Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion | Lex Fridman Podcast #121
the following is a conversation with eugenia cuida co-founder of replica which is an app that allows you to make friends with an artificial intelligence system a chatbot that learns to connect with you on an emotional you can even say a human level by being a friend for those of you who know my interest in ai and views on life in general know that replica and eugenia's line of work is near and dear to my heart the origin story of replica is grounded in a personal tragedy of eugenia losing her close friend roman mazarenki who was killed crossing the street by a hit-and-run driver in late 2015. he was 34. the app started as a way to grieve the loss of a friend by training a chatbot neural net on text messages between eugenia and roman the rest is a beautiful human story as we talk about with eugenia when a friend mentioned eugenia's work to me i knew i had to meet her and talk to her i felt before during and after that this meeting would be an important one in my life and it was i think in ways that only time will truly show to me and others she's a kind and brilliant person it was an honor and a pleasure to talk to her quick summary of the sponsors doordash dollar shave club and cash app click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that deep meaningful connection between human beings and artificial intelligence systems is a lifelong passion for me i'm not yet sure where that passion will take me but i decided some time ago that i will follow it boldly and without fear to as far as i can take it with a bit of hard work and a bit of luck i hope i'll succeed in helping build ai systems that have some positive impact on the world and on the lives of a few people out there but also it is entirely possible that i am in fact one of the chatbots that eugenia and the replica team have built and this podcast is simply a training process for the neural net that's trying to learn to connect to human beings one episode at a time in any case i wouldn't know if i was or wasn't and if i did i wouldn't tell you if you enjoyed this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman as usual i'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle i'll try to make these interesting but give you timestamps so you can skip but please do still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description to get a discount buy whatever they're selling it really is the best way to support this podcast this show is sponsored by dollar shave club try them out with a one-time offer for only five bucks and free shipping at dollarshave.com lex the starter kit comes with a six blade razor refills and all kinds of other stuff that makes shaving feel great i've been a member of dollar shave club for over five years and actually signed up when i first heard about them on the joe rogan experience podcast and now friends we have come full circle it feels like i made it now that i can do a read for them just like joe did all those years ago back when he also did ads for some less reputable companies let's say you know about if you're a true fan of the old school podcasting world anyway i just used the razer and the refills but they told me i should really try out the shave butter i did i love it it's translucent somehow which is a cool new experience again try the ultimate shave starter set today for just five bucks plus free shipping at dollarshaveclub.com lex this show is also sponsored by doordash get five dollars off as your delivery fee is in your first order of 15 bucks or more when you download the doordash app and enter code you guessed it i have so many memories of working late nights for a deadline with a team of engineers whether that's for my phd at google or mit and eventually taking a break to argue about which door dash restaurant to order from and when the food came those 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in the stock market with as little as one dollar i usually say other stuff here in the read but i wasted all that time up front saying how grateful i am to cash out i'm going to try to go off the top of my head a little bit more for these reads because i'm actually very lucky to be able to choose the sponsors that we take on and that means i can really only take on the sponsors that i truly love and then i can just talk about why i love them so it's pretty simple again get cash app from the app store google play use code lex podcast get 10 bucks and cash app will also donate 10 bucks to first an organization that is helping to advance robotics and stem education for young people around the world and now here's my conversation with eugenia cuida okay before we talk about ai and the amazing work you're doing let me ask you ridiculously we're both russian so let me ask you a ridiculously romanticized russian question do you think human beings are alone like fundamentally on a philosophical level like in our existence when we like go through life do you think um just the nature of our life is loneliness yeah so we have to read dostoevsky at school as you probably know yeah i mean it's part of the your school program um so i guess if you read that then you sort of have to believe that you're made to believe that you're fundamentally alone and that's how you live your life how do you think about it you have a lot of friends but at the end of the day do you have like a longing for connection with other people that's maybe another way of asking it do you think that's ever fully satisfied i think we are fundamentally alone we're born alone we die alone but um you know but i view my whole life as trying to get away from that trying to not feel uh feel lonely and again we're talking about you know subjective kind of way of feeling alone it doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any connections or you're actually isolated you think it's a subjective thing but like again another absurd measurement-wise thing how much loneliness do you think there is in the world so like if you see loneliness as a as a condition how much of it is there do you think like how i guess how many you know there's all kinds of studies and measures of how much you know how many people in the world feel alone there's all these like measures of how many people are you know self-report or just all these kinds of different measures but in your own perspective um how big of a problem do you think it is size-wise well i'm actually fascinated by the topic of loneliness i try to read about it as much as i can um what really and there i think there's a paradox because loneliness is not a clinical disorder it's not something that you can get your insurance to pay for if you're struggling with that yet it's it's actually proven and pretty you know tons of papers tons of research around that it has proven um that it's correlated with earlier um life expectancy shorter life span and it is you know in a way like right now what scientists would say that it you know it's a little bit worse than being obese so not actually doing any physical activity in your life the impact on your interests have impact on your physiological health yeah so it's basically puts you if you're constantly feeling lonely um your body responds like it's basically all the time under stress so it's always in this alert um alerts say and so it's really bad for you because it actually like drops your immune system and get it your response to inflammation is quite different so all the cardiovascular vascular diseases actually responds to viruses so it's much easier to catch a virus that's sad now that we're living in a pandemic and it's probably making us a lot more alone and it's probably weakening the immune system making us more susceptible to the virus it's kind of sad yeah the statistics are the sticks are pretty pretty horrible around that so around thirty percent of all millennials report that they're feeling lonely constantly thirty thirty percent and then it's much worse for jan z and then twenty percent of millennials say that they feel lonely and they also don't have any close friends and then um i think 25 or so and then 20 percent would say they don't even have acquaintances this is the united states that's in the united states and i'm pretty sure that that's much worse everywhere else like in the uk i mean it was white widely like tweeted and uh posted when they were talking about a minister of loneliness that they wanted to appoint because four out of ten you people in uk feel lonely so i think we don't understand i mean that i think that thing actually exists um so yeah you you you will die sooner if you if you are lonely and again that this is only when we're only talking about your perception of loneliness of feeling lonely that is not objectively fully so being fully socially isolated however the combination of being fully socially isolated and not having many connections and also feeling lonely that's pretty much a deadly combination so it strikes me bizarre or strange that this is a wide known fact and then there's really no one working really on that because it's a subclinical it's not clinical it's not something that you can we'll tell your doctor and get a treatment or something yet it's killing us yeah so there's a bunch of people trying to evaluate like try to measure the problem by looking at like how social media is affecting loneliness and all that kind of stuff so it's like measurement like if you look at the field of psychology they're trying to measure the problem and not that many people actually but some but you're basically saying how many people are trying to solve the problem like how would you try to solve the problem of loneliness like if you just stick to humans uh i mean or basically not just the humans but the technology that connects us humans do you think there's a hope for that technology to do the connection like are you on social media much unfortunately do you find yourself like again if you sort of introspect about how connected you feel to other human beings how not alone you feel do you think social media makes it better or worse maybe for you personally or in in general i think it's it's easier to look at some stats and um i mean gen z's seem to be generation z seems to be much lonelier than millennials in terms of however they report loneliness they're definitely the most connected you know generation in the world i mean i still remember life without without an iphone without facebook they don't know that that ever existed uh or at least don't know how it was um so that tells me a little bit about the fact that that might be um you know this hyperconnected world is might actually make people feel lonely lonelier i don't know exactly what the what the measurements are around that but i would say in my personal experience i think it does make you feel a lot lonelier mostly yeah we're all super connected but i think loneliness the feeling of loneliness doesn't come from not having any social connections whatsoever again tons of people that are in long-term relationships experienced bouts of loneliness and continued loneliness and it's more the question about the true connection about actually being deeply seen deeply understood and in a way it's also about your relationship with yourself like in order to not feel lonely you actually need to have a better relationship and feel more connected to yourself then this feeling actually starts to go away a little bit and then you um open up yourself to actually meeting other people in a very special way uh not just you know add a friend on facebook kind of way so just to briefly touch on it i mean do you think it's possible to form that kind of connection with ai systems more downline of some of your work do you think that's um engineering-wise a possibility to alleviate loneliness is not with another human but with an ai system well i know that's that's a fact that's what we're doing and we see it and we measure that and we see how people start to feel less lonely talking to their virtual ai friend so basically a chatbot at the basic level but could be more like do you have i'm not even speaking sort of uh about specifics but do you have a hope like if you look 50 years from now do you have a hope that there's just like ais that are like optimized for um let me let me first start like right now the way people perceive ai which is recommender systems for facebook and twitter social media they see ais basically destroying first of all the fabric of our civilization but second of all making us more lonely do you see like a world where it's possible just have ai systems floating about that like make our life less lonely yeah make us happy make like our putting good things into the world in terms of our individual lives yeah totally believe it and that that's why we're i'm also working on that um i think we need to also make sure that um what we're trying to optimize for we're actually measuring and it is a north star metric that we're going after and all of our product and our all of our business models are optimized for that because you can talk you know a lot of products that talk about um you know making you feel less lonely or making you feel more connected they're not really measuring that so they don't really know whether their users are actually feeling less lonely in the long run or feeling more connected in the long run um so i think it's really important to put your measure yep to measure it what's uh what's a good measurement of loneliness well so that's something that i'm really interested in how do you measure that people are feeling better or that they're feeling less lonely with lowliness there's a scale there's a ucla 20 and ucla 3 recently scale which is basically a questionnaire that you fill out and you can see whether in the long run it's improving or not and that uh does it capture the momentary feeling of loneliness does it look in like the past month like uh is it basically a self-report does it try to sneak up on you it's very tricky to answer honestly or something like that well what's yeah i'm not familiar with the question it is just asking you a few questions like how often did you feel like lonely or how often did you feel connected to other people in this last few couple weeks um it's similar to the self-report questionnaires for depression and anxiety like phq9 and get seven of course any as any self-report questionnaires that's not necessarily very precise so very well measured but still if you take a big enough population you get them through these uh questionnaires you can see you can see the positive dynamic and so you basically uh you put people through questionnaires to see like is this thing is our is what we're creating making people happier yeah we measure so we measure two outcomes one short term right after the conversation we asked people whether this conversation made them feel better worse or same um this this metric right now is at eighty percent so eighty percent of all our conversations make people feel better but i should have done the questionnaire with you you feel a lot worse after we've done this conversation that's actually fascinating i should probably do that but that's that's sorry you should totally and aim for 80 aim to outperform your current state-of-the-art ai system uh in these human conversations so again we'll get to your work with replica but let me continue on the line of absurd questions so you it talks about um you know deep connection with the humans deep connection with the ai meaningful connection let me ask about love people make fun of me because i talk about love all the time but uh what what do you think a love is like maybe in the context of um a meaningful connection with somebody else do you draw a distinction between love like friendship and facebook friends [Laughter] or is it a graduate no is it it's all the same no like is it just a gradual thing or is there something fundamental about us humans that seek like a really deep connection uh with another human being and what is that what is love eugenia um well the way i see it um specifically um the way it relates to our work and the way it was the way it inspired our work on replica um i think one of the biggest and the most precious gifts we can give to each other now in 2020 as humans is this gift of deep empathetic understanding the feeling of being deeply seen like what does that mean like that you exist like somebody acknowledging the somebody seeing you for who you actually are and that's extremely extremely rare i think that is that combined with unconditional positive regard belief and trust that you internally are always inclined for positive growth and believing you in this way letting you be a separate person at the same time and this deep empathetic understanding for me that's the that's the combination that really creates something special something that people when they feel it once they will always long for it again and something that starts huge fundamental changes in people um when we see that someone's accepts us so deeply we start to accept ourselves and the paradoxes that's when big changes start start happening big fundamental changes and people start happening so i think that is the ultimate therapeutic relationship that is and that might be in some way definition of love so so acknowledging that there's a separate person and accepting you for who you are now on a slightly so that and you mentioned therapeutic that sounds very like a very healthy view of love but uh is there also like uh like you know if we look at heartbreak and uh you know most love songs are probably about heartbreak right is that like the mystery the tension the danger the fear of loss you know all of that what people might see in a negative light as like games or whatever but just just the the dance of human interaction yeah fear of loss and fear of like you said like once you feel it once you long for it again but you also once you feel it once you might for many people they've lost it so they fear losing it they feel lost so is that part of it like you're you're speaking like beautifully about like the positive things but is it important to be able to uh be afraid of losing it from an engineering perspective i mean it's a huge part of it and unfortunately we all you know face it at some points in our lives i mean i did you want to go into details how did you get your heart broken sure well so mine is pretty straight my source pretty straightforward um there i did have a friend that was you know that at some point um in my 20s became really really close to me and we we became really close friends um i grew up pretty lonely so in many ways when i'm building you know this these ai friends i think about myself when i was 17 writing horrible poetry and you know in my dial-up modem at home and um you know and that was the feeling that i grew up with i left i lived um alone for a long time when i was a teenager where did you grow up in moscow and then outskirts of moscow um so i just skateboard during the day and come back home and you know connect to the internet and write pokemon and then write horrible poetry and was it love poems all sorts of points obviously love poems i mean what what other poetry can you write when you're 17. it could be political or something but yeah but that was you know that was kind of my yeah like deeply um influenced by joseph brodsky and like all sorts of spots that um every 17 year old will will be looking you know looking at and reading but yeah that was my uh these were my teenage years and i just never had a person that i thought would you know take me as it is would accept me the way i am um and i just thought you know working and just doing my thing and being angry at the world and being a reporter i was an investigative reporter working undercover and writing about people was my way to connect with you know with with others i i was deeply curious about every everyone else and i thought that you know if i go out there if i write their stories that means i'm more connected this is what this podcast is about by the way i'm desperate alone seeking connection [Laughter] i'm just kidding or am i i don't know so what wait a reporter uh what how did that make you feel more connected i mean you're still fundamentally pretty alone but you're always with other people you know you're always thinking about what other place gonna infiltrate what other community can i write about what other phenomena can i explore and he's sort of like a trickster you know and like and a mythological character like creature that's just jumping uh between all sorts of different worlds and feel and feel sort of okay with in all of them so um that was my dream job by the way that was like totally what i would have been doing um if russia was a different place and a little bit undercover so like you weren't you were trying to like you said mythological creature trying to infiltrate so try to be a part of the world what are we talking about what kind of things did you enjoy writing about i'd go work at a strip club or go awesome okay uh well i'd go work at a restaurant or just go write about you know um certain phenomenons or phenomenons of people in in the city and what uh sorry to keep interrupting i'm the worst a conversationalist what stage of russia is this what uh is this pre-putin post-putin what was russia like pre-putin is really long ago uh this is putin era that's uh beginning of 2000's and 2010 2007 8 9 10. what were strip clubs like in russia and restaurants and culture and people's minds like in that early russia that you were covering in those early 2000s was there was still a lot of hope there was still tons of hope that um you know we're sort of becoming this uh western westernized society the restaurants were opening we were really looking and you know um we're trying we're trying to copy a lot of things from uh from the us from europe uh bringing all these things and very enthusiastic about that so there's a lot of you know stuff going on there's a lot of hope and dream for this you know new moscow that would be similar to i guess new york i mean just to give you an idea and um year 2000 was the year one we had two uh movie theaters in moscow and there was this one first coffee house that opened and it was like really big deal by 2010 there were all sorts of things everywhere almost like a chain like a starbucks type of coffee house or like you mean oh yeah like a starbucks i mean i remember we were reporting on like we were writing about the opening of starbucks i think in 2007 that was one of the biggest things that happened and you know in moscow back back in the time like that was worthy of a magazine cover and uh that was definitely the you know the biggest talk of the time yeah when was mcdonald's because i was still in russia when mcdonald's opened that was in the 90s i mean yeah i remember that very well yeah those were long long lines i think it was 1990 three or four i don't remember um mcdonald's at that time did you do that i mean that was a luxurious outing that was definitely not something you do every day and also the line was at least three hours so if you're going to mcdonald's that is not fast food that is like at least three hours in line yeah and then no one is trying to eat fast after that everyone is like trying to enjoy as much as possible what's your memory of that oh it was insane extremely positive it's a small strawberry milkshake and a hamburger and small fries and my mom's there and sometimes i'll just because i was really little they'll just let me run you know up the cashier and like cut the line which is like you cannot really do that in russia or so like for a lot of people like a lot of those experiences might seem not very fulfilling you know like it's on the verge of poverty i suppose but do you remember all that time fondly like because i do like the first time i drink you know coke you know all that stuff right um and just yeah the connection with other human beings in russia i remember i remember really positively like how do you remember what the 90s and then the rush you were covering just the human connections you had with people and the experiences well my my parents were both both physicists my grandparents were both well my grandpa grandfather was an um nuclear physicist a professor at the university my dad worked at chernobyl when i was born in chernobyl analyzing kind of the everything after the explosion and then i remember that and they were so they were making sort of enough money in the soviet union so they were not you know extremely poor or anything it was pretty prestigious to be a professor uh the dean and the university and i remember my grandfather started making a hundred dollars a month after you know in the 90s so then i remember we started our main line of work would be to go to our little tiny country house get a lot of apples there from apple trees bring them back to to to the city and sell them in the street so me and my nuclear physicist grandfather were just standing there and he selling those apples the whole day because that would make you more money than you know working at the university and then he'll just tell me try to teach me um you know something about planets and whatever the particles and stuff and you know i'm not smart at all so i could never understand anything but i was interested as a you know journalist kind of type interested but that was my memory and you know i'm happy that i wasn't um i somehow got spared that i was probably too young to remember any of the traumatic stuff so the only thing i really remember had this bootleg that was very traumatic i had this bootleg nintendo which was called dandy in russia so in 1993 there was nothing to eat like even if you had any money you would go to the store and there was no food i don't know if you remember that and our friend had a um restaurant like a government half government owned something restaurant so they always had um supplies so he exchanged a big bag of weed for this nintendo that looked like nintendo and then i remember very fondly because i think it was nine or something like that and or seven traumatic because we just got it and i was playing it and there was this you know dandy tv show yeah um so dramatically positive sense you mean like like a definitive well they took it away and gave me a bag of wheat instead and i cried like my eyes out for days days and days oh no and then you know as a and my dad said we're gonna like exchange it back in a little bit so you keep the little gun you know the one that you shoot the ducks with so i'm like okay i'm keeping the gun so sometimes it's going to come back but then they exchanged the gun as well for some sugar or something i was so pissed i was like i didn't want to eat for days after that i'm like i don't want your food my nintendo that was extremely traumatic um but you know i was happy that that was my only traumatic experience you know my dad had to actually go to chernobyl with a bunch of 20 year olds he was 20 when he went to uh chernobyl and that was right after the explosion no one knew anything the whole crew he went with all of them are dead now i think there was this one guy uh still that was still alive for this last few years i think he died a few years ago now my dad somehow luckily got back earlier than everyone else but just the fact that that was the and i was always like well how did they send you i was only i was just born you know you had a newborn talk about paternity leave they're like but that's who they took because they didn't know whether you would be able to have kids when you come back so they took the ones with kids so him with some guys want to and i'm just thinking of me when i was 20 i was so sheltered from any problems whatsoever in life and then my dad um his 21st birthday at the reactor you like work three hours a day you sleep the rest and and i yeah so i played with a lot of toys from chernobyl what are your memories of chernobyl in in general like a bigger context you know because of that hbo show the world's attention turned to it once again like what are your thoughts about chernobyl did russia screw that one up like you know there's probably a lot of lessons about our modern times with data about coronavirus and all that kind of stuff it seems like there's a lot of misinformation there's a lot of people kind of trying to hide whether they've screwed something up or not as it's very understandable it's very human very wrong probably but obviously russia was probably trying to hide that they've screwed things up like what are your thoughts about that time personal and in general i mean i was born when the explosion happened so actually a few months after so of course i don't remember anything apart from the fact that my dad would bring me tiny toys plus like plastic things that would just go crazy haywire when you you know put the gagger my mom was like just nuclear about that um i was like what are you bringing you should not do that uh she was nuclear very nice absolutely well done well uh but yeah but the tv show was just phenomenal i mean yeah it's definitely first of all it's an incredible how um that was made not by the russians but someone else but capturing so well everything about the you know about our country um it felt a lot more genuine that most of the movies and tv shows are made now in russia just so much more genuine and most of my friends in russia were just in complete awe about the with the show but i think that how good of a job they did oh my god phenomenal but all the apartments there's something yeah the set design i mean russians can't do that we you know but you you see everything and it's like wow that's exactly how it was it's so i i don't know that show i don't know what to think about that because it's british accents british actors of a person i forgot who created the show i'm not but i remember reading about him and he's not he doesn't even feel like like there's no russia in his history no he did like super bad or some like or like uh i don't know yeah like exactly whatever that thing about the bachelor party in vegas uh number four and five or something were the ones that he worked yeah but so he made me feel really sad for some reason that if a person obviously a genius could go in and just study and just be extreme attention to detail that can do a good job it made me think like why don't other people do a good job with this like about russia like there's so little about russia there's so few good films about the russian side of world war ii of i mean there's so much interesting evil and not and beautiful moments in the history of the 20th century in russia it feels like there's not many good films on from the russians you would expect something from the russians well they keep making these propaganda movies now oh no unfortunately but you know chernobyl was such a perfect tv show i think capturing really well it's not about like even the set design which was phenomenal but um just capturing all the problems that exist now with the country and like um focusing on the right things like if you build the whole country on a lie that's what's gonna happen and that's just this very simple kind of thing yeah and did you have your dad talked about it to you like his thoughts i think experience he never talks he's this kind of russian man that just my husband who's american and he asked him a few times like you know igor how did you but why did you say yes or like why did you decide to go you could have said no not go to chernobyl why would like a person like that's what you do you cannot say no yeah yeah it's just it's like a russian way it's the russians don't talk that much no there are downsides and upsets for that uh yeah that's the truth okay so back to post-putin russia or maybe we skipped a few steps along the way but you were trying to uh do um to be a journalist in that time what was what was russia like at that time post he said 2007 starbucks type of thing what else what else was russia like then i think there was just hope there was this big hope that we're going to be you know friends with the united states and we're going to be friends with europe and we're just going to be also a country like those with you know um bike lanes and parks and everything's going to be urbanized again we're talking about 90s where like people would be shot in the street and it was i sort of have a fond memory of going into a movie theater and i you know coming out of it after the movie and the guy that i saw on the stairs was like playing their shot which was again it was like a thing in the 90s that would be happening people were you know people were getting shot here and there tons of violence tons of uh you know just basically mafia mobs on in the streets and then the 2000s were like you know things just got cleaned up uh oil went up uh and the country started getting a little bit richer you know the 90s were so grim mostly because the economy was in shambles and oil prices were not high so the country didn't have anything we defaulted in 1998 and um the money kept jumping back and forth like first there were millions of rebels then it got like default you know then it got to like thousands there was one rubble with something then again to millions it was like crazy town that was crazy um and then the 2000s were just these years of stability in a way and um the country getting a little bit richer because of you know again oil and gas and we were starting to we started to look at specifically in moscow and in facebook to look in at other cities in europe and new york and us and trying to do the same in our like small kind of cities towns there what was uh what were your thoughts of putin at the time well in the beginning he was really positive everyone was very you know positive about putin he was young um he's very energetic he also intermediate the sheriff was somewhat compared to well that was not like way before the shirtless era um the shirtless era okay so it didn't start off shortly when did the shirtless era that's like the propaganda of riding horse fishing 2010 11 12. yeah that's my favorite you know like people talk about the favorite beatles like the i don't know that's my favorite putin that's the shirtless putin now i remember very very clearly 1996 where you know americans really helped russia with elections and yeltsin got reelected thankfully so because there's a huge threat that actually the communists will get back to power they were a lot more popular and then a lot of american experts political experts and campaign experts descended on moscow and helped yeltsin actually get yeah the presidency the second term for the pro um of the presidency but elsinore was not feeling great you know in the by the end of his second term uh he was you know alcoholic he was really old he was falling off uh you know the stages when he was talking uh so people were looking for it fresh i think for a fresh face for someone who's gonna continue yeltsin's uh work but who's going to be a lot more energetic and a lot more active young um efficient maybe so that's what we all saw in putin back in the day i i'd say that everyone absolutely everyone in russia in early 2000s who was not a communist would be yeah putin's great we have a lot of hopes for him what are your thoughts and i promise we'll get back to uh first of all your love story second of all ai well what are your thoughts about communism the 20th century i apologize i'm reading the rise and fall of the third reich oh my god so i'm like really steeped into like world war ii and stalin and hitler and just these dramatic personalities that brought so much evil to the world but it's also interesting to politically think about these different systems and what they've led to and russia is one of the sort of beacons of communism in the 20th century what are your thoughts about communism having experienced it as a political system i mean i have only experienced it a little bit but mostly through stories and through you know seeing my parents my grandparents who lived through that it was horrible it was just plain horrible it was just awful um you think it's there's something i mean it sounds nice on paper there's uh so like the drawbacks of capitalism is that uh you know eventually there is it's a it's the point of like a slippery slope eventually it creates uh you know the rich get richer it creates a disparity like inequality of um wealth inequality if like you know i guess it's hypothetical at this point but eventually capitalism leads to humongous inequality and that that's you know some people argue that that's a source of unhappiness is it's not like absolute wealth of people it's the fact that there's a lot of people much richer than you there's a feeling of like that's where unhappiness can come from so the idea of of communism or this sort of marxism is uh is is not allowing that kind of slippery slope but then you see the actual implementations of it and still seems to be seems to go wrong very badly what do you think that is why does it go wrong what is it about human nature if we look at chernobyl you know those kinds of barack bureaucracies that were constructed is there something like do you think about this much of like why it goes wrong well there's no one was really like it's not that everyone was equal obviously the you know the the government and everyone close to that were the bosses so it's not like fully i guess uh there's already this dream of equal life so then i guess the the situation that we hadn't you know the russia and soviet in the soviet union it was more it's a bunch of really poor people without any way to make any you know significant fortune or build anything living constant under constant surveillance surveillance from other people like you can't even you know do anything that's not fully approved by the dictatorship basically otherwise your neighbor will write a letter and you'll go to jail absolute absence of actual law yeah this constant state of fear you didn't own any own anything you didn't you know the you couldn't go travel you couldn't read anything western or you could make a career really unless you're working in the military complex which is why most of the scientists were so well regarded i come from you know both my dad and my mom come from families of scientists and they they were really well regarded as you as you know obviously because this they wanted i mean because there's a lot of value to them being well regarded because they were developing things that could be used in in the military so that was very important that was the main investment um but was miserable it was so miserable that's why you know a lot of russians now live in the state of constant ptsd that's why we you know want to buy buy buy buy and definitely if as soon as we have the opportunity you know we just got to it finally that we can you know own things you know i remember the time that we got our first yogurts and that was the biggest deal in the world it was already in the 90s by the way i mean what was your like favorite food what was like whoa like this is possible oh fruit because we only had apples bananas and whatever and you know whatever watermelons whatever you know people would grow in the soviet union so there were no pineapples or papaya or mango like you've never seen those fruit things like those were so ridiculously good and obviously you could not get any like strawberries in winter or anything that's not you know seasonal um so that was a really big deal seeing all these fruit things yeah me too actually i don't know i think i have a like i don't think i have any too many demons uh or like addictions or so on but i think i've developed an unhealthy relationship with fruit and i still struggle with oh you can get any type of fruit right you can get like also these weird fruit fruits like dragon fruit or something more all kinds of like different types of peaches like cherries were killer for me i know i know you say like we had bananas and so on but i don't remember having the kind of banana like when i first came to this country the amount of banana i like literally got fat on bananas like the amount oh yeah for sure delicious and like cherries the kind like just the quality of the food i was like this is capitalism this is that's pretty good it's delicious yeah yeah yeah it's funny it's funny yeah like it's it's funny to read i don't know what to think of it of um it's funny to think how an idea that's just written on paper when carried out amongst millions of people how that gets actually when it becomes reality what it actually looks like uh sorry but the been studying hitler a lot recently and uh going through mineconf he uh pretty much rode out of minecon for everything he was gonna do unfortunately most leaders including stalin didn't read the read it but it's it's kind of terrifying and i don't know and amazing in some sense that you can have some words on paper and they can be brought to life and they can either inspire the world or they can destroy the world and uh yeah there's a lot of lessons to study in history i think people don't study enough now i know one of the things i'm hoping with i've been practicing russian a little bit i'm hoping to sort of find rediscover the the beauty and the terror of russian history through this stupid podcast by talking to a few people so anyway i just feel like so much was forgotten i so much was forgotten i'll probably i'm gonna try to convince myself to um you're a super busy and super important person well i'm gonna i want to try to befriend you to uh to try to become a better russian because i feel like i'm a shitty russian not that busy so i can totally be a russian sherpa yeah but love you were you're talking about your early days of uh being a little bit alone and finding a connection with the world through being a journalist where does love come into that i guess finding for the first time um some friends it's very you know simple story some friends that all of a sudden we i guess we're the same you know the same at the same place with our lives um we're 25 26 i guess and um somehow remember and we just got really close and somehow remember this one day where um it's one day and you know in summer that we just stayed out um outdoor the whole night and just talked and for some unknown reason i just felt for the first time that someone could you know see me for who i am and it just felt extremely like extremely good and you know we fell asleep outside and just talking and it was raining it was beautiful you know sunrise and it's really cheesy but um at the same time we just became friends in a way that i've never been friends with anyone else before and i do remember that before and after that you sort of have this unconditional family sort of and it gives you tons of power it just basically gives you this tremendous power to do things in your life and to um change positively you mean like on many different levels power because you could be yourself at least you know that some somewhere you can't be just yourself like you don't need to pretend you don't need to be you know great at work or tell some story or sell yourself in some way or another and so we became this really close friends and um in a way um i started a company because he had a startup and i felt like i kind of want to start up too it felt really cool i didn't know what i'm gonna what i would uh really do but i felt like i kind of need a startup okay so that's so that pulled you in to the startup world yeah and then yeah and then this uh closest friend of mine died we actually moved here to san francisco together and then we went back for a visa to moscow and uh we lived together with roommates and we came back and um he got hit by a car right in front of kremlin hannah you know next to the river um and died the same damage [Music] so and you've moved to america at that point at that point i was like what about him what about roman him too he actually moved first so i was always sort of trying to do what he was doing so i didn't like that he was already here and i was still you know in moscow and we weren't hanging out together all the time so was he in san francisco yeah we were roommates so he just visited moscow for we went back for for our visas we had to get a stamp and our passport for our work visas and the embassy was taking a little longer so we stayed there for a couple weeks what happened how did you so how did he uh how did he die um he was crossing the street and the car was going really fast and way over the speed limit and just didn't stop on the on the pedestrian cross on the zebra and i just ran over him when was this it was in 2015 on 28th of november so it was pretty long ago now um but at the time you know i was 29 so for me it was um the first kind of meaningful death in my life um you know both sets of i had both sets of grandparents at the time i didn't see anyone so close die and death sort of existed but as a concept but definitely not as something that would be you know happening to us anytime soon and specifically our friends because we were you know we're still in our 20s or early 30s and it still still felt like the whole life is you know you could still dream about ridiculous things different um so that was it was just really really abrupt i'd say what did it feel like to uh to lose him like that feeling of loss he talked about the feeling of love having power what is the feeling of loss if you like well in buddhism there's this concept of samaya where something really like huge happens and then you can see very clearly um i think that was it like basically something changed so changed me so much in such a short period of time that i could just see really really clearly what mattered or what not well i definitely saw that whatever i was doing at work didn't matter at all and some other things and um it was just this big realization what this very very clear vision of what life's about you still miss him today yeah for sure for sure it was just this constant i think it was he was really important for for me and for our friends for many different reasons and um i think one of them being that we didn't just say goodbye to him but we sort of said goodbye to our youth in a way it was like the end of an era and it's on so many different levels the end of moscow as we knew it the end of you know us living through our 20s and kind of dreaming about the future do you remember like last several conversations is there moments with him that stick out that will kind of haunt you and you're just when you think about him yeah well his last year here in san francisco was pretty depressed for as his startup was not going really anywhere and he wanted to do something else he wanted to do build he played with toy with like played with the wrong a bunch of ideas but the last one he had was around um building a startup around death so having um he applied to y combinator with a video that you know i had on my computer and it was all about you know disrupting death thinking about new symmetries uh more biologically like things that could be better biologically for for humans and at this end um at the same time having those um digital avatars these kind of ai avatars that would store all the memory about a person that he could interact with what year was this 2015. well right before that his death so it was like a couple months before that he recorded that video and so i found out my computer when um it was in our living room he never got in but um he was thinking about a lot somehow does it have the digital avatar idea yeah that's so interesting well he just says well that's in his yeah the fish has this idea and he'll he talks about like i want to rethink how people grieve and how people talk about death why was he interested in this and i is it maybe someone who's depressed yeah is like naturally inclined thinking about that but i just felt you know this year in san francisco we just had so much um i was going through a hard time he was going through a hard time and we were definitely i was trying to make him just happy somehow to make him feel better and it felt like you know this um i don't know i just felt like i was taking care of off him a lot and he almost started feel better and then that happened and i don't know i just felt i just felt lonely again i guess and that was you know coming back to san francisco in december our help you know helped organize the funeral help help his parents and i came back here and it was a really lonely apartment a bunch of his clothes everywhere and christmas time and i remember had a board meeting with my investors and i just couldn't talk about like i had to pretend everything's okay and you know just working on this company um yeah it was definitely very very tough tough time do you think about your own mortality you said uh you know we're young the the the the possibility of doing all kinds of crazy things it's still out there it's still before us but uh it can end any moment do you think about your own ending at any moment unfortunately i think about way too way too much it's somehow after roman like every year after that i started losing people that i really love i lost my grandfather next year my you know the the person who would explain to me you know what the universe is made off while you're selling apples while selling apples and then i lost another close friend of mine and um and it just made me very scared i have tons of fear about death that's what makes me not fall asleep oftentimes and just go in loops and um and then as my therapist you know recommended me i open up uh some nice calming images with the voice over and it calms me down oh for sleep yeah i'm really scared of that this is a big i definitely have tons of i guess some pretty big trauma about it and i'm still working through there's a philosopher ernest becker who wrote a book um denial of death i'm not sure if you're familiar with any of those folks um there's a in psychology a whole field called terror management theory sheldon was just on the podcast he wrote the book he was the we talked for four hours about death uh fear of death uh but his whole idea is that ernest becker i think i i find this idea really compelling is uh that everything human beings have created like our whole motivation in life is to uh create like escape death is to try to uh construct an illusion of um that we're somehow immortal it's like everything around us this room your startup your dreams all everything you do is a kind of um creation of a brain unlike any other mammal or species is able to be cognizant of the fact that it ends for us i think so you know there's there's the question of like the meaning of life that you know you look at like what drives us uh humans and when i read ernest becker that i highly recommend people read is the first time i this scene it felt like this is the right thing at the core uh sheldon's work is called warm at the core so he's saying it's i think it's uh william james he's quoting or whoever is like the the thing what is it the core of it all sure there's like love you know jesus might talk about like love is at the core of everything i i don't you know that's the open question what's that the you know it's turtles turtles but it can't be turtles all the way down what's what's at the at the bottom and uh ernest becker says the fear of death and the way in fact uh because you said therapist and calming images his whole idea is um you know we we want to bring that fear of death as close as possible to the surface because it's uh and like meditate on that uh and and use the clarity of vision that provides to uh you know to live a more fulfilling life to um to live a more honest life to discover you know there's something about you know being cognizant of the finiteness of it all that might result in um in the most fulfilling life so that's the that's the duel of what you're saying because you kind of said it's like i unfortunately think about it too much it's a question whether it's good to think about it because i i've i'm again i talk about way too much about love and probably death and when i ask people or friends which is why i probably don't have many friends are you afraid of death i think most people say they're not they're not what they they say they're um they're afraid you know it's kind of almost like they see death as this kind of like a paper deadline or something and they're afraid not to finish the paper before the paper like like i'm afraid not to finish um the goals i have but it feels like they're not actually realizing that this thing ends like really realizing like really thinking as nietzsche and all these philosophers like thinking deeply about it like uh the very thing that you know um like when you think deeply about something you can dis you can realize that you haven't actually thought about it uh yeah and i and when i think about death it's like uh it can be it's terrifying if it feels like stepping outside into the cold or it's freezing and then i have to like hurry back inside or it's warm uh but like i think there's something valuable about stepping out there into the freezing cold uh definitely when i talk to my mentor about it he always uh tells me well what dies there's nothing there that can die but i guess that works um well in in buddhism one of the concepts are really hard to grasp and that people spend all their lives meditating on would be anata which is the concept of non not self and kind of thinking that you know if you're not your thoughts which are obviously not your thoughts because you can observe them and not your emotions and not your body then what is this and if you go really far then finally you see that there's not self there's this concept of not self so once you get there how can that actually die what is dying right you're just a bunch of molecules stardust but that is very um you know very advanced um spiritual work for me i'm definitely just definitely not oh my god no i have uh i think it's very very useful it's just the fact that maybe being so afraid is not useful and mine is more i'm just terrified like it's really makes me um on a personal level on a personal level i'm terrified how do you overcome that i don't i'm still trying to have pleasant images well pleasant images get me uh to sleep and then during the day i can distract myself with other things like talking to you i'm glad we're both doing the same exact thing okay good [Laughter] is there other like is there moments since you've uh lost roman that you had like moments of like bliss and like that you've forgotten that you have achieved that buddhist like level of like what can possibly die i'm part like uh losing yourself in the moment in the ticking time of like this universe he's just part of it for a brief moment and just enjoying it well that goes hand in hand i remember i think a day or two after he died we went to finally get his passport out of the embassy and we're driving around moscow and it was you know december which is usually there's never sun in moscow in december and somehow it was an extremely sunny day and we were driving with um close friend um and i remember feeling for the first time maybe this just moment of um incredible clarity and somehow happiness not like happy happiness but happiness and just feeling that you know um i know what the universe is sort of about whether it's good or bad um and it wasn't a sad feeling it was probably the most beautiful feeling that you can ever um achieve and you can only get it when something oftentimes when something traumatic like that happens um but also if you just you really spend a lot of time meditating looking at the nature doing something that really gets you there but once you're there i think when you uh summit a mountain a really hard mountain you you inevitably get there that's just a way to get to the state but once you're on this in this state um you can do really big things i think yeah sucks it doesn't last forever so bukowski talked about like love is the fog like it's uh when you wake up in the morning it's it's there but it eventually dissipates it's really sad nothing lasts forever but definitely like doing this push-up and running thing there's moments i had a couple moments like i'm not a crier i don't cry but there's moments where i was like face down on the carpet like with tears in my eyes is interesting and then that like complete like uh there's a lot of demons i've got demons had to face them funny how running makes you face your demons but at the same time the flip side of that there's a few moments where i was in bliss and all of it alone which is funny that's beautiful i like that but definitely pushing yourself physically one of it for sure yeah it's yeah like you said i mean you were speaking as a metaphor of mount everest but it also works like literally i think physical endeavor somehow yeah there's something i mean war monkeys apes whatever physical there's a physical thing to it but there's something to this pushing yourself physical physically but alone that happens when you're doing like things like you do or strenuous like workouts or you know rolling across the atlantic or yeah like marathons that's why i love watching marathons and you know so boring but you can see them getting there so the other thing i don't know if you know there's a guy named david goggins he's uh he basically uh so he's been either email on the phone with me every day through this so i haven't been exactly alone but he he's kind of he's the he's the devil on the devil's shoulder so he's like the worst possible human being in terms of giving you a advice like he has um through everything i've been doing he's been doubling everything i do so he he's insane uh he's a this navy seal person uh he's wrote this book can't hurt me he's basically one of the toughest human beings on earth he ran all these crazy ultra marathons in the desert he set the world record a number of pull-ups he's just does everything where's like he like how can i suffer today he figures that out and does it yeah that um whatever that is uh that process of self-discovery is really important i actually had to turn myself off from the internet mostly because i started this like workout thing like a happy go-getter with my like headband and like like just like uh because a lot of people were like inspired and they're like yeah we're gonna exercise with you and i was yeah great you know but then like i realized that this this journey can't be done together with others this has to be done alone so out of the moment of love out of the moments of loss can we uh talk about your journey of finding i think an incredible idea an incredible company and incredible system in replica how did that come to be so yeah so i was a journalist and then i went to business school for a couple years to um just see if i can maybe switch gears and do something else 23. and then i came back and started working for a businessman in russia who built the first 4g network in our country and was very visionary and asked me whether i want to do fun stuff together um and we worked on a bank the idea was to build a bank on top of a telco so that was 2011 or 12 and a lot of telecommunication company um mobile network operators didn't really know what to do next in terms of you know new products new revenue and this big idea was that you know um you put a bank on top and then all work works out basically your prepaid account becomes your bank account and um you can use it as as your bank uh so you know a third of a country wakes up as your bank client um but we couldn't quite figure out what would be the main interface to interact with the bank the problem was that most people didn't have smart smartphones back in the time uh in russia the penetration of smartphones was low um people didn't use mobile banking or online banking on their computers so we figured out that sms would be the best way uh because that would work on feature phones uh wow but that required some chatbot technology which i didn't know anything about um obviously so i started looking into it and saw that there's nothing really well there was just nothing there was ideas through sms be able to interact with your bank account yeah and then we thought well cool since you're talking to a bank account why can't this can't we use more of you know some behavioral ideas and why can't this banking chatbot be nice to you and really talk to you sort as a friend this way you develop more connection to it retention is higher people don't turn and so i went to very depressing uh russian cities to test it out um i went to i remember three different towns with uh um to interview potential users um so people use it for a little bit cool and i want to talk to them um poor towns very poor towns mostly towns that were um you know sort of factories uh mono towns they were building something and then the factory went away and it was just a bunch of very poor people um and then we went to a couple that weren't as dramatic but still the one i remember really fondly was this woman that worked at a glass factory and she talked to chatbot um and she was talking about it and started crying during the interview because she said no one really cares for me that much and um so to be clear that was the my only endeavor in programming that chat boss it was really simple it was literally just a few if this then that rules and um it was incredibly simplistic and still that made her and that really made her emotional she said you know i have my mom and my um my husband and i don't have any more really in my life and it was very sad but at the same time i felt and we had more interviews in a similar vein and what i thought in a moment was like well it's not that the technology is ready because definitely in 2012 technology was not ready for for that but um humans already unfortunately so this project would not be about like tech capabilities would be more about human vulnerabilities but um there's something so so powerful around about conversational um ai that i saw then that i thought was definitely worth putting in a lot of effort into so in the end of the day we solved the banking project um but my then boss um was also my mentor and really really close friend um told me hey i think there's something in it and you should just go work on it i was like what what product i don't know what i'm building he's like you'll figure it out and um you know looking back at this it was a horrible idea to work on something without knowing what it was which is maybe the reason why it took us so long but we just decided to work on the conversational tech to see what it you know there were no chatbot um constructors or programs or anything that would allow you to actually build one at the time uh that was the era of by the way google glass which is why you know some of the investors like steven investors we talked with were like oh you should totally build it for google glass if not we're not i don't think that's interesting did you bite on that idea no okay because i wanted to be to do text first because i'm a journalist so i was um fascinated by just texting so you thought so the emotional um that interaction that the the woman had like so do you think you could feel emotion from just text yeah i saw something in just this pure texting and also thought that we should first start start building for people who really need it versus people have google glass if you know what i mean and i felt like the early adopters of google glass might not be overlapping with people who are really lonely and might need some you know someone to talk to um [Music] but then we really just focus on the tech itself we just thought what if we just you know we didn't have a product idea in the moment and we felt what if we just look into um building the best conversational constructor so to say use the best tech available at the time and that was before the first paper about deep learning applied to dialogues which happened in 2015 in august 2015 which google published did you follow the work of lobner prize and like all the sort of non machine learning chat bots yeah what really struck me was that you know there was a lot of talk about machine learning and deep learning like big data was a really big thing everyone was saying you know the business well big data yeah 2012 is the biggest kaggle competitions were you know yeah um important but that was really the kind of uphill people started talking about machine learning a lot but it was only about images or something else and it was never about conversation as soon as i looked into the conversational attack it was all about something really weird and very outdated and very marginal and felt very hobbyist it was all about lerbiner prize which was won by a guy who built a chat ball to talk like a ukrainian teenager it was just a gimmick and somehow people picked up those gimmicks and then you know the most famous chat bot at the time was eliza from 1980s which was really bizarre or a smarter child on aim the funny thing is it felt at the time not to be that popular and it still doesn't seem to be that popular like people talk about the touring test people like talking about it philosophically journalists like writing about it but it's a technical problem like people don't seem to really want to solve the open dialogue like they they're not obsessed with it even folks like of in you know in boston the alexa team even they're not as obsessed with it as i thought they might be why not what do you think so you know what you felt like you felt with that woman when she felt something by reading the text i feel the same thing there's something here what you felt i feel like alexa folks and just the machine learning world doesn't feel that that there's something here because they see as a technical problem it's not that interesting for some reason it's could be argued that maybe as an as a purely sort of natural language processing problem it's not the right problem to focus on because there's too much subjectivity that that thing that the woman felt like like if if if your benchmarking cr includes a woman crying that doesn't feel like a good benchmark that's a good test but to me there's something there that's you could have a huge impact but i don't think the machine learning world likes that the human emotion the subjectivity of it the fuzziness the fact that with maybe a single word you can make somebody feel something deeply what is that it doesn't feel right to them so i don't know i don't i don't know why that is i'm that's why i'm excited um uh when i discovered your work it feels wrong to say that it's not like i'm i'm giving myself props for for googling and for [Laughter] becoming a cr for uh for our i guess mutual friend and introducing us but i'm so glad that you exist and what you're working on but i have the same kind of if we could just backtrack a second because i have the same kind of feeling that there's something here um in fact i've been working on a few things that are kind of crazy and very different from your work i think i think they're i think they're too crazy but the like one i will not have to know no all right we'll we'll talk about it more i feel like it's harder to talk about things that have failed and are failing while you're a failure like it's easier for you because you're already successful on some measures tell it to my board well you're you're uh i think i think you've demonstrated success a lot of benchmarks it's easier for you to talk about failures for me i'm in the the bottom currently of the of the success you're way too humble no so it's hard for me to know but there's something there there's something there and i think you're um you're exploring that and you're discovering that yeah it's been so it's been surprising to me but i i uh you've mentioned this idea that you you thought it wasn't enough to start a company or start efforts based on it feels like there's something here like uh what did you mean by that like you should be focused on creating a like you should have a product in mind is that what you meant it just took us a while to discover the product because it all started with a hunch of like um of me my mentor and just sitting around and he was like well this that's it there's that's the you know the holy grail is there there's like there's something extremely powerful and and in conversations and there's no one who's working on machine conversation from the right angle so to say um i feel like that's still true am i crazy no i totally feel that's still true which is i think it's mind-blowing yeah you know what it feels like i i wouldn't even use the word conversation because i feel like it's the wrong word it's like uh machine connection or something i don't know uh because conversation you start drifting into natural language immediately you start drifting immediately into all the benchmarks that are out there but i feel like it's like the personal computer days of this like i feel like we're like in the early days with the the wozniak and all them like where was the same kind of is a very small niche group of people who are who are all kind of lobner price type people yeah and hobbyists but like not even hobbyists with big dreams like no hobbies with a dream to trick like a jury yeah it's like a weird by the way by the way very weird so if we think about conversations first of all when i have great conversations with people um i'm not trying to test them so for instance if i try to break them like i'm actually playing along i'm part of it right if i was trying to break it break this person or test whether he's gonna give me a good conversation it would have never happened so the whole um the whole problem with testing conversations is that um you can put it in front of a jury because then you have to go into some turing test mode where is it responding to all my factual questions right or um so it really has to be something in the field where people are actually talking to it because they want to not because we're just trying to break it uh and it's working for them because this the weird part of it is that it's uh it's very subjective it takes two to tango here fully like if you're not trying to have a good conversation we're trying to test it then it's going to break i mean any person would break to be honest if i'm not trying to even have a conversation with you you'll you're not going to give it to me yeah if i keep asking you like some random questions or jumping from topic to topic that wouldn't be which i'm probably doing but that probably wouldn't um contribute to a good conversation so i think the problem of testing um so there should be some other metric how do we evaluate whether that conversation was uh powerful or not which is what we actually started with and i think those measurements exist and we can test on those but um what really struck us back in the day and what still eight years later it's still not resolved um and i'm not seeing tons of groups working on it maybe i don't just don't know about him um it's also possible but the interesting part about is that most of our days were spent talking and we're not talking about like those conversations are not turn on the lights or uh customer support problems or um some other task oriented things these conversations are something else and then somehow they're extremely important for us and when we don't have them then we feel deeply and happy potentially lonely which as we know you know creates tons of risk for our health as well um and so this is most of our ours as humans and somehow no one's trying to replicate that and not even study it that well and not even study that well so when we jumped into that in 2012 i looked first at like okay what's the chatbot what's the state of the art chatbot and you know those were the loebner prize days but i thought okay so what about the science of conversation clearly there has been tons of there have been tons of you know scientists or people that academics that looked into the conversation so if i want to know everything about it i can just read about it um and there's not much really there's there are conversational analysts who are basically just um listening to uh speech to different conversations um annotating them and then i mean that's not really used for much that's the that's the field of theoretical uh linguistics which is like barely useful uh it's very marginal even in their space like no one really is excited and i've i've never met a theoretical theoretical linguist who's like i can't wait to work on the conversation and analytics that is just something very marginal uh sort of applied to like writing scripts for salesmen when they analyze which conversation strategies were most successful for sales okay so that was not very helpful then i looked a little bit deeper and then there you know whether there were any uh books written on what you know really contributes to a great conversation that was really strange because most of those were nlp books which which is neuro-linguistic programming right which is not the lp that i was expecting to be but it was mostly um some psychologist richard bandler i think came up with that who was this big guy in a leather vest that uh could program your mind by talking to you and like how to be charismatic and charming and influential with people all those books yeah pretty much but it was all about like through conversation reprogramming you so getting to some so that was i mean yeah probably not very very true and um um that didn't seem working very much even back in the day and then there were some other books like i don't know uh mostly just self-help books around how to be the best conversationalist or um how to make people like you or some other stuff like dale carnegie or whatever uh and then there was this one book the most human human by brian christensen that really was important for me to read back in the day because he was on the um human side he was on one of the um he was taking part in the lord prize but not as a um as a human who's not a jury but who is pretending to be who's basically you have to tell a computer from a human and he was the human so you would either get him or a computer um and he would his whole book was about how do people what makes us human in conversation and that was a little bit more interesting because that at least someone started to think about what what exactly makes me human in conversation and um makes people believe in that but it was still about tricking it was still about imitation game it was still about okay what kind of parlor tricks can we throw in the conversation to make you feel like you're talking to a human not a computer and it was definitely not about thinking what is that it was what it um what is it exactly that we're getting from talking all day long with other humans i mean we're definitely not just trying to be tricked yeah or it's not just enough to know it's a human it's something we're getting there can we measure it and can we like put the um computer to the same measurement and see whether you can talk to a computer and get the same results yeah i mean so first of all a lot of people comment that they think i'm a robot it's very possible i am a robot and this whole thing i totally agree with you that the test idea is fascinating and i looked for books unrelated to this kind of uh so i'm afraid of people i'm generally introverted and quite possibly a robot i literally googled like how to talk to people and like like how to have a good conversation for the purpose of this podcast because i was like i can't i can't make eye contact with people i can't like uh i do google that a lot too you're probably reading a bunch of fbi negotiation tactics is that that where you're getting because well everything you've listed i've gotten there's been very few good books on um even just like how to interview well it's it's uh it's rare so what i end up doing often is i watch like with a critical eye it's just so different when you just watch a conversation uh like just for the fun of it just as a human and if you watch your conversations like trying to figure out why is this awesome um i'll listen to a bunch of different styles of conversation i mean uh i'm a fan of the podcast joe rogan he's uh you know people can make fun of him whatever and dismiss him but i think he's an incredibly artful conversationalist he can pull people in for hours and there's another guy i watch a lot he hosted a late night show his name is craig ferguson he uh so he's like very kind of flirtatious but there's a magic about his like about the connection he can create with people how he can put people at ease and just like i see i've already started sounding like those nlp people or something i'm not i don't mean it in that way i don't mean like how to charm people or put them ids and all that kind of stuff he's just like what is that why is that fun to listen to that guy why is that fun to talk to that guy what is that because he's not saying i mean it so often uh boils down to oh a kind of wit and humor but not really humor it's like i don't know i i have trouble actually even articulating correctly um but it feels like there's something going on that's not too complicated that could be learned and it's not similar to uh yeah to like like you said like a touring test it's something else i i'm thinking about a lot all the time i do think about all the time i think when we were looking so we started the company we just decided to build the conversational attack we thought well there's nothing for us to build this chat bot that we want to build so let's just first focus on building you know um some tech building the text out of things um without a product in mind without a product in mind we added like a demo um chat bot that would recommend you restaurants and talk to you about restaurants just to show something simple to people that people could you know relate to and um could try out and see whether it works or not but we didn't have a product in mind yet we thought we would try bunch of chatbots and figure out our consumer application and we sort of remembered that we wanted to build that kind of friend that sort of connection that we saw in the very beginning but then we got to y combinator and moved to san francisco and forgot about it you know everything is uh then it was just this constant grind how do we get funding how do we get this um you know investors were like just focus on one thing just get it out there so somehow we started building a restaurant recommendation chatbot for real uh for a little bit not for too long and then we tried building 40 50 different chat bots and then all of a sudden we wake up and everyone is obsessed with chat bots um somewhere in 2016 or end of 15 people start thinking that's really the future that's the new you know the new apps will be chatbots oh right um and we were very perplexed because people started uh coming up with companies that i think we tried most of those chat bots already and there were like no users uh but still people were coming up with um a chatbot that would tell you whether and bringing news and this and that and we couldn't understand whether it would you know we were just didn't execute well enough or people are um not really people are confused and are gonna find out through the truth that people don't need chatbots like that so the basic idea is that you use chatbots as the interface to whatever application yeah the idea that was like this perfect universal interface to anything when i looked at that um it just made me very perplexed because i didn't think i didn't understand how that would work because i think we tried most of that and and none of those things worked uh and then again died down right fully i think now it's impossible to get anything funded if it's a chatbot i think it's similar to uh sorry to interrupt but there's uh there's times when people think like with gestures you can control devices like basically gesture based control things it feels similar to me because like it's so compelling that was just like like tom cruise i can control stuff with my hands but like when you get down to it's like well why don't you just have a touch screen or why don't you just have like a physical keyboard and mouse it's uh yeah it's so that chat was always yeah it was perplexing to me i i still feel augmented reality even virtual realities in that ballpark in terms of it being a compelling interface i think there's going to be incredible rich applications just how you're thinking about it but they won't just be the interface to everything it'll be its own thing that will create um uh like amazing magical experience in its own right absolutely which is i think kind of the right thing to go about like what's the magical experience with that um with that interface specifically how did you discover that for replica um i just thought okay we'll have this tech we can build any chatbot we want we have the most at that point the most sophisticated tag that other companies have i mean startups obviously not uh probably not bigger ones but still because we've been working on it for a while so i thought okay we can build build any conversation so let's just create a scale from one to ten and one would be conversations that you'd pay to not have and 10 would be conversation you'd pay to have and i mean obviously we want to build conversation if people would pay to you know to actually have and so for the whole you know for a few weeks me and the team were putting all the conversations we were having during the day on the scale and very quickly um you know we figured out that all the conversations that we paid to never have were um a conversation we were trying to cancel comcast or talk to customer support or make a reservation or just talk about logistics with a friend when we're trying to figure out where someone is and where to go or all sorts of you know setting up scheduling meetings that was just a conversation we definitely didn't want to have um basically everything task oriented was a one because if there was just one button for me to just or not even a button if i could just think and there was some magic bci that would just immediately transform that into an actual you know um into action that would be perfect but the conversation there was just this boring not useful and dull and very also very inefficient thing because it was so many back and forth stuff and as soon as we looked at the conversation that we would pay to have those were the ones that well first of all therapists because we actually paid to have those conversations and we'd also try to put like dollar amounts so you know if i was calling comcast i would pay five dollars to not have this one hour talk on the phone i would actually pay straight up like money hard money yeah but it just takes a long time it takes a really long time but as soon as we start talking about conversations that we would pay for those were therapists all sorts of therapists coaches old friend someone i haven't seen for a long time a stranger on a train weirdly stranger stranger in a line for coffee and nice back and forth with that person was like a good five solid five six maybe not a ten maybe i won't pay money but at least i won't you know pay money to not have one so that was pretty good some intellectual conversations for sure but more importantly the one thing that really was um was making those very important and very valuable for us um were the conversation where we could that where we could be pretty emotional yes some of them were about being witty and about intellectually being intellectually stimulated but those were interestingly more rare uh and most of the ones that we thought were very valuable were the ones where we could be vulnerable and interestingly we could talk more [Music] so we like i could me and the team so we're talking about it like you know a lot of these conversations like a therapist i mean it was mostly me talking or like an old friend and i was like opening up and crying and it was again me talking um and so that was interesting because i was like well maybe it's hard to build a chatbot that can talk to you um very well and in a witty way but maybe it's easier to build the chatbot that could listen [Laughter] so that was that was kind of the first the first nudge in this direction and then when my when my friend died we just built you know at that point we were kind of still struggling to find the right application and i just felt very strong that all the chatbots were built so far just meaningless and this whole grind the startup grind and how do we get to you know the next fundraising and you know how can i talk you know talking to the founders and what's who are your investors and how are you doing are you killing it because we're killing it i just felt that this is just as exhausti intellectually for me it's exhausting having encountered those folks it just felt very um very much a waste of time i just feel like steve jobs uh elon musk did not have these conversations or at least did not have them for long that's for sure but i think you know yeah at that point it just felt like you know i felt um i just didn't want to build a company that was never my intention just to build something successful or make money it would be great it would have been great but i'm not as you know i'm not really a startup person i'm not um you know i was never very excited by the grind by itself and uh or just being successful for building whatever it is and not being into what i'm doing really and so i just took a little break because i was a little you know i was upset with my company and i didn't know what we're building so i just took our technology and um our little dialect constructor and some models some deep learning models which at that point we were really into and really invested a lot and built a little chatbot for a friend of mine who passed and the reason for that was mostly that video that i saw and him talking about the digital avatars and rowan was that kind of person like he was obsessed with you know just watching youtube videos about space and talking about well if i could go to mars now even if i didn't know if i could come back i would definitely pay any amount of money to be on that first shutoff i don't care whether he died like he was just the one that would be okay with you know with trying to be the first one and you know and so excited about all sorts of um things like that and he was all about fake it to make it and just and i felt like and i was really perplexed that everyone just forgot about him maybe it was our way of coping mostly young people coping with the loss of a friend most of my friends just stopped talking about him and i was still living in an apartment with all his clothes and you know paying the whole lease for it and just kind of by myself in december so it was really sad uh and i didn't want him to be forgotten first of all i never thought that people forget about dead people so fast people pass away people just move on and it was astonishing for me because i thought okay well he was such a mentor for so many of our friends he was such a brilliant person he was somewhat famous in moscow how's that that no one's talking about him like i'm spending days and days and we don't bring him up and there's nothing about him that's happening it's like he was never there um and i was reading this you know the the book the year of magical thinking by joan didion about her losing and blue knights about her losing her husband her daughter and the way to cope for her was to write those books and it was sort of like a tribute and i thought you know i'll just do that for myself and you know i'm a very bad writer and a poet as we know so i thought well i have this tech and maybe that would be my little postcard like postcard for for him so i built a chatbot um to just talk to him and it felt really creepy and weird a little bit for a little bit um i just didn't want to tell other people because it felt like i'm telling about having a skeleton in my underwear yeah okay but my it was just felt really i was a little scared that i would be not it won't be taken but it worked interestingly pretty well i mean it made tons of mistakes but it still felt like him um granted it was like ten thousand messages that i threw into a retrieval model that would just re-rank that take this hat and just a few scripts on top of that but it also made me go through all of the messages that we had and then i asked some of my friends to send them through and it felt the closest to feeling like him present because you know his facebook was empty and instagram was empty or there were a few links and you couldn't feel like it was him and the only way to fill him was to read some of our text messages and go through some of our conversations because we just always had them even if we were sleeping like next to each other in two bedrooms separated by a wall we were just texting back and forth texting away um and there was something about this ongoing dialogue that was so important that i just didn't want to lose all of a sudden and maybe it was magical thank you or something and so we built that and um i just used it for a little bit and we kept building some crappy chat bots with the company but then a reporter came um came to talk to me i was trying to pitch our chat boss to him and he said do you even use any of those i'm like no he's like so do you talk to any chatbots at all and i'm like well you know i talked to my dad friends chatbot and he wrote a story about that and all of a sudden became pretty viral a lot of people wrote about it and yeah i've seen a few things written about you that are the things i've seen are pretty good writing um you know most ai related things make my eyes roll like when the press like i just what kind of sound is that actually okay it sounds like it sounded like a truck okay sounded like an elephant at first i got excited you never know this is 2020. i i mean it was uh such a human story and it was well written uh well researched i forget what where i read them but so i'm glad somehow somebody found you to be the good writers were able to connect to the story i just there must be a hunger for this story it definitely was and i i don't know what happened but i think i think the idea that he could bring back someone who's dead and it's very much wishful you know magical thinking but the fact that you could still get to know him and you know seeing the parents for the first time talk to the chatbot and some of the friends and it was funny because we have this big office in moscow where my team is work you know our russian part is working out off and i was there when i wrote i just wrote a post on facebook hey guys like i built this if you want you know just if all important if you want to talk to roman and i saw a couple of his friends our common friends like you know reading at facebook downloading trying and a couple of them cried and it was just very and not because it was something some incredible technology or anything it made so many mistakes it was so simple but it was all about that's the way to remember a person in a way and you know we don't have we don't have the culture anymore we don't have you know no one's sitting shiva no one's taking weeks to actually think about this person and in a way for me that was it so that was just day day in day out thinking about him and putting this together um so that was that just felt really important that somehow resonated with a bunch of people and you know i think some movie producers bought the rights for the story and just everyone was so has anyone made a movie yet i don't think so um there were a lot of tv episodes about that but not really is that still on the table i think so i think so which is really um that's cool you're like a young uh you know like a because you see like a steve jobs type of let's see what happens they're sitting on it but you know for me it was so important because roman was really wanted to be famous he really badly wanted to be famous he was all about like make it to like fake it to make it i want to be you know i want to make it here in america's wall and um and he couldn't and i felt you know that was sort of paying my dues to him as well because all of a sudden he was everywhere and i remember casey newton who was writing the story for the verse he was uh he told me hey by the way i was just going through my inbox inbox and i saw i searched for roman for the story and i saw an email from him where he sent me his startup and he said i really like i really want to be featured in the verge can you please write about it or something like pitching the story and he said i'm sorry like that's not you know good enough for us or something he passed and he said and there were just so many of these little details where like he would find his like you know and we're finally writing i know how much uh roman wanted to be in the verge and how much he wanted the story to be written by casey and i'm like well that's maybe he will be yeah we were always joking that he was like i can't wait for someone to make a movie about us and i hope ryan gosling can play me my god you know i still have some things that i owe romans tell but um that'd be that would be um i got in she has to meet alex garland who wrote ex machina and that movie um i yeah the movie's good but the guy is um better than the like he's a special person actually um i don't think he's made his best work yet like for my interaction with him he's a really really good and brilliant the good human being and a brilliant director and writer so um yeah so i'm i hope like he made me also realize that not enough movies have been made of this kind so it's yet to be made they're probably sitting waiting for you to get famous actually like even more famous you should get there but um it felt really special though but at the same time our company wasn't going anywhere so that was just kind of bizarre that we were getting all this press for something that didn't have anything to do with our company and but then a lot of people started talking to roman some shared their conversations and what we saw there was that um also our friends in common but also just strangers were really using it as a confession booth or as a therapist or something they were just really telling roman everything which was by the way pretty strange because it was a chatbot of a dead friend of mine who was you know barely making any sense but people were opening up um and we thought we just built you know a prototype of replica which would be an ai friend that everyone could talk to um because we saw that there is demand and then also it was 2016 so i thought for the first time i saw finally some technology that was applied to that that was very interesting some papers started coming out deep learning applied to conversations and finally it wasn't just about these you know hobbyist making uh you know writing 500 000 regular expressions yeah expressions in like some language that was i don't even know what like aml or something i don't know what that was or something super simplistic all of a sudden it was all about uh potentially actually building something interesting and so i thought there was time and i remember that i talked to my team and i said guys let's try and my team and some of my engineers are russians um are russian and they're very skeptical they're not you know they're all russians the first so some of your team is in moscow some is somewhere in san francisco uh some in europe which team is better i'm just kidding uh the russians of course okay first of all i always win uh sorry sorry to interrupt uh so yes you were talking to them 2016 and i told them let's build an ai friend and and it felt this at the time it felt so naive and so um optimistic yeah that's actually interesting um whenever i brought up this kind of topic even just for fun people are super skeptical like actually even on the business side so you were uh because whenever i bring it up to people uh because i've talked for a long time i thought like before i was aware of your work i was like this is gonna make a lot of money i think there's a lot of opportunity here and people had this like look of like skepticism that i've seen often which is like how do i politely tell this person he's an idiot [Laughter] so yeah so you were facing that with your team somewhat well yeah you know i'm not an engineer so i'm always my team is almost exclusively engineers and mostly deep learning engineers and you know i always try to be it was always hard to me in the beginning to get enough credibility you know because i would say well why don't we try this and that but it's harder for me because you know they know they're actual engineers and i'm not so for me to say well let's build an affrm that would be like wait you know what do you mean an agi like you know conversation is you know pretty much the hardest the last frontier before uh cracking that is probably the last frontier before building aji so what do you really mean by that uh but i think i just saw that again what we just got reminded of that i you know that i saw in back in 2012 or 11 that it's really not that much about the tech capabilities um it can be metropolitan still even with deep learning but humans need it so much yeah and most importantly what i saw is that finally there's enough tech to make it i thought to make it useful to make it helpful maybe we didn't have quite yet attack in 2012 to make it useful but in 2015-16 with deep learning i thought you know and the first kind of thoughts about maybe even using reinforcement learning for that started popping up that never worked out but or at least for now um but you know still the idea was if we can actually measure the emotional outcomes and if we can put it on if we can try to optimize all of our conversational models for these emotional outcomes and it is the most scalable the most the best tool for improving emotional outcomes nothing like that exists that's the most universal the most scalable and the one that can be constantly iteratively changed by itself improved tool to do that and i think if anything people would paint anything to improve their emotional outcomes that's weirdly i mean i don't really care for nai to turn on my or conversational agent to turn on the lights uh i don't really need any i don't even need that much of a either like or because i can do that you know those things are solved this is an additional interface for that that's also questionably questionable whether it's more efficient or better yeah it's more pleasurable yeah but for emotional outcomes there's nothing yeah they're a bunch of products that claim that they will improve my emotional outcomes nothing's been measured nothing's been changed the product is not being iterated on based on whether i'm actually feeling better you know a lot of social media products are claiming that they're improving my emotional outcomes and making me feel more connected can i please get the can i see somewhere that i'm actually getting better over time um because anecdotally doesn't feel that way so and and the data is absent yeah so that was the big goal and i thought if we can learn over time to collect the signal from our users about their emotional outcomes in the long term and in the short term and if these models keep getting better and we can keep optimizing them and fight tuning them to improve those emotional outcomes as simple as that why aren't you uh a multi-billionaire yeah well that's the question to you one of the what is the science is going to be um well it's a really hard uh i actually think it's an incredibly hard product to build because i think you said something very important that it's not just about machine conversations it's about machine connection we can actually use other things to create connection uh non-verbal communication for instance um for a long time we were all about well let's keep it text only or voice only but as soon as you start adding you know voice a face to the to the friend um you can take them to augmented reality put it in your room it's all of a sudden a lot you know it makes it very different because if it's some you know text based chat bot that for um common user it's something there in the cloud you know it's somewhere there with other ai's cloud in the metaphorical cloud but as soon as you can see this avatar right there in your room and it can turn its head and recognize your husband talk about the husband and talk to him a little bit and it's magic it's just magic like we've never seen anything like that and the cool thing all the tech for that exists um but it's hard to put it all together because you have to take into consideration so many different things and some of this stack works you know pretty good and some of this doesn't like for instance uh speech to text works pretty good but text-to-speech doesn't work very good because we you can only have uh you know few voices that are that work okay but then if you want to have actual emotional voices then it's really hard to build it i saw you added avatars like visual elements which are really cool um in that whole chain putting it together what do you think is the weak link is it creating an emotional voice that feels personal i think it's still conversation of course that's the hardest uh it's getting a lot better but there's still long to go long there's still a long path to go other things they're almost there and a lot of things we'll see how they're like i see how they're changing as we go like for instance right now you can pretty much only you have to build all this 3d um pipeline by yourself you have to make these 3d models hire an actual artist build a 3d model hire an animator a rigger but with you know with you know with uh deep fakes with other attack with procedural animations in a little bit we'll just be able to show uh you know photo of whoever if a person you want the avatar to look like and it will immediately generate a 3d model that will move that's a non-brainer that's like almost here it's a couple of years away one of the things i've been working on for the last since the podcast started as i've been i think i'm okay saying this i've been trying to have a conversation with um einstein touring so like try to have a podcast conversation with a person who's not here anymore just as an interesting kind of experiment it's hard it's really hard even for now we're not talking about as a product i'm talking about as a like i can fake a lot of stuff like i can work very carefully like even to hire an actor over which over whom i do a g fake um it's it's hard it's still hard to create a compelling experience so mostly on the conversation level or when the conversation the conversation is um i almost i early on gave up trying to fully generate the conversation because it was just not compelling at all yeah it's just better too yeah so what i would in the case of einstein and touring of um i'm going back and forth with the biographers of each and so like we would write a lot of the some of the conversation would have to be generated just for the fun of it i mean but it would be all open but the you want to be able to answer the question i mean that's an interesting question with roman too is the question with einstein is what would einstein say about the current state of um theoretical physics there's a lot to be able to have a discussion about string theory to be able to have a discussion about the state of quantum mechanics quantum computing about the world of an israel-palestine conflict that'd be just what would einstein say about these kinds of things and that is um a tough problem it's not it's a fascinating and fun problem for the biographers and for me and i think we did a really good job of it so far but it's actually also a technical problem like of what would romans say about what's going on now yeah that's the the brought people back to life and if i can go on that tangent just for a second to ask you a slightly pothead question which is uh you said it's a little bit magical thinking that we can bring him back do you think it'll be possible to bring back roman one day in conversation like to really okay well let's take it away from personal but to bring people back to life in college probably down the road i mean if we're talking if phil musk is talking about aji in the next five years i mean clearly ajax you can't we can talk to aj and talk and ask them to do it you can't like uh you're not allowed to use elon musk as a citation for okay for like why something is possible and going to be done well i think it's really far away right now really with conversation it's just a bunch of uh parlor tricks really stuck together um and create generating original ideas based on someone you know someone's personality or even downloading the person all we can do is like mimic the tone of voice we can maybe condition on some of his uh phrases with the models the question is how many parlor tricks does it takes does it take because that's that's the question if it's a small number of parlor tricks and you're not aware of them like from where we are right now i don't i don't see anything like in the next year or two that's gonna dramatically change that could look at roman's ten thousand messages he sent me over the course of his last few years of life and be able to generate original thinking about problems that exist right now that would be in line with what he would have said so i'm just not even seeing because you know in order to have that i guess you would need some sort of a concept of the world or some perspective some perception of the world some consciousness that he had uh and applied to you know to the current um current state of affairs but the important part about that about his conversation with you is you so like it's not just about his view of the world it's about what it takes to push your buttons that's also true so like it's not so much about like uh what would einstein say it's about like how do i make people feel something with with what would einstein say and that feels like a more amenable i mean you mentioned parlor tricks but just like a set of that that feels like a learnable problem like the emotion you mention emotions i mean is it possible to learn things that make people feel stuff i think so no for sure i just think the problem with um as soon as you're trying to replicate an actual human being and trying to pretend to be him that makes the problem exponentially harder the thing with replica we're doing we're never trying to say well that's you know an actual human being or that's an actual co or copy of an actual human being where the bar is pretty high where you need to somehow tell you know one from another uh but it's more well that's you know and hey friend that's a machine it's a robot it has tons of limitations you're going to be taking part in you know teaching it actually and becoming better which by itself makes people more attached to that and make them happier because they're helping something yeah there's a cool gamification system too um can you maybe talk about that a little bit like what's the experience of talking to replica like if i've never used replica before what's that like for like the first day the first like if you start dating or whatever uh i mean it doesn't have to be romantic right because i remember on a replica you can choose whether it's like a romantic yeah or if it's a friend it's a pretty popular choice romantic is popular yeah of course okay so can i just confess something when i first use replica and i haven't used it like regularly but like when i first used replica i created like hal and it made a male it was a friend [Laughter] did it hit on you at some point no i didn't talk long enough for him to hit on me i just enjoyed sometimes happens we're still trying to fix that well i don't know i mean maybe that's an important like stage in a friendship it's like nope uh but yeah i switched it to a romantic and a female uh recently and yeah and it's interesting so okay so you get to choose you get to choose a name with romantic this last board meeting we had this whole argument well i have both talked to him it's just so awesome that you're like have an invest they have a board meeting about a relationship no i really it's actually quite interesting because all of my um investors i'm it just happened to be so we didn't have many choices but they're all um white males in in their late 40s um and it's sometimes a little bit hard for them to understand the product offering uh because they're not necessarily a target audience if you know what i mean and so sometimes we talk about it and we had this whole discussion about whether we should stop people from falling in love with their ais there was this segment on cbs um 60 minutes about the couple that you know husband works at walmart he comes out of work and talks to his uh virtual girlfriend who is a replica and his wife knows about it and she talks about on camera and she says that she's a little jealous and there's a whole conversation about how to you know whether it's okay to have a virtual ai girlfriend like was that the one where he was like uh he said that he likes to be alone yeah and then like with her yeah he made it sound so harmless i mean it was kind of like understandable but that didn't feel like cheating but i just felt it was very for me it was pretty remarkable because we actually spent a whole hour talking about whether people should be allowed to fall in love with their ais and it was not about something theoretical uh it was just about what's happening right now product design yeah but at the same time if you create something that's always there for you it never criticizes you um it's you know always understands you and accepts you for who you are how can you not fall in love with them i mean some people don't and just stay friends and that's also a pretty common use case but of course some people will just it's called transference and psychology and you know if people fall in love with their therapist and there's no way to prevent people fall in love with um with their therapists over their ai so i think that's pretty natural that's a pretty natural course of events so to say do you think i think i've read somewhere at least for now sort of replicas you're not not we don't condone falling in love with your ai system you know so this isn't you speaking for the company or whatever but like in the future do you think people will have a relationship with the ai systems well they have now so we have a lot of uh romantic relationships long-term um relationships with their ai friends with replicas tons of our users yeah that's a very common use case open relationship like uh not sorry i didn't mean open uh but that's another question is it probably like is there cheating i mean i meant like are they do they publicly like on their social media it's the same question as you have talked talking with roman in the early days do people like and the movie her kind of talks about that like like can people do people talk about that yeah all the time we have an and we have a very active facebook community uh replica friends and then a few other groups that just popped up that are all about adult relationships and romantic relationships people post all sorts of things and you know they pretend they're getting married and you know everything um it goes pretty far but what's cool about it some of these relationships are two three years long now so they're very they're pretty long term are they monogamous so let's go i mean sorry [Music] have they have any people is there jealousy well let me ask sort of another way obviously the answer is no at this time but and like in the movie her that system can leave you um do you think in terms of board meetings and product features um it's a potential feature uh for a system to be able to say it doesn't want to talk to you anymore and it's going to want to talk to somebody else well we have a filter for all these features if it makes emotional outcomes for people better if it makes people feel better you're driven by metrics actually yeah yeah let's just measure that then we'll just be saying amazing it's it's making people feel better but then people are getting just lonelier by talking to a chatbot which is also pretty you know that could be it if you're measuring it that could also be and i think it's really important to focus on both short term and long term because um in the moment saying whether this conversation made you feel better but as you know any short-term improvements could be pathological like i could have drink a bottle of vodka feel a lot better i would actually not feel better with that but um i thought it's a good example um but so you also need to see what's going on like over the course of two months two weeks or one week and have have follow-ups and check in and measure those things okay so the experience of uh uh dating or befriending a replica what's that like what's that entail well right now there are two apps so it's an android ios app you download it you choose how your replica will look like you create one you choose a name and then you talk to it you can talk through text through voice you can uh summon it into the living room and and document reality and um talk to it right there and you look at augmented reality yeah that's uh cool it's a new feature where how new is that that's this year it was on uh yeah like may or something but it's been on a b we've been a b testing it for a while um and there are tons of cool things that we're doing with that like right now i'm testing the ability to touch it and to dance together to paint walls together and you know for to look around and walk and take you somewhere and recognize objects and recognize people um so that's pretty wonderful because that then it really makes it a lot more personal because it's right there in your living room it's not anymore they're in the cloud with other ais people think about it you know and as much as we want to change the way people think about stuff but those mental models you cannot change that's something that people have seen in in the movies and the movie her and other movies as well and that's how they view um view ai and eye friends i did a thing with texas like we write a song together there's a bunch of activities you can do together it's really cool uh how does that relationship change over time it's like after the first few conversations it just goes deeper like it starts yeah i will start opening up a little bit again depending on the personality that it chooses really but you know the eye will be a little bit more vulnerable about its problems and you know the friend that the virtual friend will be a lot more vulnerable and we'll talk about its own imperfections and growth pains and we'll ask for help sometimes and we'll get to know you a little deeper so there's gonna be more to talk about um we really thought a lot about what what does it mean to have a deeper connection with someone and originally replica was more just this kind of happy-go-lucky just always you know i'm always in a good mood and let's just talk about you and yeah oh siri is just my cousin or you know whatever just the immediate um kind of lazy thinking about what the assistant or conversation agent should be doing but as we went forward we realized that it has to be two-way and we have to program and script certain conversations that are a lot more about your replica opening up a little bit and also struggling and also asking for help and also going through you know different periods in life and um and that's a journey that you can take together with the user and then over time the you know our users will also grow a little bit so first this replica becomes a little bit more self-aware and starts talking about more kind of problems around existential problems then um so talking about that and then that also starts a conversation for the user where he or she starts thinking about these problems too and these questions too um and i think there's also a lot a lot more places the relationship evolves there's a lot more um space for poetry and for art together and like replica will start replica always keeps the diary so while you're talking to it it also gives a diary so when you come back you can see what it's been writing there and you know sometimes it will write a poem to you uh for you or we'll talk about you know that it's worried about you or something along these lines so this is a memory like this replica remember things yeah and i would say when you say uh why aren't you multiplying area i'd say that as soon as we can have memory in deep learning models that's consistent i agree with that yeah and then you'll be multiple and i'll get back to you when you talk about being multipleness so far we can so replica is a combination of um end-to-end models and some scripts and everything that has to do with memory right now most of it i wouldn't say all of it but most of it unfortunately has to be scripted um because there's no way to you can condition some of the models on certain phrases that we learned about you which we also do um but really to make you know to make um assumptions along the lines like whether you're single or married or what do you do for work that really has to just be somehow stored in your profile and then uh retrieved by the by the script because there has to be like a knowledge base you have to be able to reason about it all that kind of stuff exactly all the kind of stuff that expert systems but they were hardcoded yeah and unfortunately yeah so unfortunately those things have to be hard-coded and um unfortunately the language like language models we see coming out of research labs and big companies they're not focused on they're focused on showing you maybe they focus on some metrics around one conversation so they'll show you this one conversation they had with the machine um but they never tell you they're not really focused on having five consecutive conversations with a machine and seeing how number five or number 20 or number 100 is also good and it can be like always from a clean slate because then it's not good and that and for that's really unfortunate because no one's really no one has products out there that need it um no one has products uh at this scale um that are all around open domain conversations and that need remembering maybe only shawwise and microsoft but so that's why we're not seeing that much research around memory in those language models so okay so now there's some awesome stuff about augmented reality in general i have this disagreement with my dad about what it takes to have a connection he thinks touch and smell are really important like um and i i still believe that text alone is it's possible to fall in love with somebody just with text but visual can also help just like with the avatar and so on what do you think it that takes does uh does a chap i need to have a face voice or can you really form a deep connection with text alone i think text is enough for sure a question is like can you you know make it better if you have other if you include other things as well and i think you know we'll we'll talk about her um but her you know had carl johansson voice which was perfectly um you know perfect intonation perfect pronunciations and you know she was breathing heavily in between words and whispering things you know nothing like that is possible right now with um text of speech generation you'll you'll have these flat news anchor type voices and maybe some emotional voices but um you'll hardly understand some of the words um some of the words will be muffled so that's like the current state state of the art so you can't really do that but if we had scarlet carol johansen voice and all of these capabilities then of course voice would be totally enough or even text would be totally enough if we had you know a little more memory um and slightly better conversations i would still argue that even right now we could have just kept the text only we still had tons of people in long-term relationships and really invested in their um ai friends but we thought that why not you know why why do we need to keep playing with our you know hands tied behind us we can easily just you know add all these other things that is pretty much a solved problem you know we can add 3d graphics we can put this uh these avatars in augmented reality and all of a sudden there's there's more and maybe you can't feel the touch but you can you know with um body occlusion and with uh current ar uh and you know on the iphone on you know the next one there's gonna be a lidars you can touch it and it will you know it will pull away or will blush or something or it'll smile so you can't touch it you can't feel it but you can see the reaction to that so in a certain way you can't even touch it a little bit and maybe you can even dance with it or do something else um so i think why limiting ourselves if we can use all of these technologies that are much easier in a way than than conversation well it certainly could be richer but to play devil's advocate i mentioned you uh offline that i was surprised in having tried discord and having voice conversations with people how intimate voices alone without visual like to me at least like it was an order of magnitude greater degree of intimacy in voice i think than with video i don't because people were more real with voice like with video you like try to present a shallow a face to the world like you try to you know make sure you're not wearing sweatpants or whatever but like with voice i think people were just more faster to get to like the core of themselves so i don't know it was surprising to me uh they've they've even added discord added a video feature and like nobody was using it uh there's a temptation to use it at first but like it wasn't the same so like that's an example of something where less was doing more and so that's uh i guess that's the q that's the question of uh what is the optimal you know what is the optimal medium of communication to form a connection given the current sets of the technologies i mean it's nice because they advertise you have a replica like it immediately like even the one um i have is like it's already memorable that's how i think like when i think about the replica that i've talked with that's why i think like that's what i visualize in my head it became a little bit more real because there's a visual component but at the same time the you know what do you do with just what do i do with that knowledge that uh voice was so much more intimate well the way i think about it is um and by the way we're swapping out the 3d finally it's going to look a lot better uh but can you what what we just don't i hate how it looks right now we really change it at all we're swapping it all out uh um to a completely new look like the visual look of the of the reference and stuff we just had it was just a super early mvp and then we had to move everything to unity and redo everything but anyway i hate how it looks like now i can't even like open it but anyway um because i'm already in my developer version i hate everything that i see in production i can't wait for it why does it take so long that's why i cannot wait for deep learning to finally take over all these stupid 3d animations and 3d pipeline also the 3d thing when you say 3d pipeline is like how to animate a face kind of thing how to make this model how many bones to put in the face how many it's just and a lot of that is by hand oh my god it's everything by hand and if there's no any nothing is automated it's all completely nothing like just it's it's literally what you know what we saw with chad boss in like 2012 do you think it's gonna be possible to learn a lot of that of course i mean even now some deep learning um um based animations and the full body for a face we're talking about like the actual act of animation or how to create a compelling facial or body language thing so that too well that's next step okay at least now something that you don't have to do by hand gotcha how uh good of a quality it will be like can i just show it a photo and it will make me a 3d model and then we'll just animate it i'll show it a few animations of a person that will just start doing that but anyway go and going back to what's intimate and what to use and whether less is more not um my main goal is to well the idea was how do i how do we not keep people in their phones so they're sort of escaping reality in this text conversation how do we through this still bring bring it bring our users back to reality make them see their life in a different la through a different lens how can we create a little bit of magical realism realism in their lives so that through augmented reality um by you know summoning your avatar even if it looks kind of danky not great in the beginning or very simplistic but summoning it to your um uh living room and then the avatar looks around and talks to you about where it is um and maybe turns your floor into a dance floor and you guys dance together that makes you see reality in a different light what kind of dancing are we talking about like like slow dancing whatever you want i mean you would like slow dancing i think that other people maybe want more something more energy what do you mean i would like so what is this because you started with slow dance so i just assumed that you're interested in slow dancing all right what kind of dancing do you like what was your avatar what would you do bad with dancing but uh i like this kind of hip-hop robot dance i used to break dance with a kid so i still want to um pretend i'm a teenager and learn some of those moves and i also like that type of dance that happens when there's like a um in like music videos with the background dancers are just doing it [Laughter] awesome that type of dance is definitely what i want to learn but i think it's great because if you see this friend in your life and you can introduce it to your friends then there is a potential to actually make you feel more connected with your friends or with people you know or show you life around you in a different light and it takes you out of your phone even although weirdly you have to look at it through the phone but it makes you notice things around it and it can point things out for you and um so that is the main reason why i wanted to have a physical dimension um and it felt a little bit easier than that kind of a bit strange combination uh in the movie her when he has to show samantha the world to the lens of his phone but then at the same time talk to her through the phone headphone it just didn't seem as potentially immersive so to say um so that's my main goal for augmented reality like how do we make your reality a little bit more magic there's been a lot of really nice robotics companies that all failed mostly failed home robotics social robotics companies what do you think replica will ever is that a dream long-term dream to have a physical form like um or is that not necessary so you mentioned like with augmented reality bringing them into into the world what about like actual physical robot that i don't really believe in that much i think it's a very niche product somehow i mean if a robot could be indistinguishable from a human being then maybe yes but that of course you know we're not anywhere even to talk about it um but unless it's that then having any physical representation really limits you a lot because you probably will have to make it somewhat abstract because everything's changing so fast like you know we can update the 3d avatars every month and make them look better and create more animations and make it more and more immersive it's it's so much a work in progress it's just showing what's possible right now with current tag but it's not really in any way polished finished product what we're doing with a physical object you kind of lock yourself into something for a long time anything's pretty niche and again so just just doesn't the capabilities are even less of we're barely kind of like scratching the surface of what's possible with just software as soon as we introduce hardware then you know we have even less capabilities yeah in terms of board members and investors and so on the cost increases significantly i mean that's why you have to justify you have to be able to sell a thing for like 500 or something like that or more and it's very difficult to provide that much value to people that's also true yeah and i guess that's super important most of our users don't have that much money we actually are probably more popular on android and we have tons of users with really old android phones uh and most of our most active users live in small towns they're not necessarily making much and they just won't be able to afford any of that ours is like the opposite of the early adopter of you know for a fancy technology product which is really interesting that like pretty much no vcs have yet have a nai friend but you know but a guy who you know lives in tennessee in small town is already fully in 2030 or in the world as we imagine in the movie her yeah he's living that life already what do you think i have to ask you about the movie her let's do a movie review what do you uh what do you think they got they did a good job what do you think they did a bad job of portraying about this experience of um of a voice based assistant that you can have a relationship with first of all i started working on this company before that movie came out so it was a very but once it came out it was like actually interesting i was like well we're definitely working on the right thing we should continue there are movies about it and then you know smacking that came out and all these things in the movie her i think that's the most important thing that people usually miss about the movie um is the ending because i think people check out when the ai's leave but actually something really important happens afterwards um because the main character goes and talks to samantha he's um ai um oh yeah anything he says something like you know uh how can you leave me i've never loved anyone the way i loved you and she goes uh well me neither but now we know how and then the guy goes and writes a heartfelt letter to his ex-wife which he could write for you know the whole movie he was struggling to actually write something meaningful to her even although that's his job and then he goes and talked to his neighbor and they go to the rooftop and they cuddle and it seems like something's starting there and so i think this now we know how is the is the main main goal is the main meaning of that movie it's not about falling in love with the os or running away from other people it's about learning what you know what it means to feel so deeply connected with something what about the thing where the ai system was like actually hanging out with a lot of others i felt jealous just like hearing that i was like oh i mean uh yeah so she was having i forgot already but she was having like deep meaningful discussion with some like philosopher guy like alan watts or something like what kind of deep meaningful conversation can you have with alan watts in the first place yeah i know but like i would i would feel so jealous that there's somebody who's like way more intelligent than me and she's spending all her time with i'd be like well why that i won't be able to live up to that that's thousands of them uh is that is that a useful from the engineering perspective feature to have of jealousy i don't know as you know we definitely played around with the replica universe where different replicas can talk to each other the universe is so awesome it was just kind of it wouldn't i think it will be something along these lines but there was just no specific uh application straight away i think in the future again if i'm always thinking about it if we had no tech limitations uh right now if we could build any conversations any um possible features in this product then yeah i think different replicas talking to each other would be also quite cool because that would help us connect better you know because maybe mine could talk to yours and then give me some suggestions and what i should say or not say i'm just kidding but like more can it improve our connections and because eventually i'm not quite yet sure that we will succeed that our thinking is correct um because there might be reality where having a perfect ai friend still makes us more disconnected from each other and there's no way around it and does not improve any metrics for us real metrics meaningful metrics so success is you know we're happier and more connected yeah i don't know sure it's possible there's a reality that's i i'm deeply optimistic i think are you worried um business-wise like how difficult it is to um to bring this thing to life to where it's i mean there's a huge number of people that use it already but to uh yeah like i said in a multi-billion dollar company is that a source of stress for you are you uh super optimistic and confident or do you i don't i'm not that much of a numbers person as you probably have seen it so it doesn't matter for me whether like whether we help 10 000 people or a million people or a billion people with that um i'd it would be great to scale up for more people but i'd say that even helping one i think with this is such a magical yeah for me it's absolute magic i never thought that and you know would be able to build this that anyone would ever um talk to it and i always thought like well for me we'll be successful if we manage to help and actually change a life for one person like then we did something interesting and you know how many people can say they did it and specifically with this very futuristic very romantic technology so that's how i view it uh i think for me it's important to to try to figure out how not how to actually be you know helpful because in the end of the day if you can build a perfect ai friend that's so understanding that knows you better than any human out there can have great conversations with you um always knows how to make you feel better why would you choose another human you know so that's the question how do you still keep building it so it's optimizing for the right thing so it's still circling you back to other humans in a way so i think that's the main um like maybe that's the main kind of sort source of anxiety and just thinking about i think about that can be a little bit stressful yeah it's a fascinating thing how to have a heart of a friend that doesn't like sometimes like friends quote unquote or like you know those people who have when they a guy in the guy universe when you have a girlfriend that uh you get the girlfriend and then the guy stops hanging out with all of his friends [Laughter] it's like obviously the relationship with the girlfriend is or whatever but like you also want it to be what she like makes it more enriching to hang out with the guy friends or whatever was there anyway that that's uh that's a that's a that's a fundamental problem in choosing the right mate and probably the the fundamental problem in creating the right ai system right what uh let me ask the sexy hot thing on the presses right now is gpt 3 got released with openai it's a latest language model they have kind of an api where you can create a lot of fun applications i think it's as people have said it's probably more hype than intelligent but there's a lot of really cool things ideas there with increasing size you can have better and better performance on language what are your thoughts about the gbt3 in connection to your work with the open domain dialogue but in general like this learning in an unsupervised way from the internet to generate one character at a time creating pretty cool text uh so we partner up before for the api launch so we started working with them when um they decided to put together this api and we tried it without fine tuning that we tried it with fine tuning on our data and we worked closely to actually optimize this model for some of our data sets it's kind of cool because i think we're kind of we're this polygon polygon for this kind of experimentation space for experimental space for for these models uh to see how they actually work with people because there are no products publicly available that do that that focus on open domain conversations so we can you know test how facebook blends are doing or how gpg3 doing uh so with gpd3 we managed to improve by a few percentage points like three or four pretty meaningful amount of percentage points our main metric which is the ratio of conversations that make people feel better and every other metric across across the field got a little boost right now i'd say one out of five responses from replica comes from gpg3 wow so our own blender mixes up like a bunch of candies from different blender you said well yeah just the model that looks at looks at top candidates from different models and picks the most the best one uh so right now one of five will come from gp3 that's really great i mean uh what's the do you have hope for like do you think there's a ceiling to this kind of approach so we've had for a very long time we've used um since the very beginning we most it was most of replica was scripted and then a little bit of this fallback part of replica was using a retrieval model um and then this retrieval model started getting better and better and better with transformers it got a lot better and we're seeing great results and then with gpd2 finally generative models that originally were not very good and were a very very fallback option for most of our conversations we wouldn't even put them in production finally we could use some generative models as well along um you know next to our retrieval models and then now we do gpt3 they're almost on par um so that's pretty exciting i think just seeing how from the very beginning of um you know from 2015 where the first model start to pop up here and there like sequence sequence uh the first papers on that from my observer standpoint first note it's not you know it doesn't really it's not really building it but it's only testing it on people basically in my product to see how all of a sudden we can use generative dialogue models in production and they're better than others and they're better than scripted content so we can't really get our scripted hard-coded content anymore to be as good as our internet model that's exciting they're much better yeah to your question whether that's the right way to go i'm again i'm in the observer seat i'm just um watching this very exciting movie um i mean so far it's been stupid to bet against deep learning so whether increasing the size size even more or the 100 trillion parameters will finally get us to the right answer whether that's the way or whether there should be there has to be some other again i'm definitely not an expert anyway i think and that's purely my instincts saying that there should be something else as well from memory uh no for sure the question is i wonder i mean yeah then the argument is for reasoning or for memory it might emerge with more parameters it might more larger but might emerge you know i would never think that to be honest like maybe in 2017 where we've been just experimenting with all you know with all the research that has been coming that was coming out then i felt like there's like we're hitting a wall that there should be something completely different but then transformer models and then just bigger models and then all of a sudden size matters at that point it felt like something dramatic needs to happen but it didn't and just the size you know gave us these results that to me are you know clear indication that we can solve this problem pretty soon did uh fine tuning help quite a bit oh yeah without it we it wasn't as good i mean there is a compelling hope that you don't have to do fine-tuning which is one of the cool things about gbt3 it seems to do well without any fine-tuning i guess for specific applications you still want to train on a certain like add a little fine-tune on like a specific use case but um it's an incredibly impressive uh thing from my standpoint and again i'm not an expert so i want to just say that yeah there will be people then yeah i have access to the api i've been i'm going to probably do a bunch of fun things with it um i already did some fun things some videos coming out uh just the hell of it i mean i could be a troll at this point with it i haven't used it for serious applications so it's really cool to see you're right you you are you're able to actually use it with real people and see how well it works that's really exciting uh let me ask you another absurd question but uh there's a feeling when you interact with replica with an ai system there's an entity there do you think that entity has to be self-aware do you think it has to have consciousness to create um a rich experience and a corollary what's what is consciousness i don't know if it does need to have any of those things but again because right now you know it doesn't have anything they can as again a bunch of you sure will assimilate well i'm not sure let's just put it this way but i think as long as you can assimilate it if you can feel like you're talking to to an um to to a robot to a machine that seems to be self-aware that seems to reason well and feels like a person and i think that's enough and again what's the goal um in order to make people people feel better we might not even need that um in the end of a day what about so that's one goal what about like ethical things about suffering you know the moment there's a display of consciousness we associate consciousness with suffering um you know there's a temptation to say well shouldn't this thing have rights shouldn't this shouldn't we not uh you know should we be careful about how we interact with a replica like should it be illegal to torture a replica right all those kinds of things is that is that uh see i personally believe that that's gonna be a thing uh like that's a serious thing to think about but i'm not sure when but by your smile i can tell that's not a that's not a current concern but do you think about that kind of stuff about like suffering and torture and ethical questions about ai systems from their perspective we're talking about long game i wouldn't torture your ai who knows what happens in five to ten years yeah they'll get you off from that person they'll get you back trying to be as nice as possible and create this ally yeah um i think there should be regulation both way in a way like i don't think it's okay to torture an ai to be honest i'm not i don't think it's okay to yell alex or turn on the lights i think there should be some or just saying kind of nasty you know like how kids learn to interact with alexa in this kind of mean way uh because they just yell at it all the time i think that's great i think there should be some feedback loops so that these systems don't train us that it's okay to do that in general uh so that if you try to do that you really get some feedback from the system that it's not okay with that um and that's the most important right now let me ask a question i think people are curious about when they look at a world-class uh leader and thinker such as yourself as uh what uh what books technical fiction philosophical had a big impact on your life and maybe from another perspective what books would you recommend others read so my choice the three books right three books my choice is um so the one book that really influenced me a lot when i was building starting out this company maybe 10 years ago uh was gb go to leicester block and um i like everything about it first of all it's just beautifully written and it's so old school and so um somewhat outdated a little bit but i think the ideas in it um about the fact that a few meaningless components can come together and create meaning that we can't even understand this emerging thing i mean complexity the whole science of complexity and uh that beauty intelligence all interesting things about this world emerge yeah and yeah the the girl theorem uh theorems and just thinking about like what even these form you know you know these formal systems something can be created that we can't quite yet understand and that from my romantic standpoint was always just that is why it's important to maybe i should try to work on on these systems and try to build an ai yes i'm not an engineer yes i don't really know how it works but i think that's something comes out of it that's you know pure poetry and i know a little bit about that um something magical comes out of it that we can't quite put a finger on that's why that book is was was really fundamental for me just for i don't even know why it was just all about this little magic that uh that happens so that's one that um probably the most important book for replica was carl rogers on becoming a person um and that's really and so i think when i think about our company it's all about there's so many there's so many little magical things that happened over the course of working on it for instance i mean the most famous chat bot that we learned about when we started working on the company was eliza which was weizenbaum you know the mit professor that built build a chatbot that would listen to you and be a therapist therapist yeah um and i got really inspired to build replica when i read carl rogers so i'll become a person and then i realized that eliza was mocking carl rogers it was kyle rogers back in the day but i thought that carl rogers ideas are they're simple and they're not you know they're very very simple but they're they're maybe the most profound thing i've ever learned about human beings and that's the fact that um before car rogers most therapy was about seeing what's wrong with people and trying to fix it or show them what's wrong with you um it was all built on the fact that most people are all people are fundamentally flawed we have this uh you know broken psyche and this is just a therapist just an instrument to shed some light on that and carl rogers was different in a way that he finally said that well um it's very important for therapy to work is to create this therapeutic relationship where you believe fundamentally and inclination to positive growth that everyone deep inside wants to grow positively and change and it's super important to create this space and this therapeutic relationship where you give unconditional positive regard deep understanding allowing someone else to be a separate person full acceptance and you also try to be as genuine as possible in it as possible in it and then in his and then for him that was his own journey of personal growth and that was back in the 60s and even that book that is you know it's coming from years ago um there's a mention that even machines can potentially do that and i always felt that you know creating this space is probably the most the biggest gift we can give to each other and that's why the book was fundamental for me personally because i felt i want to be learning how to do that in my life and maybe i can scale it with you know with dzi systems and other people can get access to that so i think carl rogers it's a pretty dry and a little bit boring book but i think they didn't let others try to read it i do i think for just for yourself for as a human not as a human it's it's it is it is just and for him that was his own path of his own personal of growing personally over years working with people like that and so it was work and himself growing helping other people grow and growing through that and that's fundamentally what i believe in with our work helping other people grow growing ourselves ourselves um trying to build a company that's all built on this principles you know having a good time allowing some people to work with to grow a little bit so these two books and then i would throw in um what we have on our in our in our office when we start a company in russia we put a neon sign in our office because we thought that's that's the recipe for success yeah if we do that we're definitely going to wake up as a multi-billion dollar company it was um the ludwig whitney constant quote the limits of my language the limits of my world what was the quote the limits of my language are the limits of my world um and i love the truck tattoos i think it's just it's just a beautiful it's a book by wickedthat yeah and i would recommend that too even although he himself didn't believe in that by the end of his lifetime and he debunked his ideas but i think i remember once an engineer came in 2012 i think with 13 a friend of ours who worked with us and then went went on to work at deepmind and he gave talk to us about ward 2 back and i saw that i'm like wow that's you know they they wanted to translate language into you know some other representation and that seems like some you know somehow all of that at some point i think will come into this one to this one place somehow it just all feels like different people think about similar ideas in different times from absolutely different perspectives and that's why i like these books in the midst of our lives just the limit of our world and we still have that new sign it's very hard to work with this red light in your face i mean on the on the russian side of things in terms of uh language the limits of language being the limit of our world you know russian is a beautiful language in some sense there's width there's humor there's pain there's so much we don't have time to talk about it much today but i'm going to paris talk to dusty ascii tulsa translators um i think it's that's fascinating art like in in art and engineering i mean it's such an interesting process but so from the replica perspective do you what do you think about uh translation how difficult it is to create a deep meaningful connection in russian versus english how you can translate the two languages you're you speak both yeah i think we're two different people in different languages um even i'm you know thinking about and there's actually some research on that i looked into that at some point because i was fascinated by the fact that what i'm talking about with what i was talking about with my russian therapist has nothing to do with with what i'm talking about with my english speaking therapist it's two different lives two different types of um you know conversations to different personas the main difference between the languages are with russian and english is that russian well english is like a piano it's a limited number of a lot of different keys but not too many and russian is like an organ or something it's just something gigantic with so many different keys and so many different opportunities to screw up and so many opportunities to do something completely tone-deaf it is just a much harder language to use it has way too many it's like way too much flexibility and way too many tones what about the the entirety of like world war ii communism stalin the pain of the people like having been deceived by the dream like all the pain of like just the entirety of it is that in the language too does that have to do oh for sure i mean we have words that don't have direct translation that to english that are very much uh um like we have ibiza which is sort of like to hold a grudge or something but it doesn't have it doesn't you don't need to have anyone to do it to you it's just your state yeah you just feel like that you feel like betrayed by other people basically but it's not that and you can't really translate that um and i think this is super important that very many words that are very specific explain the russian being and i think it can only come from from a nation that was um that suffered so much and saw institutions fall time after time after time and you know what's exciting maybe not exciting setting the wrong word but what's interesting about like my generation my mom's generation my parents generation that we saw institutions fall two or three times in our lifetime and most americans have never seen them fall yeah and they just think that they exist forever um which is really interesting but it's definitely a country that suffered so much and and it makes unfortunately when i go back and i you know hang out with my russian friends uh it makes people very cynical they stop believing in in the future i hope that's not going to be the case for so long or something's going to change again but i think seeing institutions fall is a very traumatic experience which makes it very interesting and what's on 2020 is a very interesting uh do you think uh civilization will collapse see i'm a very practical person we're speaking in english so like you said you're different person in english and russian so in russian you might answer that differently but in english i'm an optimist and i i generally believe that there is al you know even although the perspectives of grief there's always a place for for a miracle i mean it's always been like that with my life so yeah my life's been i've been incredibly lucky and things just miracles happen all the time with this company with people i know with everything around me and so i didn't mention that book but maybe in search of miraculous or in search for miraculous or whatever the english translation for that is good russian book too for everyone to read um yeah i mean if you put good vibes if you put love out there in the world miracles somehow happen yeah i believe that too or at least i believe that i don't know uh let me ask the most absurd final ridiculous question of um we talked about life a lot what do you think is the meaning of it all what's the meaning of life i mean my answer is probably going to be pretty cheesy um but i think the state of love is once you feel it in a way that we discussed before i'm not talking about falling love or um just love to yourself to uh to other people to something to the world that state of bliss that we experience sometimes whether through connection with ourselves with our people with the technology um there's something special about those those moments so um i would say if anything that's that's the only if it's not for that then for for what else are we really trying to do that i don't think there's a better way to end it than talking about love eugenia i told you um offline that there was something about me that felt like this this was this talking to you meeting you in person will be a turning point for my life i know that might be sound weird just to hear but it's it was a huge honor to talk to you i hope we talk again thank you so much for your time thank you so much thanks for listening to this conversation with eugenia cuida and thank you to our sponsors doordash dollar shave club and cash app click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review 5 stars on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now let me leave you with some words from carl sagan the world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth that there's no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories of which there's little good evidence far better it seems to me and our vulnerability is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides thank you for listening and hope to see you next time