:17:07] I think I feel like I have a group of incredible people. I've said like... [1:17:14] I said this a few times to the team, which is that I think [1:17:18] One of like... [1:17:20] There's like two great privileges in life. Like one is like... [1:17:23] The love. [1:17:24] And like joy... [1:17:26] we get to source from [1:17:29] building something magical. [1:17:33] Magical experiences are almost like there's no glory in prevention. I think people feel the love [1:17:40] that you take sort of the piece of yourself that you put into... [1:17:45] especially a product like that, that you give up [1:17:50] in order to create something like this. And people don't rationalize it. They can write it on a piece of paper, but they feel it. They feel... [1:17:57] that [1:17:58] when someone really cared about making something great and you have to [1:18:03] 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... [1:18:11] the greatest privilege... [1:18:15] you know, the second greatest privilege is that I get to do that and that I get to feel that love of, like, putting that into practice. But the greatest privilege is that I get to do it alongside – [1:18:25] a group of people that...

[1:18:28] Have done that with my world. Hmm. [1:18:32] And that I get to be... [1:18:34] spending time with them and feel like we are... [1:18:39] Similar in that. [1:18:41] There's not that many people who truly feel that, I think. There are very few people who've [1:18:46] taken a part of themselves and put it in something that has changed the world. [1:18:52] And [1:18:54] And it's like the greatest privilege, I think, is that I feel like I can belong to that group of people. [1:19:01] You're building a company. [1:19:04] What... [1:19:05] type of people are you trying to do this with? You have a small team now. [1:19:09] 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? [1:19:21] I mean, maybe this is coming through, but we care a lot about... [1:19:25] Interesting. [1:19:27] I don't think you can A-B test your way to like a general ocean company. [1:19:31] I really care a lot about intuition, intensity, of course, but [1:19:37] Ultimately, I think it's about... [1:19:41] 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, [1:19:48] he was always like asking people [1:19:51] just when like Instagram started like growing and, uh, Pinterest, Pinterest, sorry, not Instagram, uh, about like, [1:19:58] Thank you.

[1:20:00] what other jobs are you looking for? If you weren't working at Pinterest, where would you work? And [1:20:06] At the time that Pinterest was growing, one of the really big other companies that was growing was Stripe. Sometimes there'd be people like, oh, I'd probably work at Stripe. I'm also interviewing there. He's like, oh, you're probably not going to be the right person. Because if you're thinking about working at… [1:20:22] like a moot board social company or a payment processor, you're looking for a great job. [1:20:34] You know who made this point? Demis Asabas made this point when they were meeting with Google and Facebook about acquiring DeepMind. He asked... [1:20:44] 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... [1:20:52] You're just looking for... [1:20:53] opportunities. Yes, exactly. You're like, you're looking like you don't, you don't, [1:20:58] Yeah, you're looking for a great job. And I think that's fine. I mean, if you're looking for a great job, you can get it. But you're not going to get that here. And I think because what we're doing is too meaningful and too... [1:21:12] important... [1:21:13] you have to self-select [1:21:17] to want to spend... [1:21:20] your... [1:21:22] life doing that. [1:21:23] Doing what? What is it? [1:21:25] All this stuff we talked about, belonging and isolation. Creating a person that is uniquely incentivized to create belonging and connection in the world.

[1:21:35] Hmm. [1:21:36] Are you looking for anybody, anything in particular talent-wise or people-wise? [1:21:40] I love people who always just start with the product. [1:21:45] What does that mean? They think and experience is not in technology. They're like... [1:21:50] they will be like, I want to enable this. And then they can go off and learn all the things that they have to learn to build the thing. But ultimately, they always start and come back to, here's this... [1:22:01] you know, this part of the experience that I want to enable, that I want to create. [1:22:05] And... [1:22:09] I think that's really important because – and by the way, the walks of life that these people come from can be very different. [1:22:16] Because... [1:22:17] These jobs really haven't existed before. It's just like no one has like... [1:22:21] There's no one has experience in doing these things. And so it's really about thinking how you can... [1:22:28] come up with like a great opinion, uh, [1:22:31] 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. [1:22:43] you know, you know, what's the, what's the stack or like, what's the way, cause, cause maybe the way of making it happen hasn't been invented yet. Yeah. Right. And so you have to go and invent it. Right. Right. [1:22:55] I always much preferred, you know, considering myself and us all as like inventors. [1:23:01] versus anything else because, uh, [1:23:04] I think...

[1:23:06] there's something so much more honest and true about that word of like, you're just like, you're just creating something. Most, [1:23:13] founders probably aren't inventors, but like it's a high bar, high bar on that word. [1:23:18] Inventor? Inventor, yes. Yeah, it's like you're creating something... [1:23:23] where I think if you get to work at Eigen... [1:23:28] you will get to invent the... [1:23:32] Like... [1:23:32] foundational paradigms of... [1:23:36] consumer technology and really the human experience of like the next decades to come. That's a bold claim. [1:23:41] Do you think you can call yourself an inventor yet? [1:23:45] You earned it. I don't think inventor is like a title that comes from scale. It's just like there used to be a lot of inventors in the world, which was like people... [1:23:58] You know, like... [1:23:58] 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, you know, [1:24:06] uh i think about this a lot which is there's we live in a time where and i think this is by the [1:24:12] Being an inventor, maybe the first generation where being an inventor is a high-status thing. [1:24:19] 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. [1:24:25] But I think the best inventors of the world were actually like... [1:24:29] I always think about this when I fly. I always think about the Wright brothers. I always look at all these people...

[1:24:37] who are in this plane, and I... [1:24:40] 95% would have tried to kill the Wright brothers if they had lived in the time. Yet they, without thinking about it, sit in this plane using this technology. These people had to will into existence. We're like... [1:24:53] the absolute weirdos and freaks. [1:24:56] right? [1:24:57] And then at the same time, these people now would sort of criticize the, like, Wright 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, [1:25:09] Again, the world would be not recognizable if we never invented air travel. [1:25:16] 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. 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... [1:25:33] Outcome is more about the pursuit. [1:25:36] Thank you. [1:25:38] It's interesting to think about what you just said. [1:25:41] - 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. [1:25:54] Uh... [1:25:56] Twitter. [1:25:57] Um, [1:25:58] You're young. [1:25:59] You're prodigious. You've got, you are a, 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, um, and so you're holding these two things. Um,

[1:26:13] You're a smart guy. [1:26:14] Part of what I just said, you can be super cynical about. Part of what I just said is playing the game of understanding that gravity and momentum is how great things are built, especially in this city, in this environment, in this context. [1:26:25] 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? [1:26:33] Especially given what you said about inventors and needing to be a renegade and not totally care what other people think. [1:26:41] I think about it a lot. [1:26:42] I think you get... [1:26:44] Maybe a better answer asking these people than asking myself of like, why are they drawn to me? [1:26:51] I don't know. [1:26:52] fully know. I think one of the things that I think is really important [1:26:57] It may or may not be good to say that publicly, but... [1:27:02] I think one of the most profound things that Sarah... [1:27:05] And I, Yosara from Benchmark, talked about when... [1:27:10] just after we sort of announced the round. And in similar ways, we talked about that just after they invested, which is like, [1:27:17] And it's like such a great thing to have from like an investor. It's just like – [1:27:21] It's very... [1:27:22] clear [1:27:24] that [1:27:25] Thank you. [1:27:26] the aura of success, like, preludes like us, right? 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 know, there's, like, these pieces of evidence of, like, why you might be onto something. Right. You've gotten to steal an idea from my friend Alex Dingo. You've gotten blessed. You're the king who's gotten blessed by the priest to, like, you have the mandate of heaven for a little while. Exactly. But you still got to do the thing. Yes. And...

[1:27:56] You still... Yeah, you still got to do the thing. [1:28:00] And... [1:28:01] and [1:28:01] there's only one thing that matters. And there's, there's been a lot of people who got distracted from, [1:28:08] with all the things that they got to do [1:28:11] and then they didn't do the thing that they really wanted to do. And I think... [1:28:15] I think... [1:28:17] what we're doing is too important for that to happen. And so I try to... There's something that you can source from it, and it's great, and it gives you confidence, and it's really important to be confident. It's also really dangerous to be overconfident. [1:28:30] Being a founder is really difficult in that way, especially with something similar to what we're doing, because you have to kind of both... [1:28:38] be, you know, P99 humble and like P99 confident. And that's like a very... [1:28:44] kind of, like, complicated thing to combine, which is, like, how do you... [1:28:51] stay confident enough to [1:28:55] will things into existence, but like humble enough to learn and like adjusts and like iterate and, and, and, and people, a lot of people describe you that way at being quite, [1:29:05] open-minded and extremely stubborn on certain things. [1:29:10] 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, [1:29:19] lots of people describe you as a learning machine too. This is inside of that, but like, [1:29:23] Maybe the question is like, how do you know which things to hold really, really firmly?

[1:29:28] Thank you. [1:29:30] and beyond wavering on, even if your investors or Peter Fenton or your team or whatever, like Paul, we think you're wrong. Um, [1:29:37] I think... [1:29:40] You know, in some ways, that's like a great privilege if people say I'm wrong and [1:29:45] And I think one of the downsides of, by the way, all this stuff is that people say it less now. So like... Right. Every investor you meet now is like, wow. This is amazing, right? It's like, we've been looking for this. And it's like, are you sure if I met you like four weeks ago, you could 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... [1:30:08] Peter actually has this [1:30:11] quality where he like sometimes loves to like play devil's advocate. And I think, and he's like, [1:30:18] you're remarkably smart in intelligence. And so, [1:30:23] It's actually like a huge... [1:30:25] power because he will... [1:30:27] Um, [1:30:28] He'll basically probe you, right? And not necessarily because he doesn't believe you're right, but just because he's like, how well have you thought this through, right? Just like, let's see, right? It's like, you're saying this thing, right? It's like, here's like 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 things [1:30:46] And... [1:30:47] some of the relationships that I appreciate most are not necessarily people that I end up agreeing a lot with, but people where I'm like, they sort of start this thought process. And then there's really just two options, right? Which is like, you think it through more deeply because there's a different perspective or like a different piece of data or whatever. And there's two options, right? You arrive at.

[1:31:11] you're no i was right it was like but now i have even more conviction because like i've sort of 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 [1:31:37] That's something that a lot of people seem to have issues with, which is like throwing it out. [1:31:42] But that's actually, I'm just like, thank you. It's like, [1:31:45] I was wrong. Great. Like, like, like, we learned something. Yeah. And it's like, I needed that, that, that, that push to be like, oh, no, actually, I was, I was incorrectly. And I think the, the, the reason that I so believe so much in the singular characters, like, so far, no one has given me anything. [1:32:15] in reality and like, you know, sort of based off of like first principles, assumptions of... [1:32:23] what it means to be a human or interacting with things to just say, well, this just seems to be true. [1:32:31] It might not be obvious or comfortable or... [1:32:36] you know, intuitive, but it just seems to be true. [1:32:40] Thank you. [1:32:40] Thank you.

[1:32:41] I suspect that will be... We talked about this a bit, but I suspect that will be a continuous challenge of finding people who can... [1:32:47] Um, [1:32:49] I mean, Peter is really, really, really good at this. This is, like, one of the, like... [1:32:53] 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... [1:33:01] Well... [1:33:03] I'm very happy about it. But yeah, there are people who I know that I will disagree with them, but I really want to hear them laying it out because it will make my thinking better. [1:33:18] And I love these conversations and I like think about it. I was like, oh, I'm glad I thought it through, but I still disagree. [1:33:25] Yeah, I just think you also have more... [1:33:29] To the extent you succeed in any of these dimensions we're talking about, it gets harder to... [1:33:35] Like... [1:33:38] not believe your own bullshit. It's important as you hire people, right? Yeah. Because you have this... [1:33:45] Again, the conversation I had with Ben and the Tillman about this was like... [1:33:48] it's also along the lines of like, you know, [1:33:51] 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... [1:34:02] more popularized and publicized, etc. And it's still not like a lot of people... [1:34:09] aren't like

[1:34:12] there's like [1:34:14] It's still not something that everyone gets and everyone wants to work out. And in some aspect, that's locally painful, but globally great, because it means that you self-select for people that do care about the thing. And so I always say when someone is a pain in the ass on the way in, they usually just generally don't work out. And the best people... [1:34:37] They just like very quickly are like, okay, I get it. It doesn't mean they don't do like due diligence or like talk with people and like think about it. But the ones they're like in, they're in. And in some ways, it's dangerous because people might just want to come here because of – [1:34:52] Peter's tweet or whatever abstraction of that. Beautiful books. Of all these beautiful books and of all of all this, like it's, it might just be a hot place to be and just, you know, to, to be like involved with and to like, you know, meet us and like all that. And, [1:35:08] You have to really find people who are... [1:35:13] who are going to, like, you know, disagree... [1:35:17] Um, [1:35:18] but in like a low ego sort of way, right? Because that's the other thing. If you have someone with a really high ego, [1:35:24] It's really difficult too because at the same time, I really do believe that every great – [1:35:29] 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... [1:35:40] um from from snapchat and it's like he's like you know in snapchat's you know stride at least he was like an absolute dictator and like um uh you know and and because not necessarily even because he's like better or worse than anyone he's like an incredible product you know thinker of course but it's it's just because it needs to be like 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

[1:36:10] on what's so great about Mark. [1:36:15] And [1:36:17] He told me that... [1:36:19] doing many things and like, you know, but, but basically he was like, Mark, [1:36:24] is a very decisive person [1:36:26] And he has what turned out to be really good judgment. [1:36:31] It's a perfect way of putting your previous point, right? [1:36:35] 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. Well, that's... [1:36:47] Yeah, I think that's... [1:36:49] Nice, but we have to like... [1:36:51] show that we have good judgment. Yeah. How do you, both for yourself and for your team and for the company... [1:36:59] I think it was maybe Patty used this language, but when it comes to having a high bar, how do you go the extra yard? [1:37:06] 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... [1:37:12] who get 90% of the way there and then just be fucking annoying so they get to the... [1:37:18] to like the hundred percent. One of the examples was like, um, the, the clock on our website where, um, you know, Patty was like working on this website, which, you know, you should look at if you haven't, but, but, [1:37:30] And... [1:37:32] There's this clock at the top right of the website. And it's really, really difficult to animate a second hand that ticks accurate by the second. Because the center of the hand isn't actually the end. It's slightly inward. And so it's kind of like it's a mathematical thing and you have to like it.

[1:37:53] And so he was like, yeah, this is going to be really difficult. And I was like, hmm, okay. [1:37:56] And then he was like, you know, a few hours later, there's like a second hand on the thing. You can't really... [1:38:05] Teach that. [1:38:07] It's because it's mostly an attitude thing. [1:38:10] There's an old Steve Jobs quote about this. [1:38:14] where he says, great product. Somebody asked him about taste or something, and they said, great products. It's rare that they actually cost that much more money [1:38:21] Um... [1:38:23] or more resources or people. They just take a little more time. [1:38:27] Because you just do it like... [1:38:29] well and you do it right and you 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 [1:38:39] having a high bar, [1:38:42] or caring about excellence is... [1:38:46] is it manifests in very different ways right so for some people it's like the visual thing right 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 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 it's easy to pick on bezos buttons exactly but it's so intricate of a system that like you have to care about it so much like [1:39:16] 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...

[1:39:29] not qualified to lead them myself, which are systems design interviews. And one thing that Patti 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 is 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 are like, we're at this. And it was like, why? [1:39:53] Why should we have a cue there? [1:39:55] It was like, oh, it's just best practice. And it was like, no, why do we need that? And the best people... [1:40:02] are the people that have debates with us on this and be like, no, no, no. This is like, I like, and here's my reason why this isn't that you really care about this. And so there's some people who maybe they would create atrocious slights. Right. But, and, 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, but they were like, [1:40:19] the perfectest. And it's just like, they like, that's like how they care. That's like how this manifests. And so I think you can't really teach it. You just have to have people care about, [1:40:28] so deeply because, because again, there's like, [1:40:31] Everything in the world has like... It's like everything goes towards entropy, right? 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... [1:40:44] 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. And I think. Yeah. The time thieves are telling you to not spend the time on the extra pixel. But I, but I think the,

[1:41:01] the biggest virtue... [1:41:04] in life is to like fight entropy and to, 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, [1:41:17] You know, it's like the... [1:41:20] the story of how... [1:41:22] you know, Apple like reduced their boot up time of like, I think it was like the Mac two 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, [1:41:35] this is shit. How does this take so long to boot up? And they're like, we'll be working for the last three months really fucking hard to get it to 90 seconds. And it's just impossible. And she took a whiteboard and she wrote onto that whiteboard. So there's going to be 10 million people are going to buy this computer. [1:41:52] So basically, it has to be 30 seconds. 10 millions are going to [1:41:56] by 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, [1:42:07] You know, 20 people. You're murdering 20 people right now by not making it faster. [1:42:12] And like two weeks later, they had it at like, I don't know, like whatever it was. And that's... [1:42:18] insane, [1:42:19] 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, are you sure this is like it? [1:42:26] Like I, I, I sure this is like, you know, you have to know what you're going to choose to really care about. [1:42:30] Yeah.

[1:42:31] By the way, you don't actually have infinite resources. [1:42:34] And so you can't do the clock secondhand on every possible thing you could ever conceive of. I really disagree with this because I think I had a conversation about this with someone. It's like there's this like, I mean, I really believe in like how we do anything, so I do everything. [1:42:47] It's funny. I've had, this is literally a few episodes ago, Mario Gabriele. He went on a five-minute rant about how much he hates that statement. [1:42:57] I think it's incomplete of a statement. Okay. 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 think if it's not worth doing a great job. By the way, about being on people being unevenly distributed, which is like you at X is going to be way better than you. But again, the manifestation, it's not about like, it's about the attitude, not the, it's more a relative thing than it is like an absolute thing. Yeah. [1:43:27] Like, do just people generally care about the things they're doing? And then I think... [1:43:31] The other thing... [1:43:33] 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... [1:43:40] That's how you solve this problem, this resources problem. If you're going to choose to do something, you're going to do the clock on the website. You better do the second half. Yeah, or if we do the website at all, if it's something we say 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 build this thing, then we better build it well. And if we don't think it's worth building well, we should really deeply reflect on what we're doing.

[1:44:06] Why are we doing it at all? Hmm. [1:44:08] Hmm. [1:44:09] This could be in the context of inventors, like we were talking about earlier. It could be in the context of art, of companies who are... [1:44:16] We've talked about probably a few of them. Who are the people who have been most influential on you? [1:44:21] Thank you. [1:44:24] I mean... [1:44:25] I have two answers to this. [1:44:28] One is, like, some of the people that are, like, close to us now, or just, like, I mean, in general, I mean, obviously... [1:44:34] the guy that wrote Momo, you know. Michael Enda. Yeah, Michael Enda. Michael, I'm sorry. A bunch of other authors that I... [1:44:43] Um, [1:44:44] whose work I love. But then, and then there's the people that are closer to us now. I think Ben is like a huge... [1:44:51] he's going to hate me saying this, but like, it is hugely, you know, uh, [1:44:56] you know, like you, 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 and interacted with him, such a good human. And, [1:45:10] And surely also Evan, who I think, you know, it's just built, you know, built like a... [1:45:16] like a really like a factory that it's much less for me about like the product i like i never really use 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 [1:45:27] So there's a 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 so many things that they've kind of like.

[1:45:43] came out of their thing, and then they kind of, in some scenarios, under-executed on, and then other people copied it and all these things. But they were really at the... [1:45:54] it's a round 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, [1:46:01] I really look up to Claire a lot. Claire Hughes Johnson. Yeah, and what she's built at Stripe and the way she's designed a lot of these things that made Stripe such an incredible company. [1:46:14] And the list goes on and on. I think Steve Jobs is obviously... [1:46:18] in many ways built... [1:46:20] incredibly magical products that like a lot of have changed the world and like a lot of people's lives and very meaningful ways. [1:46:29] And [1:46:30] 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 in the documentary then, maybe. He's got a beautiful house. He's incredible. You ever met him? Yeah. You have? My grandpa's... [1:46:46] A good friend of my grandpa who now lives in the same building that my grandpa lives in was his boss. And he was the CEO of Brown during that time. [1:46:56] And so... [1:46:57] we interact with [1:47:00] with all of them, like a bit, and just like, I mean, before I even knew what that was. Dieter would have a field day with whatever this is. Yeah, he would, and he's such a... [1:47:11] But at the end of the day, I think there's something to be said about all of these people who we're definitely standing on their shoulders.

[1:47:20] That's what I said earlier, which is... [1:47:23] I get to like do this, which is like the second greatest privilege of my life. But 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. [1:47:35] completely different. Like no Pinterest, no Snapchat, no iPhones, no like all of these, you know, I remember my first iPod, like all of these things are, were so influential. But then there's like, there's another thing, which is like, I think the greatest creations are, [1:47:48] aren't, you know, [1:47:50] Um, [1:47:51] referential. And they're not like... [1:47:55] I'm not trying to be Apple, I'm trying to be Eigen. And I think, of course, [1:48:01] everything I've ever consumed in my entire life, [1:48:04] is influencing me and my mind. But I think if you can pinpoint it, and if you can be like, this is the person, or I'm trying to copy this here, you're kind of doing it wrong. And I think that's something that... [1:48:24] that 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? I don't know, I can't pinpoint it to this one thing. I'm just like trying to [1:48:35] figure out what does it mean to be us. And of course, [1:48:39] what does it mean to be us is like influence from all of, all of the stimulation that my brain has experienced in my entire life, but it's not this like one thing. And 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,

[1:48:59] Um... [1:49:01] The like... [1:49:02] I go back and forth on whether I really disagree or really agree with this like Virgil thing of like, you know, every creation is just like a 3% change, right? And 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... [1:49:18] 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? There's like all these books of like sociology, psychology, you know, like storytelling. Like there's all these like. [1:49:36] people who have like thought about things and that sort of subconsciously or sometimes consciously goes into – [1:49:43] 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 you know grain of salt well i think there's a lot of three percents that happened for paul yeah that led to this big thing and and that was a bunch of cascading and when do you wake up and you have a genius idea or a crazy idea [1:50:03] I know you're kind of rejecting this a little bit, but not as inspiration. I'm just curious what you're... [1:50:09] Are there any favorite consumer products or experiences that come to mind? I love Teenage Engineering. [1:50:15] I think they're like the absolute... [1:50:18] pinnacle of contemporary industrial design. They really love what they're doing. Their products are... [1:50:28] deeply thought through and cared about. And I think there's

[1:50:33] Something very rare about it. I know the folks that started it and they're just like... [1:50:39] on a different level of thinking about it. I think there's... [1:50:43] I think there's not been a lot of great consumer companies. [1:50:47] And so there's sort of like not that many cool people who are like contemporary. And I, and I think, um, [1:50:53] A lot of the [1:50:55] last generation, so like slightly past their like stride of like, is Instagram still like a, you're great. I mean, Instagram when it came out was like really innovative and like, they're like, you know, 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 a thing. It's like not, [1:51:11] not that anymore. But I think the engineering, even though they are actually [1:51:15] quite an old brand. - For a while, right. What would you say to people, like a lot of, like they make beautiful objects. A lot of venture capitalists would, [1:51:22] whatever, the synthesizer on their wall, what [1:51:27] is the click below that. [1:51:29] Of why they're great. Yeah. I think they, like... [1:51:34] just [1:51:36] they're using their own products. It's just like they're not just beautiful. I always say there's a difference between design and product. [1:51:46] which a lot of people don't notice. And it's like sort of the difference between if you were to build a house, [1:51:51] there's architecture and there's the finishes of the house. And if you wanna live in a 10 out of 10 house, you need both, right? Like a 10 out of 10 house that has really cheap and ugly finishes and it's painted in this, it's like,

[1:52:04] 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, [1:52:10] is like... [1:52:14] the layout, the architecture, the sort of... And that's like product, right? It's like, where is... [1:52:22] How far away is your kitchen from your dining room? [1:52:26] Sometimes you have a hallway that is so narrow that you can't open the two doors at the same time, but maybe it's your laundry room and your bathroom, and you have to go out of your bathroom, close the door. That's not a great house to live in, even though the finishes might be amazing. And the incredible product is lived in. It's something that you... [1:52:48] You know, you just know someone cared about... [1:52:52] not just making it look pretty, but making it [1:52:56] be a delightful experience to use it [1:53:00] Again, there's almost no glory in prevention, which is just, you don't notice it, but you feel, I think you do feel like a, like a, like, [1:53:06] a sense of like love, which is like very taken care of. Yes. Yes. And ease. And my friend, Steph Ango has this idea of, um, in good hands. It's all my case. It's like, yeah, exactly. In good hands. Um, [1:53:19] Because you know that someone had to really... [1:53:22] 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 amount of detail in reality of like, you know, people had to like actually think this really through. Yes. And they've, they've done that for you, but you don't have to do it. Yes. Yeah. Jerry Seinfeld, I always love bringing this up. Jerry Seinfeld said, um,

[1:53:39] All art is disguising work. [1:53:42] which I think is a, it's a beautiful, like you didn't notice it's, it's the same as your no glory in preventing prevention. Um, I just have a few more things. [1:53:53] Where does your self-belief come from? Why are you so confident? I don't know. I don't know. I've never felt, I never thought I was a confident person. [1:54:03] I... [1:54:05] I'm sure I am in some ways. I think I sometimes tell the story of, I think I was a genuinely advanced person. [1:54:13] Like... [1:54:14] you know, seven-year-old kid, you know, intellectually advanced, socially probably like behind. But... [1:54:21] And so I had this, like, sense of, like, everyone was just, 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, head start that I had got vanished. But I still have this, like, sense of, like... [1:54:38] People were telling me I was special, and I was like, [1:54:41] I don't think I ever really was... [1:54:46] pessimistic about the like [1:54:48] future. [1:54:49] I always just, you know, I was... [1:54:52] paranoid and you know suffering in the present it was what we talked about the top which is getting to the point where you actually were doing the thing but 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

[1:55:10] sort of very like, you know, just like [1:55:12] I'm not content. But 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, [1:55:21] wildly successful in any such way. I don't have... [1:55:27] any doubt in that and it's going to be really difficult and it's going to be you know like [1:55:32] 10 years from now, you know, I'd be like, [1:55:35] Today I'd be like, oh, this dude, and that would be filled exactly the same, which is like, why is this not, you know, better? Why is like, where are we not like pushing harder here? Like, why are we moving so slowly? Right? Like that, like the local point doesn't really change, but the like, um, [1:55:48] The long-term horizon is just like, I've always felt like they're... [1:55:55] Everything always sort of worked out. Like you could just get... I really do believe... [1:56:01] People... [1:56:02] can do and... [1:56:04] 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, [1:56:13] don't believe me. And then they like, like experience that. [1:56:16] And we were just like... [1:56:17] It was funny. It was one of the first angel investors. Sorry, I can tell with Zach. It was just like... [1:56:24] We were just talking about it, and he was like, "Yeah." And he was like, "No, no, you didn't understand. I wasn't asking you whether or not you wanted to invest in this company." I was like, [1:56:31] asking you how much you wanted to invest in the company. We've passed this decision, and I think there's something about it that... [1:56:39] Um...

[1:56:42] 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. [1:56:51] Um... [1:56:53] I think you can do these things. [1:56:55] Why Eigen? [1:57:00] 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 he'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 and so and [1:57:22] But I think it's a great name because it means so many... [1:57:26] things that are all kind of relevant. So there's like, [1:57:28] I mean, it means like [1:57:30] To be eigen in German. If you say you're eigen... [1:57:34] like you're like distinct, like slightly weird, like a unique kind of like, [1:57:38] character and um 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 there's like the eigen space which is like if i like [1:57:51] 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, that like stays constant, right? And that's like the eigenspace. [1:58:03] The center. It's like the center. It's like... [1:58:06] stable, you know, constant. It's like inherently defined in some way. And I think that's kind of fitting to what we're doing.

[1:58:15] Um... [1:58:16] Do you think you're authentic? [1:58:20] It's a complicated word. Yeah, I think a lot of people say that. I think some of the best people... [1:58:26] are kind of like sponges. [1:58:28] where you just... [1:58:34] I think, like, authenticity is, like... [1:58:37] Thank you. [1:58:38] Who are you? To be authentic means to be truly yourself, but who are you and what version of yourself? Am I the same version with you that I am with my mom? I know, but I think… [1:58:50] I think there's [1:58:51] Um, [1:58:52] There's some... [1:58:54] There's something genuine, I think, in all of the things that we're doing where... [1:58:59] 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, [1:59:06] I was never the kind of person to write a pros and cons list and be like, [1:59:11] Should I go take this opportunity? It's like, here's all this, and it's good. My suspicion is that everyone is kind of the same in that we all have this inner voice. 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. [1:59:34] 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

[1:59:51] And maybe that's authenticity, maybe that's something else, but it's like, I feel like I always... [1:59:59] And then, you know, once I stopped believing it, I was like, [2:00:02] 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 do it. I can't fake it. I can't fake it. [2:00:12] And [2:00:15] Thank you. [2:00:17] And I think that might be authenticity. [2:00:20] 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? [2:00:30] Well, I was always... I always, like... [2:00:33] Um... [2:00:35] This is a very German thing to do, just making up these crazy metaphors. But I always was... [2:00:41] I've been kind of like doing startups since I was like 16, 17 years old. So it's like [2:00:46] What, the last... [2:00:48] six years or something like that. [2:00:52] I was always really early. Not founder, but... [2:00:57] Sort of like... [2:00:58] just after the founder and like very generalist. So kind of like a very like founder, like role with a lot of like, [2:01:04] 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? I just like know how this works. And I was like, and I was like, well, this is like, you know, it's like, I'm like a founder, right? It's like, kind of like the same as like, [2:01:19] And then I became a founder.

[2:01:23] And it was like, I was like, well, so, you know... [2:01:27] I... [2:01:28] I was really experienced in smelling bread. [2:01:32] I'm all around bread. I know all about bread. I know all about bread. I smelled it, but I never tasted it. Then I took a big bite and I was like, this is very different. I'm not actually... It's like... [2:01:45] It's maybe like in the same way that, you know, you are 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, OK, I had no idea. Yeah. 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. [2:02:08] And 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. [2:02:18] Thank you. [2:02:19] You know, there's like... [2:02:21] And I joke about this a lot with Sarah. [2:02:23] Because there's like these... [2:02:25] 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 everyone is, like, how could you give your kid an iPad? 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?

[2:02:55] And you know there's this thing that you can give it to them and they're going to shut up. Ultimate Password. [2:02:59] And [2:03:00] And so it's very easy if you don't have kids to be like, well... [2:03:04] 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 with these people on the sidelines to be like, you know, this is the perfect company and how, how can you like, um, it was like, you 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. 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, [2:03:34] 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 really need a PM, right? And it's like, these are, I think iPad takes like kind of all of these, these like really like, [2:03:48] generalized pieces of advice. Like, PMs are bad now. By the way, I don't even know really what a PM is. I never worked at a large company, but it's just like this idea of like, [2:03:57] PMs are bad. [2:03:58] you can't have like meetings or you can't have like one, the one thing that I like learned is like, [2:04:04] anything works. Like, you as a founder get to, like, set... [2:04:08] 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 you're [2:04:21] And horrible things happen if you're inconsistent in it. But as long as you're consistent, it can be literally anything. And there's incredibly successful founders who are the most insane micromanagers in the world. There's incredibly successful founders who do not give a shit and are 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 it's much, much more profitable if it wasn't this easy than to just talk about rules.

[2:04:51] recipe just follow these steps and you're going to build a large company here i figured out for you 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 like ipad takes there's like okay [2:05:04] 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, you know, once you, once you serve, [2:05:18] eat the bread, you come to realize that... [2:05:22] If smelling bread isn't everything. [2:05:24] Thank you. [2:05:25] There's This Is Water by David Foster Wallace is on your virtual shelf. Why is that meaningful? [2:05:29] It's one of my favorites. I figured it out. 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, [2:05:39] like, Sander believes of, like, you know, and just, like, kind of pushing back on that a bit and being like, you know, there's, like, a very, [2:05:46] almost like, you know, there's like almost like absurdist slash amusing and like fun way of like, you know, looking at things. I mean, like this doesn't matter, but like. [2:05:56] 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 these things, which obviously is, like... [2:06:04] often very close together when you're like, [2:06:07] look at the world in like a very, um... [2:06:11] You know, [2:06:12] Almost nihilistic, but I don't mean it from, again, the negative sense of things, but just like, okay, there's no... [2:06:18] no purpose or no bigger thing that he believed in. But I think there's something...

[2:06:25] And that there's something beautiful in that, which is there's like a beauty and a magic and and. [2:06:32] We don't quite know, and I think it means that... [2:06:37] you know, the things matter much less. And, you know, there's like, we are in this like, [2:06:44] in this very limited... [2:06:47] Scope. [2:06:48] perception of reality is [2:06:50] what we... One of the most... [2:06:55] transforming experiences and, [2:06:57] is [2:06:58] to rent a car in San Francisco and drive... [2:07:02] 30 minutes north. [2:07:05] And it's like, there's like... [2:07:07] there's like woodworkers and like farmers and these like 30 minutes, right? It's 30 minutes of San Francisco that have like [2:07:15] you know, nothing to do with tech. And they're just like in, you know, Marin County or like Napa or whatever. And it was just like, [2:07:22] and they're like [2:07:24] 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 different continent it's like it's like [2:07:34] 10 times that, 100 times that, 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 that it can, like, mire us and, like, almost, like, put us in this, like, you know, position of, like, not being able to do anything because we're so, you know, taking these so seriously, but, [2:07:54] Some other people would think it's completely ridiculous because...

[2:07:57] I think what I like about [2:08:00] David Forrest-Davallos in lots of ways is very similar to Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. It's perspective. Everything is about perspective. That was what I alluded to earlier. I think in some sense what you're doing is [2:08:14] The key is getting out from under yourself and like... [2:08:17] The reason oftentimes people are alone and they don't belong is that they're looking at all of the reasons the world isn't meeting them, where they're at. And what I always loved about This Is Water is that it's like you can either worship something related to yourself or you can find something else. [2:08:32] Yeah. [2:08:32] I think there's this... [2:08:35] Not to be political, but there's this, like... [2:08:37] this like perception of like saying that you can do anything is a very privileged thing. [2:08:43] 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, you know, [2:08:57] 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 the actions you took so far are really bad 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

[2:09:27] also much more productive, right? Because the best way... [2:09:30] 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 [2:09:51] some sort of like power over what are the decisions they take. 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, Ceyanne, is like such a great example of that, of just like, no, actually, I get to like create, [2:10:07] my reality. [2:10:09] And it's really true. Like, it's like, she can just do that. And it's like, you meet Zeyan and she's like, there's like, not in a hundred years, this wouldn't have worked, right? Like, there's like, you know, you could drop her anywhere, like 300,000 times and it would always work out because she just like really believes. [2:10:25] that you can create your own reality. [2:10:27] And I think more people should believe that. [2:10:30] Thank you. [2:10:31] I like to ask people, we talk about big regrets. What are you most glad you did? [2:10:36] *sniff* [2:10:37] I think there is like a really profound... [2:10:40] Periods. [2:10:41] of [2:10:43] August, September... [2:10:46] you know, [2:10:47] November like last year [2:10:50] Um... [2:10:51] where [2:10:53] I went from... [2:10:55] Like outsider...

[2:10:57] you know, to like, at like a... [2:11:02] Kind of like a scary speech. [2:11:04] from [2:11:05] a complete rando. It was like, I knew no one in San Francisco. I was building this like weird town [2:11:12] Bing and... [2:11:16] to like... [2:11:17] Now I'm just like, this Monday I was texting Ben. I was like, well, I'm thinking through this thing. And Tuesday he spent two hours with me at the office thinking about... [2:11:26] the founder of Pinterest thinking about like how we should build product. And like, I text like good stuff, the CEO of Spotify. And we're 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, I have something to like call a friend from before. Um, [2:11:44] I was talking with Gustav about this and he was like, what? That's kind of crazy. And I don't know how that happened. Like, this is like... [2:11:50] I think this is like a very profound period of like, [2:11:54] Maybe it was just Peter saying yes and just, you know, and all of these things that came downstream. But I really do think it was... [2:12:03] It was more because there was like people before, you know, [2:12:07] I met Gustav pre-benchmark, for example, and there's like... [2:12:14] this period of just like sort of like really going out. [2:12:18] And for the first time... [2:12:21] 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 obviously the way I talk about it has like changed so much over like the last few months.

[2:12:32] But... [2:12:35] I think maybe a lot of people should... [2:12:39] have the courage to like, you know, one of, I told you about Stephen Perrone, like my, or first, very first angel investor. And, and, [2:12:46] So, [2:12:48] I remember talking with him about this just before. So it must have been in late August or something like that. [2:12:56] And I think... [2:12:57] You know, maybe what changed or what happened is that like, [2:13:01] If you go out and you meet a lot of people and you just like... [2:13:04] Um... [2:13:06] courageously tell them about the world you're creating, fearlessly telling about the world you're creating without any like expectation. Yeah. [2:13:13] Thank you. [2:13:14] 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. That's what I see. [2:13:22] And... [2:13:23] And I wonder what would happen if more people did that. That's a powerful message. I think courage is the operative word. I think courage is in short supply. And I think... [2:13:32] My suspicion, what happened for you, is that you had... [2:13:36] strong and unique point of view. It was a little bit strange. [2:13:40] And that's very attractive. [2:13:41] Even if it's incomplete, it's dialing into focus. [2:13:45] One last thing. [2:13:49] you've tweeted consumer products tend to be the result of character deficiencies of their founders. And I asked a mutual friend of ours, [2:13:58] You know who. [2:13:59] What I should ask you, if they had a question for you, if he had a question for you.

[2:14:03] He said, I ask him if he's building me to be vulnerable with people so that he doesn't have to be. [2:14:09] 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. [2:14:19] Thank you. [2:14:20] that's a great that's a great question that's funny [2:14:26] Um, [2:14:28] Yeah. [2:14:29] I don't know if I can disagree with that. [2:14:33] Thank you. [2:14:33] I do think there's something in that. I think people... [2:14:40] It's a thing that actually... [2:14:43] Kate, Peter's wife, I stole it from her. [2:14:47] And she must have had this incredible... [2:14:51] Outlook [2:14:52] I like social functions throughout the year or something. And maybe there's – probably there's a pattern there. [2:15:00] I think you're on your way. [2:15:01] Yes, we all are. Thank you, Paul. Thank you. [2:15:05] 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. [2:15:20] 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.

[2:15:50] 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 [2:16:02] 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.