Personhood vs. Humanhood: Honesty and Boundaries

Paul Scherer (X, LinkedIn) is the founder of Eigen (check out their beautiful website), where he’s building a mutual friend: an AI that brings people closer together and helps us belong.

Paul grew up in a small town outside of Frankfurt, Germany, and dropped out of high school at seventeen to work on startups, including Augment. He recently raised $15M from Benchmark, with legendary partner Peter Fenton comparing him to the founders of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. I was introduced to him by Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari, who is an angel investor in Eigen. Dialectic guest Brie Wolfson has also been working with Paul, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and why so many people I respect were so enamored with a kid who has yet to publicly launch a product.

We start with Paul’s central influence: Michael Ende’s children’s novel, Momo, and the little girl who reminds a village to be present in the face of Time Thieves quietly pushing them to be more efficient. Then we talk about how even though the internet has shaped both of our lives and relationships, it increasingly feels that social media is making us feel both more connected and more alone. Paul explains what they are working on at Eigen, why we need an (AI) mutual friend, why it should be a single “person,” and why it feels less like engineering and more like parenting or growing someone/thing you don’t have complete control over. I also ask Paul about the pressures and psychology around being “blessed” by Silicon Valley’s powers that be, and why authenticity, or something like it, is in short supply.

I hope you are inspired to be courageous in your convictions, even if they are strange, and to listen to the voice inside that so many of us stop listening to in adulthood.

All links available at dialectic.fm/paul-scherer

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Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Learn more about Notion’s new developer platform and workers here. Inside Notion by Brie Wolfson & Camille Ricketts for Colossus. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.

Timestamps:

• (0:00) Opening Highlights
• (1:13) Intro to Paul
• (2:33) Thanks to Notion
• (3:28) Start: 'Momo', Presence, Friendship, and Time
• (11:10) How the Internet Connects Us and Isolates Us, and Conflating Social and Media
• (25:12) A Future Where We Talk to AIs
• (33:55) Paul and Eigen are Building a Mutual Friend to Help Us Connect with Other Humans
• (48:01) Why Do We Need a Mutual Friend? And Making a Friend We Can Trust
• (1:16:53) Belonging, Building the team at Eigen, and Inventor as Outlaw
• (1:25:38) Managing the Psychology of Being a Promising Young Founder
• (1:36:53) Maintaining a High Bar, Fighting Entropy, and Influences
• (1:53:50) Self-belief, Authenticity, Seeing the Water
• (2:10:30) Courage, and a Final Question from a Mutual Friend
• (2:15:04) Thanks Again to Notion