Rana el Kaliouby: Emotion AI, Social Robots, and Self-Driving Cars | Lex Fridman Podcast #322
there's a broader question here right as we build socially and emotionally intelligent machines what does that mean about our relationship with them and then more broadly our relationship with one another right because this machine is going to be programmed to be amazing at empathy by definition right it's going to always be there for you it's not going to get bored I don't know how I feel about that I think about that a lot the following is a conversation with Rana l kalyubi a Pioneer in the field of emotion recognition and human-centric artificial intelligence she is the founder of effectiva Deputy CEO of Smart Eye author of girl decoded and one of the most brilliant kind inspiring and fun human beings I've gotten the chance to talk to this is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Rana l kalyubi you grew up in the Middle East in Egypt what is the memory from that time that makes you smile or maybe a memory that stands out as uh helping your mind take shape and helping you to find yourself in this world so the memory that stands out is uh we used to live in my grandma's house she used to have these mango trees in her garden and in the summer and so mango season was like July and August and so in the Summer she would invite all my aunts and uncles and cousins and you know like it was just like maybe there were like 20 or 30 people in the house and she would cook all this amazing food and um us the kids we were like go down the garden and we would like pick all these mangoes and um and I don't know I think it's just the bringing people together like that always stuck with me the warmth around the mango tree yeah around the mango tree and there's just like the The Joy the joy of of being together around food and and um I'm a terrible cook so I guess that didn't that that memory didn't translate to me kind of doing the same I love hosting people do you remember colors smells is that what like what how does memory work yeah like what do you visualize you should visualize people's faces Smiles do is there colors is there like a a theme to The Colors is it smells because of food involved yeah I think that's a great question so the those Egyptian mangoes there's there's a particular type that I love and it's called darwazi mangoes and they're kind of you know they're oval and they have a little red in them so I kind of they're red and mango colored on the outside so I remember that this red indicate like extra sweetness is that yes that means like it's it's nicely sweet yeah it's nice and ripe and stuff yeah oh yeah what uh what's like a definitive food of Egypt you know there's like these almost their typical Foods in different parts of the world like Ukraine invented borscht bush is this beet soup with that you put sour cream on you see it's not I can't see if you played it that way if you if you know if you know what it is I think you know is delicious but if I explain it it's just not gonna sound delicious I feel like beet soup this doesn't make any sense but that's kind of and you probably have actually seen pictures of it because it's one of the traditional foods in Ukraine in Russia in different parts of the Slavic uh world so this but it's become so cliche and stereotypical that you almost don't mention it but it's still delicious like I I visited Ukraine it's I eat that every single day so do you um do you make get yourself how hard is it to make no I don't know I think to make it well like anything like Italians they say well tomato sauce is easy to make but it didn't make it right that's like a generational uh skill so anyway is there something like that in Egypt is there a culture of food there is and and actually um called and it's um It's Made of This green plant it's like it's somewhere between spinach and kale and you mince it and then you cook it in like chicken broth and my grandma used to make and my mom makes it really well and I try to make it but it's not as great so we used to have that and then we used to have it alongside stuffed pigeons I'm pescetarian now so I don't eat that anymore but stuffed pigeons yeah it's like it was really yummy it's the one thing I miss about you know now that I'm pescetarian and I don't eat the stuffed pigeons yeah the stuff pigeons is it what are they stuffed with if if that doesn't bother you too much to describe no no it's soft with a lot of like just rice and um oh gosh yes rice yeah so and yeah you also you've said that you're first in your book that your first computer was an Atari and Space Invaders was your favorite game uh is that when you first fell in love with computers would you say yeah I would say so video games or just the computer itself just something about the machine oh this thing It's Magic in here yeah I think the magical moment is definitely like playing video games with my I have two younger sisters and we just like had fun together like playing games but the other memory I have is my first code the first code I wrote I wrote um I drew a Christmas tree and I'm Muslim right so it's kind of it was kind of funny that I that I that the first thing I I did was like this Christmas tree so um yeah and that's when I realized wow you can you can write code to do all sorts of like really cool stuff I must have been like six or seven at the time so you can write programs and the programs do stuff for you that's power that's important if you think about it that's empowering hey hi yeah I know well it is I don't know if that you see like I don't know if many people think of it that way when I first learned to program they just love the puzzle of it like oh this is cool it's pretty it's a Christmas tree but like it's power it is like you eventually I guess you couldn't at the time but eventually this thing if it's interesting enough if it's a pretty enough Christmas tree it can be run by millions of people and bring them Joy like that little thing and then because it's digital it's easy to spread so like you just created something that's easily spreadable to millions of people totally it's hard to think that way when you're six in the book you write I am who I am because I was raised by a particular set of parents both modern and conservative forward-thinking yet locked in Tradition I'm a Muslim and I feel I'm stronger more centered for it I adhere to the values of My Religion even if I'm not as beautiful as I once was and I am a new American and I'm thriving on the energy vitality and entrepreneurial spirits of this great country so let me ask you about your parents what have you learned about life from them especially when you were young so both my parents they're Egyptian but they moved to Kuwait right out they actually there's a cute story about how they met so my dad taught cobal in the 70s nice and my mom decided to learn programming so she signed up to take his cobal programming class and he tried to date her and she was like no no I don't date and so he's like okay I'll propose and that's how they got married whoa I know right exactly right that's really impressive so um those those Cobalt guys know how to how to impress a lady so so yes what have you learned from them so definitely Grit one of the core values in our family is just hard work there were no Slackers in our family and that's something I've definitely it's definitely stayed with me both both as a professional but also my personal life um but I also think my mom my mom always used to like I don't know it was like unconditional love like I just knew my parents would be there for me kind of regardless of what I chose to do um I think that's very powerful and they got tested on it because I kind of challenged you know I challenged cultural norms and I kind of took a different path I guess than what's expected in of you know a woman in the Middle East and then they and I you know they still love me which is which is I'm so grateful for that one was like a moment that was the most challenging for them which moment where they kind of they had to come face to face with the fact that you're a bit of a rebel just gotten married but I decided to go do my PhD at Cambridge University and because my husband at the time he's now my ex ran a company in Cairo he was going to stay in Egypt so it was going to be a long distance relationship and that's very unusual in the Middle East for a woman to just head out and kind of EX you know pursue her career and so my dad actually my dad and my my parents-in-law both said you know we do not approve of you doing this but now you're under the jurisdiction of your husband so he can make the call and luckily for me he was supportive he he said you know this is your dream come true we've always wanted to do a PhD I'm going to support you um so I think that was the first time where you know I I challenged the cultural norms was that scary oh my God yes it was totally scary it was the biggest culture shock from uh from there to to Cambridge to London well that was also during right around September 11th so everyone thought that there was going to be a third world war or it was really okay and and I and I at the time I used to wear the hijab so I was very visibly Muslim and so my parents were they were afraid for my safety but anyways when I got to Cambridge because I was so scared I decided to take off my head scarf and wear a hat instead so I just went to class wearing these like British hats which was in my opinion actually worse than just showing up in a head scarf because it was just so awkward right like sitting in class with like all these trying to fit in yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so after a few weeks of doing that I was like to heck with that I'm just gonna go back to wearing my head scarf yeah you wore the the hijab uh so starting in 2000 and for 12 years after so it's always whenever you're in public you have to wear the head covering can you speak to that to the hijab maybe your mixed feelings about it like what does it represent in its best case what does it represent in the worst case yeah I wore it voluntarily I was not forced to wear it and in fact I was one of the very first women in my family to decide to put on the hijab and my family thought it was really odd right like there was they were like why do you want to put this on and and and at its best it's it's a sign of modesty humility um it's like me wearing a suit people are like why are you wearing a suit it's a step back into some kind of tradition or respect for traditions of sorts right so you said because it's by choice you're kind of free to make that choice right to celebrate a tradition of modesty exactly and and and I actually like made it my own I remember I would really match the color of my head scarf with what I was wearing like I it was a form of self-expression and I and at its best I I loved wearing it you know I have a lot of questions around how we practice religion and religion and you know and and I think and I think also it was a time where I was spending a lot of time going back and forth between the US and Egypt and I started meeting a lot of people in the U.S who were just amazing people very um purpose-driven people who have very strong core values but they're not Muslim that's okay right and so that was when I just had a lot of questions and politically also the situation in Egypt was when the Muslim Brotherhood ran the country and I didn't agree with their ideology um it was at a time when I was going through a divorce like it was like it was like just the perfect storm of like political personal conditions where I was like this doesn't feel like me anymore and it took a lot of courage to take it off because uh culturally it's not it's okay if you don't wear it but it's really not okay to wear it and then take it off but you're still so you have to do that while still maintaining a deep core and pride in the origins in your origin story totally so still being Egyptian still being a Muslim right and being I think generally like Faith driven but but yeah but what that means changes year by year for you it's like a personal Journey yeah exactly what would you say is the role of faith in that part of the world like how do you say you mentioned it a bit in the book too yeah I mean I think I think there is something really powerful about just believing that there's a bigger Force you you know there's a kind of surrendering I guess that comes with religion and you surrender and you have this deep conviction that it's gonna be okay you're right like the universe is out to like do amazing things for you and it's gonna be okay and there's strength to that like even when you're going through adversity um you just know that it's going to work out yeah it gives you like an inner peace a calmness exactly exactly yeah that's good it's faith in all the meanings of that word right faith that everything is going to be okay and it is because time passes and time cures all things it's like a calmness right with the chaos of the world yeah and also there's like a silver I'm a True Believer of this that something at a specific Moment In Time can look like it's catastrophic and it's not what you wanted in life but then time passes and then you look back and there's the Silver Lining right it maybe closed the door but it opened a new door for you and so I'm a True Believer in that that you know there's a silver lining and and almost anything in life you just have to have this like a faith or conviction that it's going to work out so such a beautiful way to see a shitty feeling so if you're if you feel shitty about a current situation I mean it almost is always true uh unless it's the cliches thing of uh if it doesn't kill you whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger it's it does seem that over time when you take a perspective on things that uh the the hardest moments and periods of your life are the most meaningful yeah yeah so over time you get to have that perspective right uh what what about because you mentioned uh Kuwait uh what about let me ask you about war what's the role of War and Peace maybe even the Big Love and Hate in that part of the world because it does seem to be a part of the world where there's turmoil there was turmoil there's still turmoil it is so unfortunate honestly it's it's such a waste of human resources and and and yeah and human mind share I mean and at the end of the day we all kind of want the same things we want you know we want human connection we want joy we want to feel fulfilled we want to feel you know a life of purpose and I just I just find it baffling honestly that we are still having to Grapple with that um I have a story to share about this you know I grew up in need on Egyptian American now but but you know um originally from Egypt and when I first got to Cambridge it turned out my office mate like my PhD kind of you know she ended up you know we ended up becoming friends but she was from Israel and we didn't know yeah we didn't know how it was going to be like oh did you guys sit there just staring at each other for a bit actually turns out he emailed our PhD advisor asked him if she thought it was going to be okay yeah um and oh this is around 9 11 too yeah and and Peter um Peter Robinson our PhD advisor was like yeah like this is an academic institution just show up and we became super good friends we were both um new moms like we both had our kids during our PhD we were both doing artificial emotional intelligence she was looking at speech I was looking at the face we just had so the culture was so similar our jokes were similar it was just I was like why on Earth are our countries why is there all this like war and tension and I think it falls back to the narrative right if you change the narrative like whoever creates this Narrative of War I don't know we should have women Run the World yeah that's that's one solution the good women because there's also evil women as well true okay [Laughter] um but yes yes there could be less war for women around the world the the other aspect is uh it doesn't matter the gender the people in power you know I get to see this with with Ukraine and Russian different um parts of the world around that conflict now uh and that's happening in Yemen as well and everywhere else there's these uh narratives told by the leaders to the populace yep and those narratives take hold and everybody believes that and they have a distorted view of the humanity on the other side in fact especially during war you don't even see the people on the other side as as uh as human or as equal intelligence or Worth or value as as you you tell all kinds of narratives about them being uh Nazis or uh Dom or whatever whatever narrative you want to Weaver on that or evil mm-hmm uh but I think when you actually meet them face to face you realize they're like the same exactly right it's an actual big shock for people to realize like um that they've been they've been essentially lied to um within their country and I I kind of have faith that social media is as ridiculous it is to say or any kind of technology is able to bypass the the walls that uh governments put up and connect people directly and then you get to realize ooh like people fall in love across different nations and religions and so on and that I think ultimately can cure a lot of our ills especially sort of in person just I also think that if leaders met in person to have a conversation that would have that could cure a lot of the ills of the of the world especially in private um let me ask you about the women running running the world okay uh so gender does in part perhaps shape the landscape of just our Human Experience um so in what ways was the limiting it in what ways was it empowering for you to be a woman in the Middle East my comment on like women running the world I think it comes back to empathy right which which has been a Common Thread throughout my my entire career and it's this this idea of human connection um once you build common ground with a person or a group of people you build trust you build loyalty you build um friendship and then and then you can turn that into like Behavior change and motivation and persuasion so so it's like empathy and emotions are just at the center of of everything we do and and I think being being from the Middle East kind of this human connection is is very strong like we have this running joke that if you come to Egypt for a visit people are gonna we'll know everything about your life like right away right I have no problems asking you about your personal life um there's no like No Boundaries really no personal boundaries in terms of getting to know people we get emotionally intimate like very very quickly but I think people just get to know each other like authentically I guess um you know there isn't this like superficial level of getting to know people you just try to get to know people really he's a part of that totally because you can put yourself in this person's shoe and kind of yeah imagine you know what what challenges they're going through and um so I think I've I've definitely taken that with me um generosity is another one too like just being generous with your time and love and attention and even with your wealth right even if you don't have a lot of it you're still very generous I think that's another enjoying the humanity of other people and so if you think there's a useful difference between men and women in that aspect and empathy or is doing these kind of big General groups does that hinder progress I don't I I actually don't want to over generalize I mean I love the men I know are like the most empathetic humans yeah I strive to be yeah you're actually very empathetic um yeah I thought so I don't want to over generalize um although one of the researchers I worked with when I was at Cambridge Professor Simon Baron Cohen he's uh Sasha Baron Cohen's cousin yeah and he runs the autism Research Center at Cambridge and he's written multiple books um on autism and one of his one of his theories is the empathy scale like the systemizers and the empathizers and it there's a disproportionate amount of computer scientists and Engineers who are systemizers and perhaps not great empathizers and then you know there's and there's more men in that bucket I guess than women and then there's more women in the empathizer's bucket so again not not to over generalize I sometimes wonder about that is it's been frustrating to me how many I guess systemizes there are in the fields of robotics yeah it's actually encouraging to me because I care about obviously social Robotics and because uh it's it it uh there's more opportunity for people that are empathic exactly I totally agree well right so it's nice yes so everybody said talk to they don't see the the human as interesting as um like it does it's not exciting you want to avoid the human at all costs it's a it's a safety concern to be touching the human um which it is but it's also an opportunity for a deep connection or collaboration or all that kind of stuff so and because most of most brilliant roboticists don't care about the human it's an opportunity right uh for in your case it's a business opportunity too uh but in general an opportunity to explore those ideas so in this beautiful journey to Cambridge uh to you know UK and then to America what uh what's the moment or moments there were most transformational for you as a scientist and as a leader so you became an exceptionally successful CEO founder researcher scientist and so on um was there a face shift there where like I can be somebody I can I can really do something in this world yes I actually just kind of a little bit of background so the reason why I moved from Cairo to Cambridge UK to do my phds because I had a very you know clear career plan I was like okay I'll go abroad get my PhD I'm gonna crush it in three or four years come back to Egypt and teach it was very clear very well laid out was topic clear or no the topic well I did I did my PhD around building artificial emotional intelligence in your master plan ahead of time when you're sitting by the mango tree did you did you know it's going to be artificial intelligence no no no that I did not know although I think I kind of knew that I was going to be doing computer science but I didn't know the specific area but I love teaching I mean I still love teaching so I just yeah I just wanted to go abroad get a PhD come back teach why computer science can we just Linger on that what because you're such an empathic person who cares about emotion humans and so on isn't it aren't computers cold and emotionless and just changing that yeah I know but like isn't that the or did you see computers as the having the capability to actually um connect with humans I think that was like my takeaway from my experience just growing pewter's sit at the center of how we connect and communicate with one another right or technology in general like I remember my first experience being away from my parents we communicated with a fax machine but thank goodness for the facts Miss Sheen because we could let send letters back and forth to each other this was pre-emails and stuff um so I so I think I think there's I think technology can be not just transformative in terms of productivity Etc it actually does change how we connect with one another and can I just defend the fax machine yeah there's something um like the haptic feel is the email is All Digital there's something really nice I still write letters to people there's something nice about the haptic aspect of the fax machine because you still have to press you still have to do something in the physical world to make this thing a reality the sense right and then it like comes out as a printout and you can actually touch it and read it yeah there's something there's something lost when it's just an email obviously I wonder how we can regain some of that in the digital world which goes to the metaverse and all those kinds of things we'll talk about it anyway so uh actually do a question on that one do you still do you have photo albums anymore do you still print photos no no but I'm a minimalist okay so it was one of the one of the painful steps in my life was to scan all the photos and let go of them and then let go of all my books ah you let go of your books yeah I switched to Kindle everything kind so I I thought I thought okay think 30 years from now nobody's gonna have books anymore it's the technology of digital books can get better and better and better are you really gonna be the guy that's still romanticizing physical books are you gonna be the old man on the porch who's like kids yes so just get used to it because it was it felt it still feels a little bit uncomfortable to read on a on a Kindle but get used to it like you always I mean I'm trying to learn new programming language is always you like with technology you have to kind of challenge yourself to adapt to it you know I force myself to use tick tock now uh that thing doesn't need much forcing it pulls you in like a like a like the worst kind of or the best kind of drug anyway uh yeah uh so yeah but I do love haptic things there's a magic to the haptic even like touch screens It's tricky to get right to get the experience of uh a button yeah anyway what were we talking about so AI so the the journey your your whole plan was to come back to Cairo and teach right and then what did the plan go wrong yeah exactly right and then I got to Cambridge and I fall in love with the idea of research right and and kind of embarking on a path nobody's explored this path before you're building stuff that nobody's built before and it's challenging and it's hard and there's a lot of non-believers I just totally love that and at the end of my PhD I think it's the meeting that changed the trajectory of my life Professor Rosalind Picard who's she runs the affective Computing group at the MIT media lab I had read her book I you know I was like falling falling following all her research AKA Roz yes AKA Ross and she was giving a talk at a pattern recognition conference in Cambridge and she had a couple of hours to kill so she emailed the lab and she said you know I if any students want to meet with me like just you know sign up here and so I signed up for slots and I spent like the weeks leading up to it preparing for this meeting and I want to show her a demo of my research and everything and we met and we ended up hitting it off like we totally clicked and at the end of the meeting she said do you want to come work with me as a postdoc at MIT and this is what I told her I was like okay this would be a dream come true but there's a husband waiting for me and Cairo I kind of have to go back yeah he said it's fine just commute and I literally started commuting between Cairo and Boston um yeah it was it was a long commute and I didn't I did that like every few weeks I would you know hop on a plane and go to Boston but that that changed the trajectory of my life there was no I kind of outgrew my dreams right I didn't want to go back to Egypt anymore and be faculty like that was no longer my dream I had a dream what was the what was it like to be at MIT what was that culture shock um you mean America in general but also I mean Cambridge is its own culture so what was MIT like and what was America like I wonder if that's similar to experience at MIT I was at the media lab in particular I was just really impressed is not the right word I didn't expect the openness to like Innovation and the acceptance of taking a risk and failing like failure isn't really accepted back in Egypt right you don't want to fail like there's a fear of failure which I think has been hardwired in my brain but you got to MIT and it's okay to start things and if they don't work out like it's okay you pivot to another idea and that kind of thinking was just very new to me I was liberating well media a lot for people don't know MIT media lab is its own beautiful thing because they I think more than other places at MIT reach for Big Ideas and like they try I mean I think I mean depending of course on who but certainly with Rosalind this you try wild stuff you try big things and crazy things and and also uh try to take things to completion so you can demo them so always always have a a demo like if you go one of the sad things to me about robotics Labs at MIT and there's like over 30 I think uh is like usually when you show up to a robotics lab there's not a single working robot they're all broken all the robots are broken which is like the normal state of things because you're working on them but it would be nice if we lived in a world where robotics Labs had uh wrote some robots functioning one of my like favorite moments that just sticks with me I visited Boston Dynamics and there was a first of all seeing so many spots so many legged robots in one place I'm like I'm home but the Thrive yeah uh this is where I was built uh the the cool thing was just to see there was a random robot uh spot was walking down the hall it's probably doing mapping but it looked like he wasn't doing anything and he was wearing he or she I don't know but it it well I I like I I like in my mind there are people they have a backstory but this one in particular definitely has a backstory because uh he was wearing a cowboy hat so as you saw a spot robot with a cowboy hat walking down the hall and it was just this feeling like there's a life like he has a life he probably has to commute back to his family at night like there's a there's a feeling like there's life instilled in this robot and it's magical I don't know it was It was kind of inspiring to see they didn't say hello to did he say hello to you yeah very there's a focused nature to the robot no no listen I love competence and focus and great like it was not gonna get distracted by the the shallowness of small talk there's a job to be done and he was doing it so anyway the the fact that it was working is a beautiful thing and I think media lab really Prides itself on trying to always have a thing that's working it could show off yes we used to call it demo or die you you could not yeah you could not like show up with like PowerPoint or something you actually have to have it working you know what my son who is now 13 I don't know if this is still his life long goal or not but when he was a little younger his dream is to build an island that's just inhabited by robots like no humans he just wants all these robots to be connecting and having fun and that's all there you go does he have human um does he have an idea of which robots he loves most is it is it Roomba like robots is it humanoid robots robot dogs or is not clear yet um laughing with a giant head yes it spins right exactly can rotate and it's an eye it has oh well like not glowing like right right right exactly the Cal 9000 but the friendly version all right you love that and then he just loves uh um yeah he just he I think he loves all forms of robots actually so it embodies intelligence yes I like I personally like legged robots especially uh anything that can wiggle its butt no that's not the definition of what I love but that's just technically what I've been working on recently because I've I have a bunch of legged robots now in Austin and I've been oh that's so cool doing I was I've been trying to uh have them communicate affection with their body in in different ways just for art for art really because I I love the idea of walking around with the robots like as you would with the dog I think it's inspiring to a lot of people especially young people like kids love kids love it the parents like adults are scared of robots but kids don't have this kind of weird construction of the world that's full of evil they love the cool things yeah I remember when Adam was in first grade so he must have been like seven or so I went in to class with a whole bunch of robots and like the emotion AI demo and I asked the kids I was like do you would you kids want to have a robot you know robot friend or robot companion everybody said yes and they wanted it for all sorts of things like to help them with their math homework and to like be a friend so there's it just struck me how there was no fear of robots it was a lot of adults have that like us yeah none of that of course you want to be very careful because you still have to look at the lessons of history and how robots can be used by the power centers of the world to abuse your rights and all that kind of stuff but mostly it's good to enter anything new with an excitement and optimism speaking of Roz what have you learned about science and life from Rosalind Picard oh my god I've learned so many things about life from Roz um I think the thing I learned the most is perseverance uh when I first met Roz we applied and she invited me to be our postdoc we applied for a grant to the National Science Foundation to apply some of our research to autism and we got back we were rejected rejected yeah and the reasoning first time you were rejected for for fun yeah yeah it was and I basically I just took the rejection to mean okay we're rejected it's done like end of story right that's great news they love the idea they just they just don't think we can do it so let's build it show them and then reapply and it was that oh my God that story totally stuck with me um and and she's like that in every aspect of her life she just does not take no for an answer reframe all negative feedback uh it's a challenge that's a challenge yes they like this yeah yeah it was all right yeah uh what else about science in general about how you see computers and um also business and just every everything about the world she's a very uh a powerful brilliant woman like yourself so is there some aspect of that too yeah I think Ross is actually very Faith driven she has this like deep belief in conviction um yeah in in the good in the world and humanity and um I think that was meeting her and her family was definitely like a defining moment for me because that was when I was like wow like you can be of a different background and religion and whatever and you can still have the same core values so that was that was yeah I'm grateful to her so Roz if you're listening thank you yeah she's great she's been on this podcast before I'm I'm I hope she'll be on I'm sure she'll be on again you are the founder and CEO of effectiva which is a big company that was acquired by another big company Smart Eye and you're now the deputy CEO of smart eyes so you're a powerful leader you're brilliant you're brilliant scientist a lot of people are inspired by you what advice would you give especially to young women but people in general who dream of becoming powerful leaders like yourself in a world where perhaps um in a world that's perhaps doesn't uh give them a clear easy path to do so whether we're talking about Egypt or elsewhere no encapsulates I think what I think is the biggest challenge of all which is believing in yourself right I have had to like grapple with this what I call now the Debbie Downer voice in my head the kind of basically is just shattering all the time it's basically saying oh no no no you can't do this like you're not going to raise money you can't start a company like what business do you have like starting a company or running a company or selling a company like you name it that's always like and and I think my biggest advice to not just women but people who have who are Taking A New Path and you know they're not sure is to not let yourself and let your thoughts be the biggest obstacle in your way and I've had to like really work on myself to not be my own biggest obstacle so you got that negative voice yeah um so is that am I the only one I don't think I'm the only one no I have that negative voice I'm not exactly sure if it's a bad thing or a good thing I've been really torn about it because it's been a lifelong companion it's hard to know it's kind of um it drives productivity and progress but it can hold you back from taking big leaps I think you I the best I can say is probably you have to somehow be able to control it so turn it off when it's not useful and turn it on when it's useful like I have from almost like a third person perspective right somebody somebody yeah like because it is useful to uh to be critical like after um again I just gave a talk yesterday uh at MIT and I was just you know there's so much love and it was such an incredible experience so many amazing people I got a chance to talk to but you know afterwards when I when I went home and just took this long walk it was mostly just negative thoughts about me I don't like I one basic stuff like I I don't deserve any of it and second is like like why did you that was so dumb that you said this that's so dumb like you got you should have prepared that better why did you say this but I think it's good to hear that voice out all right and like sit in that and ultimately I think you grow from that now when you're making really big decisions about funding or starting a company or taking a leap to go to the UK or take a leave to go to America to to work a media lab though yeah there's a that's uh you should be able to shut that off then because uh you should have like this weird confidence almost like faith that you said before that everything's gonna work out so take the leap of faith take the leap of faith despite all all the negativity I mean there's there's some of that you you actually tweeted a really nice uh tweet thread uh it says quote a year ago a friend recommended I do Daily Affirmations and I was skeptical but I was going through major transitions in my life so I'd give it a shot and it set me on a journey of self-acceptance and self-love so what was that like you may maybe talk through this idea of affirmations and how that helped you yeah because really like I'm just like myself as a kind person in general but I'm kind of mean to myself sometimes yeah and so um I've been doing journaling for almost 10 years now um I used an app called day one and it's awesome I just journal and I use it as an opportunity to almost have a conversation with the Debbie Downer voice in my it's like a rebuttal right like Debbie Downer says oh my God like you you know you won't be able to raise this round of funny I'm like okay let's talk about it record of device it's literally like so I wouldn't I don't know that I can shut off the voice but I can have a conversation with it and it just it just um and I bring data to the table right nice so so that was the journaling part which I found very helpful but the affirmation took it to a whole Next Level and I I just love it I I'm I I'm a year into doing this and you literally wake up in the morning and the first thing you do I meditate first um and then and then I write my affirmations and it's it's the energy I want to put out in the world that hopefully will come right back to me so I will say I always start with my smile lights up the whole world and I kid you not like people in the street will stop me and say oh my God like we love your smile yeah [Laughter] so so my affirmations will change depending on you know what's happening this day is it funny I know don't judge don't judge no that's not what laughter is not judgment it's just awesome I mean it uh it's true but you're saying affirmation somehow hope kind of uh what is it they do work to like remind you right of the kind of person you are and the kind of person you want to be which actually maybe in verse order the kind of person you want to be and that helps you become the kind of person you actually are that's I think it's intentionality to like what you're doing right and so by the way I was laughing because my affirmations which I also do are the opposite oh you do oh I don't have a my smile lights up maybe I should add that because like I I have I just I have every oh my boy I just it's uh it's much more stoic like about focused about this that's kind of okay but the joy the emotion that you're just in that little affirmation is beautiful so maybe I should add that yeah I have some like focused stuff yeah but that's usually but that's a cool start it's just after all they're like smiling you're inspiring playful and joyful and all that and then it's like okay I kick butt let's get shit done all right let's get shit done that for me okay cool so uh like what else is on there oh what else is on there um well I I have I'm als I'm I'm a magnet for all sorts of things so I'm an amazing people magnet I attract like awesome people into my universe uh so that's an actual affirmation yes that's great yeah so that that's and then yeah and that somehow manifests itself into like working I think I think so yeah like can you speak to like why it feels good to do the affirmations grounds the day and then it allows me to instead of just like being pulled back and forth like throughout the day it just like grounds me I'm like okay like this thing happened it's not exactly what I wanted it to be but I'm patient or I'm you know I'm I trust that the universe will do amazing things for me which is one of my other consistent affirmations or I'm an amazing Mom right and so I can grapple with all the feelings of mom guilt that I have all the time um or here's another one I'm a love magnet and I literally say I will kind of picture the person that I'd love to end up with and I write it all down and hasn't happened yet but what do you what are you picturing because of Brad Pitt Brad Pitt because that's what I picture okay that's what you picture yeah okay running holding hands running together um no more like Fight Club that uh The Fight Club Brad Pitt where he's like staying all right people will know okay anyway I'm sorry I'll get off on that do you have uh like when you're thinking about the being a love magnet in that way are you picturing specific people or is this almost like um in the space of like energy right it's somebody who um is smart and well accomplished and successful in their life but they're generous and they're well traveled and they want to travel the world things like that like their head over heels into me is like I know it sounds super silly but it's literally what I write yeah and I believe it'll happen one day oh you actually write so you don't say it out loud no I write it I write all my affirmations yeah if I'm alone I'll say it out loud yeah I said try that huh it I think it's which what feels more powerful to you to me more powerful saying stuff feels more powerful yeah yeah writing is um writing feels like I'm losing losing the words like losing the power of the words maybe because I write slow do you hand write no I I type it's on this app it's day one basically and I just I can look the best thing about it is I can look back yeah and see like a year ago what was I affirming right so it also changes over time it hasn't like changed a lot but it but the focus kind of changes over time I got it yeah I see the same exact thing over and over and over oh you do okay there's a comfort in the in the sameness of it uh well actually let me jump around because let me ask you about because we talked all this talk about Brad Pitt or maybe what's going on inside my head um let me ask you about dating in general um you tweeted are you based in Boston in single question mark and then you pointed to a startup singles night sponsored by smile dating app because I mean this is jumping around a little bit because since you mentioned um can AI help solve this uh dating love problem what do you think this problem of connection that is part of the human condition can AI help that you yourself are in the search affirming maybe that's what I should affirm like build an AI build an AI that finds love I think I think there must be a science behind that first moment you meet a person and you either have chemistry or you don't right like you I guess that was the question I was asking would you put a brilliantly is that a science or an art oh I think there are like there's actual chemicals that get exchanged when people two people meet oh I don't know about that but okay I like how you're changing yeah yeah changing your mind as we're describing it but it feels that way right but it's what science shows us is sometimes we can explain with the rigor the things that feel like magic right right so maybe you can remove all the magic maybe it's like I honestly think like I said that Goodreads should be a dating app which like books I I wonder I wonder if you look at just like books or content you've consumed I mean that's essentially what YouTube does when it does recommend a recommendation if you just look at your footprint of content consumed if there's an overlap but maybe interesting difference with an overlap that some I'm sure this is a machine learning problem that's solvable like this person is very likely to be not only there to be chemistry in the short term but a good lifelong partner to grow together I bet you it's a good machine learning problem we just need the data let's do it well two of us that they're ought to be ought to be learning algorithm that can ingest all this data and basically say I think the following 10 people would be interesting connections for you right um and and so smile dating app kind of took one particular angle which is humor it matches People based on their humor Styles which is one of the main ingredients of a successful relationship like if you meet somebody and they can make you laugh like that's a good thing and if you develop like internal jokes like inside jokes and you're bantering like that's fun yeah so I think yeah yeah definitely definitely but yeah that's the uh the number of and the rate of inside joke generation you could probably measure that and then optimize it over the first few days right and then we're just turning this into a machine learning problem I love it uh but for somebody like you who's exceptionally successful and busy um is there is there science to that aspect of dating is it tricky is there advice you can give oh my God I'd give the worst advice well I can tell you like I have a spreadsheet I'm stretchy that's great is that a good or a bad thing do you regret the spreadsheet uh well I don't know what's the name of this spreadshe Is It Love the date track dating tracker it's very like love tracker yeah and there's a rating system I'm sure yeah there's like weights and stuff and it's too close to home oh is it do you also well I don't have a spreadsheet but I would now that you say it it seems like a good idea oh no uh turning into Data um yeah I do wish that somebody else had a spreadsheet about me hmm if you know if it was a cut like like I said like you said uh convert collect a lot of data about us in a way that's privacy preserving that I own the data I can control it and then use that data to find not I mean not just romantic love but uh collaborators friends all that kind of stuff it seems like the data is there right uh the that's the problem social networks are trying to solve but I think they're doing a really poor job even Facebook tried to get into a dating app uh business and I think there's so many components to running a successful the company that connects human beings and part of that is you know uh having Engineers they care about the human side right as you know extremely well it's not it's not easy to find those but but you don't also don't want just people that care about the human they also have to be good Engineers so it's like you have to find this this beautiful mix and for some reason just empirically speaking it's it people who have not done a good job of that of building companies like that and it must mean that it's a difficult problem to solve dating apps it seems difficult Okay Cupid tender all those kind of stuff they seem to find of course they work but they seem to not work as well as I would imagine it's possible like right with data wouldn't you be able to find better human connection it's like arrange marriages on steroids right right arranged by Machine learning algorithms arranged by Machine learning algorithm but but not a superficial one I think a lot of the dating apps out there are just so superficial they're just matching on like high level criteria that aren't ingredients for successful partnership but you know what's missing though too I don't know how to fix that the Serendipity piece of it like how do you engineer Serendipity like this random like chance encounter and then you fall in love with the person like I don't know how a dating app can can do that so it has to be a little bit of Randomness Maybe every 10th match is just a you know yeah somebody that the algorithm wouldn't have necessarily recommended but it's it allows for a little bit of well it can also you know it can also trick you into thinking it sounded to be by like somehow showing you a tweet of a person that he thinks you'll match well with but do it accidentally as part of another search right and like you just notice it like and then you get it you go down a rabbit hole and you connect them in outside the app to like so you connect with this person outside the house somehow so it's just it creates that moment of meeting um of course you have to think of from an app perspective how you can turn that into a business but I think ultimately a business that helps people find love in any way like that's what Apple was about create products that people love right that's beautiful I mean that's you got to make money somehow right if you help people fall in love personally with the product find self-love or another human being you're gonna make money yeah you're gonna figure out a way to make money um I just feel like the dating apps often will optimize for something else than love it's a single social networks they optimize for engagement right as opposed to like a deep meaningful connection um that's ultimately ground in like personal growth you as a human being growing and all that kind of stuff um let me do like a pivot to a dark topic which you open the book with um yeah a story because I'd like to talk to you about just emotion and artificial intelligence that I think this is a good story to start to think about emotional intelligence uh you open the book with a story of a central Florida man Jamal Dunn who was drowning and drowned while five teenagers watched and laughed saying things like you're gonna die and when Jamel disappeared below the surface of the water one of them said he just died and the others laughed what is this incident uh teach you about human nature and the response to it perhaps yeah I mean I think this is a really really really sad story and it and it and it highlights what I believe is a it's a real problem in our world today it's it's an empathy Christ yeah we're living through an empathy crisis and crisis yeah yeah and and I mean we've we've talked about this throughout our conversation we dehumanized each other and unfortunately yes technology is bringing us together but in a way it's just dehumanized it's creating this like yeah dehumanizing of the other and I think that's a huge problem the good news is I think solution the solution could be Technology based like I think if we rethink the way we design and deploy our Technologies we can solve parts of this problem but I worry about it I mean even with my son a lot of his interactions are computer mediated and I just questioned what that's doing to his empathy skills and you know his ability to really connect with people so do you think you think it's not possible to form empathy through the digital medium I think it is we have to be thoughtful about because the way the way we engage face to face which is what we're doing right now right there's the the non-verbal signals which are a majority of how we communicate it's like 90 of how we communicate is your facial expressions you know I'm saying something and you're nodding your head now and that creates a feedback loop and and if you break that and now I have anxiety about it relax oh boy I am just recognizing your facial expressions during this interview all right okay look normal look human yeah nod head yeah not head in agreement if Rana says yes yeah then not head else don't do it too much because it might be at the wrong time and then it'll send the wrong signal oh God and uh make eye contact sometimes because humans appreciate that all right anyway okay uh yeah but something about the especially when you say mean things in person you get to see the pain of the other person but if you're tweeting it at a person and you have no idea how it's gonna land you're more likely to do that on social media than you are in face-to-face conversations so um I mean what do you think is more important EQ or IQ EQ being emotional intelligence in terms of uh in what makes us human I think emotional intelligence is what makes us human it's it it's how we connect with one another it's how we build trust it's how we make decisions right like your emotions Drive kind of what you had for breakfast but also where you decide to live and what you want to do for the rest of your life so I think emotions are underrated um but so emotional intelligence isn't just about the effective expression of your own emotions it's about a sensitivity and empathy to other people's emotions and that sort of being able to effectively engage in the dance of emotions with other people I like that thinking about it as a dance because it is really about that it's about sensing what state the other person's in and using that information to decide on how you're going to react um and I think it can be very powerful like people who are the best most persuaded most persuasive leaders in the world tap into you know they have if you have higher EQ you're more likely to be able to motivate people to change their behaviors so um so it can be very powerful at a more kind of technical maybe philosophical level you've written that emotion is universal it seems that sort of like Chomsky says language is universal there's a bunch of other stuff like cognition Consciousness seems a lot of us have these aspects so the human mind generates all this and so what do you think is the they all seem to be like Echoes of the same thing uh what do you think emotion is exactly like how deep does it run is it a surface level thing that we display to each other is it just another form of language or something deep within I think it's it's really deep it's how you know we started with memory I think emotions play a really important yeah the emotions play a very important role in how we encode memories right our our memories are often encoded almost indexed by emotions yeah um yeah it it said this core of how you know our decision-making engine is also heavily influenced by our emotions so emotions is part of cognition it's totally it's intermixed into the whole thing yes absolutely and in fact when you take it away people are unable to make decisions they're really paralyzed like they can't go about their daily or their you know personal or professional lives so um it does seem like there's probably some interesting interweaving of emotion and Consciousness I wonder if it's possible to have like if they're next door neighbor somehow or if they're actually uh flatmates I don't I don't it feels like the the hard problem of Consciousness where it's some it feels like something to experience the thing like red feels like red and it's you know when you eat a mango sweet The Taste the the the the sweetness that it feels like something to experience that sweetness that whatever generates emotions but then like I feel like emotion is part of communication it's very much about communication and then that means it's also deeply connected to language but then probably human intelligence is deeply connected to the collective intelligence between humans it's not just a standalone thing so the whole thing is really connected so emotions connected to language language is connected to intelligence and then intelligence connect to Consciousness and Consciousness is collect connected to emotion the whole thing is that the is a beautiful mess so uh um can I comment on the emotions being a communication mechanic because I think there are two facets of of of our emotional experiences um one is communication right like we use emotions for example facial expressions or other nonverbal cues to connect with other human beings and with other beings in the world right um but even if it's not a communication context we still experience emotions and we still process emotions and we still leverage emotions to make decisions and to learn and you know to experience life so it isn't always just about communication and we learned that very early on in our in kind of our work at affectiva one of the very first applications we brought to Market was understanding how people respond to content right so if they're watching this video of ours like are they interested are they inspired are they bored to death and so we watch their facial expressions and we had we weren't sure if people would express any emotions if they were sitting alone like if you're in your bed at night watching a Netflix TV series would we still see any emotions on your face and we were surprised that yes people still emote even if they're alone even if you're in your car driving around you're singing along a song and you're joyful we'll see these Expressions so it's not just about communicating with another person it sometimes really isn't just about experiencing the world and first of all I wonder if some of that is because we develop our intelligence and our emotional intelligence by communicating with other humans and so when other humans disappear from the picture was still kind of a virtual human the code still runs basically yeah the code still runs and but you also kind of you're still there's like virtual humans you don't have to think of it that way but there's a kind of when you like chocolate yeah like you're you're kind of chuckling to a virtual human I mean it's possible that the the code is the has to have another human uh there because if you just grow up alone I wonder if emotion will still be there in this visual form so I yeah I I wonder but anyway the uh what can you tell from the human face about what's going on inside so that's the problem that affectiva first tackled which is using computer vision using machine learning to try to detect stuff about the human face as many things as possible and convert them into a prediction of categories of emotion anger happiness all that kind of stuff how hard is that problem extremely hard it's very very hard because there is no one-to-one mapping between a facial expression and your internal State there just isn't there's this oversimplification of the problem where it's something like if you are smiling then you're happy if you do a brow Furrow then you're angry if you do an eyebrow race then you're surprised and just think about it for a moment you could be smiling for a whole host of reasons you could also be happy and not be smiling right um you could follow your eyebrows because you're angry or you're confused about something or you're constipated yeah um so I think this over simplistic approach to inferring emotion from a facial expression is really dangerous the solution is to incorporate as many contextual signals as you can right so if for example I'm driving a car and you can see me like nodding my head and my eyes are closed and the blinking grade is changing I'm probably falling asleep on at the wheel right it doesn't because you know the context you understand what the person is doing so I think or add additional channels like voice or gestures or even physiological sensors um but I think it's very dangerous to just take this over simplistic approach of yeah smile equals happy and if you're able to in a high resolution way specify the context there's certain things that are going to be somewhat reliable signals of something like drowsiness or happiness or stuff like that I mean when when people are watching Netflix that problem that's a really compelling idea that you can kind of at least in aggregate exactly highlight like which part was boring which part was exciting how hard was that problem um that was on the scale of like difficulty I think that's some of one of the easier problems to solve because it's um um a relatively constrained environment you have somebody sitting in front of initially we started with like a device in front of you like a laptop and then we graduated to doing this on a mobile phone which is a lot harder just because of you know from a computer vision perspective profile view of the face can be a lot more challenging we had to figure out lighting conditions because usually people are watching content literally in their bedrooms at night lights are dimmed um yes I mean if you're standing it's probably going to be the uh looking up the nostril view yeah and nobody looks good at I've seen data sets from that perspective it's like this is not a good look for anyone uh or if you're laying in bed at night what is it side view or something right it's and you have your faces like on a pillow actually I don't I would love to know have data about uh like how people watch stuff in bed at night like do they prop their is it a pillow the like I'm sure there's a lot of interesting Dynamics right from a health and well-being perspective right like it's like oh you're already machine learning perspective but yes but also yeah yeah um yeah once you have that data you can start making all kinds of inference about health and stuff like that interesting yeah there's a interesting thing when I was at Google that we were um it's it's called active authentication where you you want to be able to unlock your phone without using a password so it would it would face but also other stuff like the way you take a phone out of the pocket amazing so that kind of data to use the multimodal uh with machine learning to be able to identify that it's you or likely to be you likely not to be you that allows you to not always have to enter the password that was the the idea but the funny thing about that is I just want to tell a small anecdote is because it was all male engineers uh except so there's my boss is uh uh our boss who's still one of my favorite humans was was a woman uh Regina Dugan um oh my God I love her she's awesome she's the best um so uh but anyway there was a there's one female engine uh a brilliant female engineer on the team and she was the one that actually highlighted the fact that um women often don't have pockets it was like well that was not even a category in the code of like wait a minute you can take the phone out of some other place than your pocket so anyway that's a it's a funny thing when you're concerning people laying in bed watching a phone you have to consider if there you have to the you know uh diversity in all its forms depending on the problem depending on the context yeah actually this is like a very important I think this is you know you probably get this all the time like people are worried that ai's going to take over humanity and like get rid of all the humans in the world I'm like actually that's not my biggest concern my biggest concern is that we are building bias into these systems and then they're like deployed at large and at scale and before you know it you're kind of accentuating the bias that exists in society and yeah I'm not you know I know people it's very important to worry about that but I it the worry is an emergent phenomena to me which is a very good one because I think these systems are actually by encoding the data that exists they're revealing the bias that in society they're for teaching us what the bias is therefore we can now improve that bias within the system so they're almost like putting a mirror to ourselves I I so I'm not we have to be open to looking at the mirror though you have to be right open to scrutinizing the data if you just take it as a ground or you don't even have to look at the I mean yes the data is how you fix it but then you just look at the behavior of the system it's like and you realize holy crap this thing is kind of racist right like why is that and then you look at the days like okay and then you start to realize that I think that's a much more effective way to uh to be introspective as a society than through sort of political discourse like AI kind of right uh um because people are easy people are for some reason more productive and rigorous in criticizing AI then they're criticizing each other so I think this is just a nice method for studying society and see which way progress lies anyway what we're talking about you're watching the problem of watching Netflix in bed or elsewhere and seeing which parts are exciting which parts are boring you're saying that's relatively constrained because you know you have a captive audience and you kind of know the context and one thing you said that was really key is the accurate you're doing this in aggregate right like we're looking at aggregated response of people and so when you see a peak yeah say a smile Peak they're probably smiling or laughing at something that's in the content um so that was one of the first problems we were able to solve and and when we see the smile Peak it doesn't mean that these people are internally happy they're just laughing at content so it's important to you know call it for what it is um but still really really useful data I wonder how that compares to so what like YouTube and other places will use is obviously they don't uh have in for the most case they don't have that kind of data but they have the data of when people um tune out drop off and I think that's a at in aggregate for you to release a pretty powerful signal I worry about what that leads to because um looking at uh like YouTubers that are kind of really care about views and you know try to maximize the number of views I think they when they say that the video should be constantly interesting which seems like a good goal I feel like that leads to this manic pace of a video like the idea that I would speak at the current speed that I'm speaking I don't know um and that every moment has to be engaging right engaging but yeah I think there's value to silence there's value to the boring bits I mean all some of the greatest movies ever some of the greatest stories ever told me that boring bits seemingly boring bits I don't know I I wonder about that of course it's not that your the human face can capture that either it's just giving an extra signal you have to I have to really I don't know you have to really collect deeper long-term data about what was meaningful to people when they think 30 days from now what they still remember what moved them what changed them what helped them grow that kind of stuff you know it would be a really I don't know if there are any researchers out there who are doing this type of work wouldn't it be so cool to tie your emotional Expressions while you're say listening to a to a podcast interview and then go you know and then 30 days later interview people and say hey what do you remember you've watched this 30 days ago like what stuck with you and then see if there's any there ought to be maybe there ought to be some correlation between these emotional experiences and and yeah what you stays with you huh uh so the the one guy listening now on the beach in Brazil please record a video of yourself listening to this and send it to me and then I'll interview you 30 days from now it will be statistically significant and a one but you know um yeah yeah I I think that's really fascinating I think that's um that kind of holds the key to uh to to a future where entertainment or content is both entertaining and uh I don't know um makes you better empowering in some way so figuring out like showing people stuff that entertains them but also they're happy they watched 30 days from now because they've become a better person because of it well you know okay not to Riff on this topic for too long but I have two children right and I see my role as a parent as like the chief opportunity officer like I am responsible for exposing them to all sorts of things in the world and but often I have no idea of knowing like what stuck like what was you know is this actually going to be transformative you know for them 10 years down the line and and I wish there was a way to quantify these experiences like are they I can tell in in the moment if they're engaging right I can tell but it's really hard to know if they're going to remember them 10 years from now or if it's going to yeah that one is weird because it seems like kids remember the weirdest things I've seen parents do incredible stuff for their kids and they don't remember any of that they remember some tiny small sweet thing a parent did right like some it took you to like this amazing country whatever and then there'll be like some like stuffed toy you got or some or the new PlayStation or something or some some silly little thing so I I think they they just like that we're designed that way they want to mess with your head but definitely kids are very impacted by it seems like sort of negative events so minimizing the number of negative events is important but not too much right you can't you can't just like uh you know they're still discipline and Challenge and all those kinds of things so some adversity for sure so yeah I mean I'm definitely when I have kids I'm gonna drive them out into the woods okay and then they have to survive and make figure out how to make their way back home like 20 miles out okay okay yeah and after that we can go for ice cream anyway um I'm working on this whole parenting thing I haven't figured it out okay uh what were we talking about yes effectiva the the the problem of emotion of emotion detection so there's some people maybe we can just speak to that a little more where there's folks like uh Lisa Felman Barrett that that challenge this idea that emotion could be fully detected or even um well detected from the human face so that there's so much more to emotion what do you think about uh ideas like hers criticism like hers yeah I actually agree with a lot of Lisa's um criticism so even even my PhD worked like 20 plus years ago now um time flies when you're having fun I know right that was back when I did like Dynamic Bayesian networks and I mostly that's before deep learning that was before deep learning yeah yeah I know my day now you can just like use yeah yeah it's it's all it's all all the same architecture you can apply it to anything yeah right um but yeah but but even then I kind of I I did not subscribe to this like theory of basic emotions where it's just the simplistic mapping one-to-one mapping between facial expressions emotions I actually think also we're not in in the business of trying to identify your true emotional internal State we just want to quantify in an objective way what's showing on your face because that's an important signal it doesn't mean it's a true reflection of your internal emotional state um so I think a lot of the you know I think she's she's just trying to kind of highlight that this is not a simple problem and overly simplistic Solutions are going to hurt the industry um and and I subscribe to that and I think multimodal is the way to go like whether it's additional contacts information or different modalities and channels of information I think that's what we um that's where we ought to go and I think I mean that's a big part of what she's advocating for as well so but there's signal in the human face that's there's definitely signal that's a projection of emotion there's that that there at least in part is uh the interstate is captured in some meaningful way on the human face I think it it um an expression of your internal state but sometimes it's a social signal so this so you cannot look at the face as purely a signal of emotion it can be a signal of cognition and it can be a signal of a a social expression and I think to disambiguate that we have to be careful about it and we have to add initial information humans are fascinating aren't they with the whole face thing this can mean so many things um from humor to sarcasm to everything the whole thing some things we can help some things we can't help at all in all the years of leading effectiva and emotional recognition company like we talked about what have you learned about emotion about humans and about AI oh big big sweeping questions yeah that's a big sweeping question well I think the thing I learned the most is that even though like we are in the business of of building AI basically right it always goes back to the humans right it's always about the humans um and so for example the thing I'm most proud of in in building affectiva and yeah the most the thing I'm most proud of on this journey I love the technology and I'm so proud of the solutions we've built and we've brought to Market but I'm actually most proud of the people we've like built and cultivated at the company and the culture we've created um you know some some of the people who've joined affectiva this was their first job and while at affectiva they became American citizens and they bought their first house and they found their partner and they had their first kid right like key moments in life that we got to be part of and that's the thing I'm most proud of so that's that's a great thing at a company that works on them right me like celebrating Humanity in general broadly speaking yes and that's a great thing to have in a company that works on AI because that's not often the thing that's celebrated in AI company so often just raw great engineering um just celebrating the humanity that's great and especially from a leadership position um well what do you think about the movie Her let me ask you that before I talk before I talk to you about because it's not effectiva is and was not just about emotion so I'd love to talk to you about smart eye but before that let me just jump into um the movie uh her do you think we'll have a deep meaningful connection with increasingly deep and meaningful connections with computers is that a compelling thing to you something I think that's already happening the thing I love them I love the movie Her by the way but the thing I love the most about this movie is it demonstrates how technology can be a conduit for positive behavior change so I forgot the guy's name in the movie um whatever Theodore Theodore so Theodore was like really depressed right and he just didn't want to get out of bed and he just just like done with with life right and Samantha right Samantha yeah she just knew him so well she had she was emotionally intelligent and so she could persuade him and motivated him to change his behavior and she got a man and they went to the beach together and I think that represents the promise of emotion AI if done well this technology can help us live happier lives more productive lives healthier lives more connected lives so that's the part that I love about the movie obviously it's Hollywood so it takes a Twist and whatever but but the but the key notion that technology with emotion AI can persuade you to be a better version of who you are I think that's awesome well what about the twists you don't think you don't think it's good for spoiler alert that Samantha starts feeling a bit of a distance and basically leaves Theodore um you don't think that's a good feature that's a that you think that's a bugger feature well I think what went wrong is Theodore became really attached to Samantha like I think he kind of fell in love with us do you think that's wrong I mean I think that I think she was putting out the signal this is an intimate relationship right there's a deep intimacy to it right but what does what does what does that mean what does that mean AI system right what does that mean right I'm just friends yeah well I think when he realized which is such a human thing of jealousy when you really like this was talking to like thousands of people she's parallel dating yeah that did not go well right uh you know that doesn't and from a computer perspective like that doesn't take anything away from what we have it's like you getting jealous of Windows 98 for being used by millions of people but it's like it's like not liking that Alexa yeah right it's a bunch of you know other families but I think Alexa currently is just a servant it it tells you about the weather it's not it doesn't do the intimate deep connection and I think there is something really powerful about that the intimacy of a connection with an AI system that would have to respect and play the human game of of jealousy of Love of uh heartbreak and all that kind of stuff which the matter does seem to be pretty good at I think she this AI systems knows what it's doing I don't think she was talking to anyone else you don't think so you think she was just done with Theodore yeah oh she knew that yeah and then and she she wanted to really want to move on she didn't have the guts to just break it off cleanly okay she just wanted to put it no I don't know well she could have ghosted him she could have gone I'm sorry there's our Engineers oh God uh but I think those are really I I honestly think some of that some of it is Hollywood but some of that is featured from an engineering perspective not not a bug I think I think AI systems that can leave us now this is for more social robotics than it is for anything that's useful like I I hated if Wikipedia said you know I need a break right now right right right right like no no I need you um but if if it's just purely uh for for um companionship then I think the ability to leave is really powerful I don't know that I never thought of that so so because I've always taken the human perspective right um like for example we had a gebo at home right and my son loved it and then the company ran out of money and so they had to basically shut down G like Jibo basically died right and it was so interesting to me because we have a lot of gadgets at home and a lot of them break and my son never cares about it right like if our Alexa stopped working tomorrow I don't think he'd really care but when Jibo stopped working it was traumatically he got really upset and as a parent that like made me think about this deeply right did I was I comfortable with that I I liked the connection they had because I think it was a positive relationship but I was surprised that it affected him emotionally so much and I think there's a broader question here right as we build socially and emotionally intelligent machines what does that mean about our relationship with them and then more broadly our relationship with one another right because this machine is going to be programmed to be amazing at empathy by definition right it's going to always be there for you it's not going to get bored in fact there's a chat bot in China and it's like the number two or three most popular app and it basically is just a confidant and you can tell it anything you want and people use it for all sorts of things they confide in like um domestic violence or suicidal attempts or you know if they have challenges at work I don't know what that I don't know if I'm com I don't know how I feel about that I think about that a lot yeah I think first of all obviously the future in my perspective uh second of all I think there's a lot of trajectories that that becomes an exciting future but I think everyone should feel very uncomfortable about how much they know about the company about where the data is going how the data is being collected because I think and this is one of the lessons of social media that I think we should demand full control and transparency of the data on those things plus one totally agree yeah so like I I think it's really empowering as long as you can walk away as long as you can like delete the data or know how the date it's a opt-in or or at least the clarity of like what is being used for the company and I think it's CEO or like leaders are also important about that like you need to be able to trust the basic Humanity of the leader exactly and also that that leader is not going to be a puppet of a larger machine but they actually have a significant role in defining the culture uh and the way the company operates so anyway so but we should be we should definitely scrutinize companies in that aspect but it just I'm personally excited about that future but also even if you're not it's coming so let's figure out how to do it in the least painful yeah and the most positive moment that's great you're the deputy CEO of Smart Eye can you describe the mission of the company what a Smart Eye yeah so smart eye is a Swedish company they've been in business for the last 20 years and other their main focus like the industry they're most focused on is the automotive industry so bringing driver monitoring systems uh to basically save lives right so I first met the CEO Martin Krantz um gosh it was right when covet hit it was actually the sea the last C the last Cas right before covet so CS 2020 right 2020 yeah January yeah January exactly so we were there met him in person he's basically we were competing with each other um I think the difference was they'd been doing driver monitoring and had a lot of credibility in the automotive space we didn't come from the automotive space but we were using new technology like deep learning and building this emotion recognition and you wanted to enter the automotive space you wanted to operate in automotive space exactly it was one of the areas we were we had just raised a round of funding to focus on bringing our technology to the automotive industry so we met and honestly it was the first it was the only time I met with a CEO who had the same vision as I did like he basically said yeah our vision is to bridge the gap between humans and machines I was like oh my God this is like exactly almost to the to the word you know how we describe it too and we started talking and first it was about okay can we align strategically here like how can we work together because we're competing but we're also like complementary and then I think after four months of speaking almost every day on FaceTime yeah he was like is your company interested in an acquisition and it was the first I usually say no when people approach us um it was the first time that I was like huh yeah I might be interested let's talk yeah um so you just hit it off yeah so they're they're a respected uh very respective in the automotive sector of of like delivering products and increasingly sort of better and better and better uh for I mean maybe you could speak to that but it's the driver's testing for basically having a device that's looking at the driver and it's able to tell you where the driver is looking correct it's able or also drowsiness stuff correct it does stuff from the face and the eye exactly like it's monitoring driver distraction and drowsiness but they bought us so that we could expand Beyond just the driver so the driver monitoring systems usually sit the camera sits in the steering wheel or around the steering wheel column and it looks directly at the driver but now we've migrated the camera position in partnership with car companies to the rear view mirror position so it has a full view of the entire cabin of the car and you can detect how many people are in the car what are they doing so we do activity detection like eating or drinking or in some regions of the world smoking we can detect if a baby's in the car seat right and if unfortunately in some cases they're forgotten the parents just leave the car and forget the kid in the car that's an easy computer vision problem to solve right you can detect there's a car seat there's a baby you can text the parent and hopefully again save lives so so that was the impetus for the acquisition it's been a year um so that I mean there's a lot of a lot of questions really exciting space especially to me I just find this a fascinating problem it could could enrich the experience in the car in so many ways especially because like we spend still despite covet I mean Kobe changed things so it's in interesting ways but I think the world is bouncing back and we spend so much time in the car and the car is such a weird little world we have for ourselves like people do all kinds of different stuff like listen to podcasts they they think about stuff they they get angry they get um they do phone calls they're so it's like a little world of its own with a kind of privacy that uh for many people they don't get anywhere else uh it's and it's it's a little box that's like a psychology experiment because it feels like the angriest many humans in this world get is inside the car it's so interesting so it's such an opportunity to explore how we can enrich um how how companies can enrich that experience and also as the cars get become more and more automated there's more and more opportunity the variety of activities that you can do in the car increases so it's super interesting so um I mean on a practical sense Smart Eye has been selected at least I read by 14 of the world's leading car manufacturers for 94 car models so it's in a lot of cars how hard is it to work with car companies so they're all different they all have different needs the ones I've gotten the chance to interact with are very focused on cost so um it's and anyone who's focused on costs it's like all right do you hate fun let's just have some fun let's figure out the most fun thing we can do and then worry about costs later but I think because the way the car industry works I mean it's it's a very thin margin that you get to operate under so you have to really really make sure that everything you add to the car makes sense financially so anyways there is is this new industry especially at this scale of Smart Eye does it hold any lessons for you yeah I think it is a very tough Market to to penetrate but once you're in it's awesome because once you're in you're designed into these car models for like somewhere between five to seven years which is awesome and you just once they're on the road you just get paid a royalty fee per vehicle so it's a high barrier to entry but once you're in it's amazing I think the thing that I struggle the most with in in this industry is the time to Market so often we're asked to lock or do a code freeze two years before the car is going to be on the road I'm like guys like do you understand the pace with which technology moves so I think car companies are really trying to make the Tesla the Tesla transitioned to become more of a software-driven architecture and that's hard for many it's just the cultural change I mean I'm sure you've experienced that right oh definitely I think one of the biggest inventions or imperatives created by Tesla is like to me personally okay people are going to complain about this but I know electric vehicle I know autopilot AI stuff to me the software over there software updates is like the biggest revolution in cars and it is extremely difficult to switch to that because it is a culture shift it uh at first especially if you're not comfortable with it it seems dangerous like there's a there's an approach to cars it's so safety focused for so many decades that like what do you mean we dynamically change code the whole point is you have a thing that you test like right and like it's not reliable because you know how much it costs if we have to recall these cars right like there's a there's a and there's an understandable obsession with safety but the downside of an obsession with safety is the same as with being uh obsessed with safety as a parent is like if you do that too much you limit the potential development and the flourishing of in that particular aspect human being but in this particular aspect the software the the artificial neural network of it and um but it's tough to do it's really tough to do culturally and technically like the deployment the mass deployment of software is really really difficult but I hope that's where the industry is doing one of the reasons I really want Tesla succeed is exactly about that point not autopilot not the electrical vehicle but the softwarization yeah of basically everything but cards especially because to me that's actually going to increase two things increase safety yeah because you can update much faster but also increase the effectiveness of uh folks like you who dream about enriching The Human Experience right with AI because you can just like you can just like there's a feature like you want like a new Emoji or whatever like the way Tick Tock releases filters you can just release that for in-car in car stuff so but yeah that that that's definitely um one of the use cases we're looking into is once you know the sentiment of the passengers of the vehicle you can optimize the temperature in the car you can change the lighting right so if the backseat passengers are falling asleep you can dim the lights you can lower the music right you can do all sorts of things yeah um I mean of course you could do that kind of stuff with a two-year delay but it's tougher right yeah um do you think do you think uh Tesla or waymo or some of these companies that are doing of semi or fully autonomous driving should be doing driver sensing yes are you thinking about that kind of stuff so not just how we can enhance the encap experience for cars that are mainly driven but the ones that are increasingly more autonomously driven you if we fast forward to the universe where it's fully autonomous I think interior sensing becomes extremely important because the role of the driver isn't just to drive if you think about the driver almost manages manages the Dynamics within a vehicle and so who's going to play that role when it's an autonomous car we want a solution that is able to say oh my God like you know Lex is bored to death because the car is moving way too slow let's engage Lex or rana's freaking out because she doesn't trust this vehicle yet so let's tell Rana like a little bit more information about the route or right so I think or or somebody's having a heart attack in the car like you need interior sensing and fully autonomous vehicles but with semi-autonomous vehicles I think it's I think it's really key to have driver monitoring because semi-autonomous means that sometimes the car is in charge sometimes the driver is in charge or the co-pilot right and you need this you need both systems to be on the same page you need to know the car needs to know if the driver's asleep before it transitions control over to the driver and sometimes if the driver is too tired the car can say I'm going to be a better driver than you are right now I'm taking control over so this Dynamic this dance is so key and you can't do that without driver sensing yeah there's a disagreement for the longest time I've had to deal on that this is obvious that this should be in the Tesla from day one and it's obvious the driver sensing is not a hindrance it's not obvious that's I should I should be careful because having studied this problem nothing is really obvious but it seems very likely a driver sensing is not a hindrance to an experience it's only in um enriching to the experience uh and likely increases the safety that said it is very surprising to me uh just having studied semi-autonomous driving how well humans are able to manage that dance because it was the intuition before you were doing that kind of thing that humans will become just incredibly distracted they would just like let the thing do its thing but they're able to you know because it is life and death right and they're able to manage that somehow but that said there's no reason not to have driver sensing on top of that I feel like that's going to allow you to do that dance that you're currently doing without driver sensing except just touching the steering wheel uh to do that even better I mean the possibilities are endless and the Machine learning possibilities are such a such a beautiful it's also a constrained environment so you could do a much more effectively than you can with the external environment right external environment is full of weird edge cases and complexities just inside there's so much it's so fascinating such a fascinating world I I do hope that companies like Tesla and others even even waymo um which I don't even know if waymo is doing anything sophisticated inside the cab I don't think so it's like hey like what what what is it I honestly think I honestly think it goes back to the robotics thing we were talking about which is like great Engineers that are building these AI systems just are afraid of the human being and not thinking about The Human Experience they're thinking about the features and yeah the perceptual abilities of that thing they think the best way I can serve the human is by doing the best perception and control I can by looking at the external environment keeping the human safe right but like there's a huge I'm here right like uh you know I I need to be uh noticed and um interacted with and understood and all those kinds of things even just on a personal level for entertainment honestly for entertainment yeah yeah um you know one of the coolest work we did in collaboration with MIT around this was we looked at longitudinal data right after because because you know MIT has access to like tons of data um and we and and like just seeing the patterns of people like driving in the morning versus off to work versus like commuting back from work or weekend driving versus weekday driving and is what is so cool if your car knew that and then was able to optimize either the route or the experience or even make recommendations yeah I think it's very powerful yeah like why are you taking this route you've always unhappy when you take this route and you're always happy when you take this alternative route take that route instead exactly that I mean that if to have that even that little step a relationship with a car I think is is in incredible of course you have to get the Privacy right you have to get all that kind of stuff right but yeah I wish I I honestly you know people are like paranoid about this but I would like a smart refrigerator we have a such a deep connection with food as a human civilization I would like to have a a refrigerator that would understand me that you know I also have a complex relationship with food because like you know pig out too easily and all that kind of stuff so you try you know uh like maybe I want the refrigerator to be like are you sure about this because maybe you're just feeling down or tired like maybe maybe less the version of the smart refrigerator is way Kinder than mine is it just me and yelling at you yeah no it was just because I I don't I don't um you know I don't drink alcohol I don't smoke but I eat a ton of chocolate like it's just my advice and so I and and sometimes I scream too and I'm like okay my smart refrigerator will just like lock down I'll just say dude you've had way too many today like no yeah no but here's the thing are you do you regret having like let's say not the next day but 30 days later would you what would you what would you like to the refrigerator to have done then well I think actually like the more positive relationship would be one where there's a conversation right as opposed to like four that's probably like the more sustainable relations it's like late late at night just no listen listen I know I told you an hour ago right it's just not a good idea but just listen things have changed I could just imagine a bunch of stuff being made up just to convince that's hilarious uh but I mean I just think that there's opportunities there I mean maybe not locking down but for our systems that are such uh deep part of our lives like we use uh we used a lot of us uh a lot of people that commute use their car every single day a lot of us use a refrigerator every single day the microwave every single day like and we just like I feel like certain things could be made more efficient more enriching and AI is there to help like some just basic recognition of of you as a human being about your patterns about what makes you happy and not happy and all that kind of stuff and the car obviously like maybe maybe we'll say wait wait instead of this like ice cream how about this hummus and carrots or something I don't know maybe even make it like yeah like a reminder just in time recommendation right but not like a generic one right but a reminder that last time you chose the carrots you smiled 17 times more after the next day right yeah you're happier the next day and uh and but yeah I don't but then again if you're the kind of person that that gets better from negative negative commas you could say like hey remember like that wedding you're going to you want to fit into that dress remember about that let's think about that right before you're eating this no I don't it's for some probably that would work for me like a refrigerator that is just ruthless it's shaming me but like I would of course welcome it like right that would work for me just that that well I would know I think it would if it's really like smart it would optimize its nudging based on what works for you right exactly that's the whole point personalization right in every way depersonalization you were part of a webinar titled advancing Road Safety the state of alcohol intoxication research so for people who don't know every year 1.3 million people around the world die in Road crashes and more than 20 percent of these fatalities are estimated to be alcohol related a lot of them are also distraction related so can AI help with the alcohol thing I answer is yes there are signals and we know that as humans like we can tell in a person you know is it different phases of being drunk um right yeah and I think you can use technology to do the same and again I think the ultimate solution is going to be a combination of different sensors how hard is the problem from the vision perspective non-trivial part is getting the data right it's like getting enough data examples so we for This research project we partnered with the transportation authorities of Sweden and we literally had a race track with a safety driver and and we basically progressively got people drunk nice so but but you know uh that's that's a very expensive data set to to to collect and you want to collect it globally and in multiple conditions and yeah the the ethics of collecting a data set where people are drunk is tricky yeah definitely which is funny because I mean let's put Drunk Driving aside the number of drunk people in the world every day is very large right it'd be nice to have a large data set of drunk people getting progressively drunk in fact you could build an app where people can donate their data because it's hilarious right actually yeah but but the liability liability the ethics the how do you get it right It's Tricky it's really really tricky because like drinking is one of those things that's funny and hilarious and what loves it's social the so on and so forth but it's also the thing that uh hurts a lot of people like a lot of people like alcohol is one of those things it's legal but it it it it it's really damaging to a lot of lives it destroys lives and not just in the driving context um I should mention people should listen to Andrew huberman who recently talked about um alcohol he has an amazing podcast Andrew humor is a neuroscientists from Stanford a good friend of mine oh cool and he he's like a human encyclopedia about all health related wisdom so it does a podcast you you would love it I would love that no no no no no no oh you don't know Andrew huberman okay listen you listen to to Andrew he's called huberman Lab podcast this is your assignment just listen to one okay I guarantee you this will be a thing where you say Lex this is the greatest human I've ever discovered so oh my God because I think because because I've already have kind of health and wellness and I'm learning lots and I'm trying to like build these I guess Atomic habits around just being healthy um so I yeah I'm definitely gonna do this I'm gonna his whole thing this is this is this is this is great uh he's a legit scientist like um really well published but in his podcast what he does he's not he's not talking about his own work he's like a human Encyclopedia of papers and so he his whole thing is he takes the topic and in a very fast you mentioned Atomic Habits Like very clear way summarizes the research in a way that leads to Protocols of what you should do he's really big on like that not like this is what the science says but like this is literally what you should be doing according to the side so like he's really big and there's a lot of recommendations he does uh which several of them I definitely don't do like get sunlight um as soon as possible from waking up and like for prolonged periods of times okay that's a really big one and he's there's a lot of science behind that one there's a bunch of stuff you're gonna and you're gonna be like Lex this is uh this is my new favorite person I guarantee it and if you guys somehow don't know Andrew huberman and you care about your well-being um you know you should definitely listen to them I love you Andrew anyway so uh what were we talking about oh alcohol and detecting alcohol so this is a problem you care about and you're trying to solve and actually like broadening it um I I believe that the car is going to be a Wellness Center like because again imagine if you have a variety of sensors inside the vehicle Tracking not just your emotional state or level of distraction and drowsiness and drowsiness level of distraction challenge drowsiness and intoxication but also maybe even things like um your physical you know your heart rate and your heart rate variability and your breathing rate um and it can start like optimizing yeah it can optimize the ride based on what your goals are so I think we're going to start to see more of that I'm I'm excited about that yeah what are the what are the challenges you're tackling well with Smart Eye currently what's like the the trickiest things to get is it is it basically convincing more and more car companies that having AI inside the car is a good idea or is there some is is there more technical algorithmic challenges what's what's been keeping you mentally busy a lot of the car companies we are in conversations with are already interested in definitely driver monitoring like I think it's becoming a must-have but even interior sensing I can see like we're engaged in a lot of like Advanced engineering projects and proof of Concepts um I think technologically though and the even the technology I can see a path to making it happen I think it's the use case like how does the car respond once it knows something about you because you wanted to respond in a thoughtful way that doesn't that isn't off-putting to the consumer in the car so I think that's like the user experience I don't think we've really nailed that and we usually that's not part we're the sensing platform but we usually collaborate with the car manufacturer to decide what the use case is so so say you do you figure out that somebody's angry while driving okay what should the car do you know do you see yourself as a role of of nudging of like basically coming up with Solutions essentially that and then and then the the car manufacturers kind of put their own little spin on it right like we we are like the ideation creative thought partner but at the end of the day the car company needs to decide what's on brand for them right like maybe when it figures out that you're distracted or drowsy it shows you a coffee cup right or maybe it takes more aggressive behaviors and basically said okay if you don't like take a rest in the next five minutes the car's gonna shut down right like there's a whole range of actions the car can take and doing the thing that is most yeah that builds trust with the driver and the passengers I think that's what we need to be very careful about yeah car companies are funny because they have their own like I mean that's why people get cars still I hope that changes but they get it because it's a certain feel and look and it's a certain they become proud like Mercedes-Benz or BMW or whatever and that's their thing that's the family brand or something like that remember Ford or GM whatever they they stick to that thing yeah it's interesting it's like it should be I don't know it it should be a little more about the technology inside and I suppose there too there could be a branding like a very specific style of luxury or fun right right all that kind of stuff yeah you know I'm um I have a I have an AI focused fund to invest in early stage kind of AI driven companies and one of the companies we're looking at is trying to do what Tesla did but for boats for recreational votes yeah they're so they're building an electric and kind of Slash autonomous um but it's kind of the same issues like what kind of sensors can you put in what kind of states can you detect both exterior and interior within the boats anyways it's like really interesting do you vote at all no not well not in that way I I do like to get on the lake uh or a river and fish from okay but that's not boating that's the difference low Tech get away from get closer to nature but I guess going out into the ocean is also uh is also getting closer to Nature in some deep sense I mean I guess that's why people love it yeah the the the enormity of the water just underneath you yeah I love the I love both I love salt water it was like the big and just it's humbling to be in front of this giant thing that's so powerful that was here before us and be here after but I also love the piece of a small like wooded like it's just everything's calm um therapeutic who you tweeted that I'm excited about Amazon's acquisition of iRobot I think it's a super interesting just given the trajectory of which you're part of of these honestly small number of companies that are playing in the space that are like trying to have an impact on human beings so the it is an interesting moment in time that Amazon would acquire iRobot uh you tweet I imagine a future where home robots are as ubiquitous as microwaves or toasters here are three reasons why I think this is exciting if you remember I can look it up but what why is this exciting to you for the exact like um order in which I put them but one is just it's it's going to be an incredible platform for understanding our behaviors within the home right like you know if you think about Roomba which is um you know the robot vacuum cleaner the flagship product of iRobot at the moment um it's like running around your home understanding the layout it's understanding what's clean and what's not how often do you clean your house and all of these like behaviors are a piece of the puzzle in terms of understanding who you are as a consumer and I think that could be again um used in in really meaningful ways not just to recommend better products or whatever but actually to improve your experience as a human being so I think I think that's very interesting um I think the Natural Evolution of these robots in the in in the home so it's interesting Roomba isn't really a social robot right at the moment um but I once interviewed one of the chief Engineers on the Roomba team and he talked about how people named their roombas and if the Roomba broke down they would call in and say you know my Roomba broke down and the company would say oh we'll just send you a new one and no no Rosie like you have to like yeah yeah I want you to fix this particular robot um so people have already built like interesting emotional connections with these home robots and I think that again that provides a platform for really interesting things so to just motivate change like it could help you I mean one of the companies that spun out of MIT uh Catalia health um the guy who started it spent a lot of time building robots that help with weight management so weight management sleep eating better yeah all of these things um but if I'm being honest Amazon is not exactly have a track record of winning over people in terms of trust now that said it's a really difficult problem for human being to let a robot in their home that has a camera on it right that's really really really tough and I think Roomba actually I have to think about this but I'm pretty sure now or for some time already has had cameras because they're doing the the most recent rule but I have so many roombas oh you actually do well I programmed I don't use the Roomba for back off people have been to my place they're like yeah you definitely don't use these roombas uh good because that should be a good I can't tell like the valence of this comment was it a compliment or like no it's a giant mess it's just a bunch of electronics everywhere there's I have uh six or seven computers have robots everywhere Lego robots a small robots and big robots it's just Giant just piles of robot stuff and yeah um but including the roombas they're they're being used for their body and intelligence but not for their purpose every I've changed them with the repurpose them for other purposes for deeper more meaningful purposes than just uh like the bottle robot yeah which is you know brings a lot of people happiness I'm sure uh they have a camera because the thing they advertised I had my own cameras too but the the the the camera on the new Roomba they have like state-of-the-art poop detection as they advertised which is a very difficult apparently it's a big problem for for vacuum cleaners is you know if they go over like dog poop it just runs it runs it over and creates a giant mess so they have like apparently they collected like a huge amount of data and different shapes and looks and whatever of poop and then now they're able to avoid it and so on they're very proud of this uh so there is a camera but you don't think of it as having a camera yeah you don't think of it as having a camera because you've grown to trust it I guess because our phones at least most of us seem to trust right this phone even though there's a camera looking directly at you I think that if you trust that the company is taking security very seriously I actually don't know how that trust was earned with smartphones I think I just started to provide a lot of positive value into your life where you just took it in and then the company over time has shown that it takes privacy very seriously that kind of stuff but I I just Amazon is not always in the in its social robots communicated this is a trustworthy thing both in terms of culture and competence because I think privacy is not just about what do you intend to do but also how well how good are you at doing that kind of thing so that's a really hard problem to solve but I mean but a lot of us have Alexis at home and I mean Alexa could be listening in the whole time right and doing all sorts of Nefarious things the data um you know yeah hopefully it's not but I don't think it is but you know Amazon is not it's such a tricky thing for a company to get right which is like to earn the trust I don't think Alexa's earned people's trust quite yet yeah I think it's it's not there quite yet I agree and they struggle with this kind of stuff in fact when these topics are brought up people are always get like nervous and I think if you get nervous about it I mean that like the way to uh earn people's trust is not by like oh don't talk about this it's just be open be frank be transparent and also create a culture of like where it radiates at every level from engineer to CEO that like you're good people that have uh Common Sense idea of what it means to respect basic human rights and uh the privacy of people and all that kind of stuff and I think that propagates throughout the uh that's the best PR which is like over time you understand that this these are good right good folks right doing good things anyway uh uh speaking of social robots have you heard about Tesla Tesla bot the humanoid robot yes I have yes yes yes but I don't exactly know what it's designed to do to you you probably do uh no I know it's designed to do but I I have a different perspective on it but it's designed to it's a humanoid form and it's designed to for automation tasks in the same way that industrial robot arms automated task in the factory so it's designed to automate task in the factory but I think the humanoid form is what we're talking about before is um is one that we connect with us human beings anything anything legged honestly but the humanoid form especially we anthropomorphizes it most intensely and so the possibility to me it's exciting to see both Atlas developed by Boston's Dynamics and anyone including Tesla trying to make humanoid robots cheaper and more effective this is the obvious way transforms the world is social robotics to me versus um versus automation of tasks in the factory so yeah I just wanted to in case that was something you were interested in because I I find it I find its application social robotics super interesting we did a lot of work with uh pepper um pepper the robots a while back we were like the emotion engine for pepper uh which is softbanks humanoid robot and how tall is pepper it's like yeah like um I don't know like five foot maybe right yeah yeah pretty pretty big pretty big um and it was designed to be at like airport lounges and you know retail stores mostly customer service right hotel lobbies um and I mean I don't know where the state of the robot is but I think it's very promising I think there are a lot of applications where this can be helpful I'm also really interested in um yeah social robotics for the home right like that can help elderly people for example transport things from one location of the home to the other or even like just have your back in case something happens um yeah I don't know I do think it's a very interesting space it seems early though do you feel like the timing is now I yes 100 uh so it always seems early until it's not right right right I think the time I definitely think that the time is now like this decade for social robots whether the humanoid form is right I don't think so I don't I think uh the like if we just look Jibo at Jibo as an example I feel like most of the problem the challenge the opportunity of social connection between an AI system and a human being does not require you to also solve the problem of robot manipulation and Mobility bipedal Mobility so I think you could do that with just a screen honestly but there's something about the interface of Jibo it can rotate and so on that's also compelling but you get to see all these robot companies that are fail that fail incredible companies like Jibo and um even uh I mean the iRobot in some sense is a big success story that is able to find right and a niche a niche thing and focus on it but in some sense it's not a success story because they didn't build any other robot like any other it didn't expand into all kinds of Robotics like once you're in the home maybe that's what happens with Amazon is they'll flourish into all kinds of other robots but uh do you have a sense by the way why it's so difficult to build a robotics company like why so many companies have failed think we're building a vertical stack right like you're building the hardware plus the software and you find you have to do this at a cost that makes sense so I think Jibo was retailing at like I don't know like 800 like 700 800 which for the use case right there's a dissonance there it's it's too high so I think cost is a is you know the cost of building the whole platform in a way that that is yeah that that is Affordable for what value it's bringing I think that's the challenge um I think for these home robots that are going to help you know help you do stuff around the home um that's a challenge too like the mobility piece of it that's that's hard well one of the things I'm really excited with with Tesla bot is the people working on it and that that's probably the criticism I would apply to some of the other folks who worked on social robots is the people working on Tesla bot know how to they're focused on and know how to do Mass manufacture and create a product that's super cheap very cool Focus the engineering Focus isn't uh I would say that you can also criticize them for that is they're not focused on the experience of the robot they're they're focused on how to get this thing to do the basic stuff that the humanoid form requires to do it as cheap as possible then the fewest number of actuators the fewest numbers of Motors the increasing efficiency they decrease the weight all that kind of stuff so that's that's really interesting I would say that g-bone all those folks they focus on the design the experience all of that and it's secondary how to manufacture right it's like no you have to think uh like the Tesla bought folks from first principles what is the fewest number of components the cheapest components how can I build it as much in-house as possible without without having to consider all the complexities of a supply chain all that kind of stuff interesting because if you have to build a robotics company you you have to you're not building one robot You're Building hopefully millions of robots you have to figure out how to do that where the final thing I mean if it's Jibo type of robot is there a reason why Jibo like we can have this lengthy discussion is there a reason why Jibo has to be over a hundred dollars it shouldn't be right like the basic right the basic components components of it right like you could start to actually discuss like okay what is the essential thing about gebo how much what is the cheapest way I can have a screen what's the cheapest way I can have a rotating base right all that kind of stuff and then and then you get to get down continuously drive down costs speaking of which you have launched an extremely successful companies you have helped others you've invested in companies can you give advice on how to start a successful company I would say have a problem that you really really really want to solve right something that you're deeply passionate about um and honestly take the first step like that's often the hardest and don't overthink it like you know like this idea of a minimum viable product or a minimum viable version of an idea right like yes you're thinking about this like a humongous like super elegant super beautiful thing what like reduce it to the littlest thing you can bring to Market that can solve a problem or that can I you know that can help um address a pain point that somebody has they often tell you like start with a customer of one right if you can solve a problem for one person then there's probably myself or some other person's right pick a person exactly it could be you yeah that's actually often a good sign that if you enjoy a thing right enjoy a thing or you have a specific problem that you'd like to solve that's a good that's a good end of one to to focus on right what else what else is there to actually so Step One is the hardest but there's other steps as well right um I also think like who you bring around the table early on is so key right like being clear on on what I call like your core values or your North Star it might sound fluffy but actually it's not so and Roz and I feel like we did that very early on we sat around her kitchen table and we said okay there's so many applications of this technology how are we going to draw the line how are we going to set boundaries we came up with a set of core values that in the hardest of times we fell back on to determine how we make decisions and so I feel like just getting Clarity on these core like for us it was respecting people's privacy only engaging with Industries where it's clear opt-in so for instance we don't do any work in security and surveillance um so things like that just getting we very big on you know one of our core values is human connection and empathy right and that is yes it's an AI company but it's about people well these are all they become encoded in how we act even even if you're a small tiny team of two or three or whatever um so I think that's another piece of advice so what about finding people hiring people if you care about people as much as you do like and it's it's it seems like such a difficult thing to uh to hire the right people I think early on as a startup you want people who have um who share the passion and the conviction because because it's gonna be tough like I've yet to meet a startup where it was just a straight line to success yeah right even even not just startups like even everyday people's lives right through you always like ha run into obstacles and you run into naysayers and um so you need people who are believers whether they're people on your team or even your investors you need investors who are really Believers in what you're doing because that means they will stick with you they won't they won't give up at the first obstacle yeah yeah what about raising money what about finding investors first of all raising raising money but also raising money from the right sources from the ultimately don't hinder you but help you Empower you all that kind of stuff what advice would you give there you successfully raised money and many times in your life yeah again it's not just about the money um it's about writing finding the right investors who are going to be aligned in terms of what you want to build and believe in your core values like for example especially later on like I yeah in my latest like round of funding I try to bring in investors that um really care about like the ethics of AI right and they alignment of of vision and Mission and core values is really important it's like you're picking a life partner right it's the same kind of so you take it that seriously for investors yeah because they're gonna have to stick you're stuck together for a while anyway yeah maybe not for life but for a while for sure yeah better or worse I forget what the valves usually sound like For Better or Worse no they're worse through something yeah yeah yeah oh boy um yeah anyway this it's romantic and deep and you're in it for a while um so it's not just about the money you tweet about going to your first capital Camp investing get together and yeah and then you learned a lot so this is about um investing so what what have you learned from that what have you learned about investing in general from both because you've been on both ends of it I mean I try to use my experience as an operator now with my investor hat on when I'm identifying companies to to invest in um first of all I think the good news is because I have a technology background right and I really understand you know machine learning and computer vision and AI Etc I can apply that level of understanding right because everybody says they're an AI company or they're an AI Tech and I'm like no no no no show me the technology so I can do that level of diligence which I actually love um and then I I have to do the litmus test of you know if I'm in a conversation with you am I excited to tell you about this new company that I just met right and and and if I if I'm an ambassador for that company and I'm passionate about what they're doing I I usually use that yeah that's important to me when I'm investing so that means you actually can explain what they're doing and and you're excited about it exactly exactly thank you for putting it so succinctly I'm just like rambling but exactly that's it sometimes the sun it's funny but sometimes it's unclear exactly you I'll hear people tell me you know in the talk for a while and it's sounds cool like they paint a picture of a world but then when you try to summarize it you're not exactly clear of what uh maybe maybe with the core powerful idea is like you can't just build another Facebook or um there has to be a there has to be a core simple to explain idea that yeah that then you can or can't get excited about but this it's there it's something right there yeah yeah what uh but how do you ultimately pick who you think would be successful it's not just about the thing you're excited about like there's other stuff right and companies which is where I'm investing sometimes the the business model isn't clear yet or the go to market strategy isn't clear there's usually like it's very early on that some of these things haven't been hashed out which is okay so the way I like to think about it is like if this company is successful will this be a multi-billion slash trillion dollar market operative you know or company and and so that's definitely a lens that I use um what's pre what's pre-seed what are the different stages and what's the most exciting stage and what's or not what's what's interesting about every stage I guess yeah so a pre-seed is usually when you're just starting out you've maybe raised the friends and family rounds you've raised some money from people you know and you're getting ready to for to take your First Institutional check-in like first check from an investor and um I love this stage there's a lot of uncertainty so some investors really don't like this stage because the financial models aren't there often the teams aren't even like formed really really early um to me if if it's like a magical stage because it's it's the time when there's so much conviction so much belief almost delusional right yeah right and there's a little bit of naivete around with with Founders at this stage I just love it it's contagious and um I and I love I love that I can often they're first-time Founders not always but often they're first-time Founders and I can share my experience as a Founder myself and I can empathize right and I can almost I create a safe ground where because you know you have to be careful what you tell your investors right and I will I will often like say I've been in your shoes as a Founder you can tell me if it's challenging you can tell me what you're struggling with it's okay to vent so I create that safe ground um and I think I think that's the superpower yes you have to uh what I guess you have to figure out if this kind of person is going to able to ride the roller coaster uh like of many pivots and challenges and all that kind of stuff and if the space of ideas they're working in is is interesting like the way they think about the world yeah because it if it's successful the thing they end up with might be very different the reason right successful for actually you you know I was gonna say the third quite so so the technology is one aspect the market or the idea right is the second and the third is the founder right is this somebody who I believe has conviction is a hustler you know is gonna overcome obstacles um yeah I think that it is going to be a great leader right like as a startup as a Founder you're often you are the first person and your role is to bring amazing people around you to build this thing and so you're in an evangelist right so how good are you going to be at that so I try to evaluate that too you're also in the Tweet Thread about it mentioned is this a known concept random Rich dudes rrds okay and saying that there should be like random rich women I guess what's the dudes what's the dude's version of women the women version of dudes ladies I don't know I don't know what's what's is this the technical term is this known random I didn't make that up but I was at this Capital Camp which is a get-together for uh investors of all types and there must have been maybe 400 or so attendees maybe 20 were women it was just very disproportionately um you know a male a male dominated which I'm used to I think you're used to this kind of thing I'm used to it but it's still surprising and as I'm raising money for this fund so my my fund partner is a guy called Rob May who's done this before so I'm new to the investing world but he's done this before most of our investors in the fund are these I mean awesome I'm super grateful to them random just Rich guys I'm like where are the rich women so I'm really adamant in both investing in women-led AI companies but I also would love to have women investors be part of my fund um because I think that's how we drive change yeah so the net you know that that takes time of course but there's been quite quite a lot of progress but yeah for for the next Mark Zuckerberg to be a woman and all that kind of stuff because that that's just like a huge number of wealth generated by right by women and then controlled by women then allocated by women and then beyond just women just broadly across all different measures of diversity and so on um let me ask you to put on your wise Sage hat okay so we already you already gave advice on startups and just advice um uh for women but in general uh advice for folks in high school or college today how to have a career they can be proud of how to have a life they can be proud of I suppose you have to give this kind of advice to your kids yeah well here's the number one advice that I give to my kids my daughter's now 19 by the way and my son is 13 and a half so they're not little kids anymore but but I break your heart it does oh it's like a girlfriend they're awesome they're my best friends but um yeah yeah I think the number one advice I would share is embark on a journey without attaching to outcomes um and enjoy the journey right so you know we often were so obsessed with with the end goal a that doesn't allow us to be open to different endings of a journey or a story um so you become like so fixated on a particular path you don't see the beauty in the other alternative path um and then you forget to enjoy the journey because you're just so fixated on the goal and I've been guilty of that for many many years in my life and I've I've now I'm now trying to like make the shift of no no I'm gonna again trust that things are going to work out and it'll be amazing and maybe even exceed your dreams but you have to be open to that yeah taking uh taking a leap into all kinds of things I think he tweeted like you went on vacation by yourself or something like this or I know this was and just just just just going just taking the leap doing it totally doing it and enjoying enjoying them enjoying the moment enjoying the weeks enjoying not looking at the some kind of career ladder next step and so on yeah there's there's something to that like over planning too I'm surrounded by a lot of people that kind of so I don't plan you don't no do you not do goal setting um my goal setting is very like I like the affirmations it's very it's almost uh I don't know how to put into words but it's it's a little bit like um what my heart yearns for kind of and I guess in the space of emotions more than in the space of like this will be like in the rational space because I just tried to picture a world that I would like to be in and that world is not clearly pictured it's mostly in the emotional world I mean I think about that from from robots because you know I have this desire I've had it my whole life to to well they took different shapes but I think once I discovered AI the desire was to I think in this in the context of this conversation could be easily easier described as basically a social robotics company and that's something I dreamed of doing and um well there's a lot there's a lot of complexity to that story but that that's that's the that's the only thing honestly I dream of doing so I I imagine a world that that I could help create but it's not um there's no steps along the way and I think I'm just kind of stumbling around and following happiness and working my ass off in almost ran like an aunt does in many directions but a lot of people a lot of successful people around me say this you should have a plan you should have a clear goal you have a goal at the end of the month you have a goal at the end of the year I don't I don't I don't and um there's a balance to be struck of course but there's something to be said about really making sure that you're living life to the fullest that goals can actually get in the way of so one of the best like kind of most um uh what do you what do you call it one as like challenges your brain would you call it um uh the only thing that comes to mind and this is me saying is the mind fuck but yes okay okay something like that yes super inspiring talk Kenneth Stanley he was at open AI he just laughed and here's a book called why greatness can't be planned and it's actually an AI book so and he's done all these experiments that basically show that when you over optimize you you it like the trade-off is you're less creative right and to create true greatness and truly Creative Solutions to problems you can't over plan it you can't and I thought that was and so he generalizes it Beyond Ai and he talks about how we apply that in our personal life and our organizations and our companies which are over kpi right like look at any company in the world and it's all like these are the goals these are the you know weekly goals and you know the Sprints and then the quarterly goals blah blah blah and and he just shows with a lot of his AI experiments that that's not how you create truly game changing ideas so there you go yeah yeah he's awesome yeah there's there's a balance of course that's yeah many moments of Genius will not come from planning and goals but you still have to build factories and you still have to manufacture and you still have to deliver and there's still deadlines and all that kind of stuff and that for that it's good to have calls I do goal setting with my kids we all have our goals but but I think we're starting to morph into more of these like bigger picture goals and not obsessed about like I don't know it's hard well I honestly think especially with kids it's better much much better to have a plan and have goals and so on because you have to you have to learn the muscle of like what it feels like to get stuff done yeah but I think once you learn that there's flexibility for me because I I spend most of my life with goal setting and so on so like sure I've gone good with good grades in school I mean in school if you want to be successful at school you I mean the kind of stuff in high school and college the kids have to do in terms of managing their time and getting so much stuff done it's like you know taking five six seven classes in college they're like that would break the spirit of most humans if they took one of them later in life it's like really difficult stuff especially in engineering curricula so um I think you have to learn that skill but once you learn it you can maybe because you're you can be a little bit of on autopilot and use that momentum and then allow yourself to be lost in the flow of life you know just kind of um or also give like I work pretty hard to allow myself to have the freedom to do that that's really right that's a tricky freedom to have yeah because like a lot of people get lost in the rat race and they right and they also like like financially they whenever you get a raise they'll get like a bigger house right right or something like this I put very so like there's you're always trapped in this race I put a lot of emphasis on on um uh living like below my means always uh and so there's a lot of freedom to do whatever the heart desires that yeah that's a really but everyone has to decide what's the right thing what's the right thing for them for some people having a lot of responsibilities like a house they can barely afford or having a lot of kids the responsibility side of that uh is really helps them get their shit together like all right I need to be really focused some of the most successful people I know have kids and the kids bring out the best in them they make them more productive accountability yeah accountability thing absolutely and almost something to actually live and fight and work for like having a family yeah it's it's fascinating to see because you would think kids would be a hit on productivity but they're not for a lot of really successful people they really like they're like an engine of right efficiency oh my God yeah yeah it's weird yeah I mean it's beautiful it's beautiful to see and also social happiness speaking of which what role do you think love plays in The Human Condition love huh is um yeah I think I think it's why we're all here I think it would be very hard to live life without love in any of its forms right yeah that's the most beautiful of uh uh forms that that human connection takes right yeah I feel like everybody wants to feel loved right in one way or another right and and to love yeah and to love too totally yeah I agree with that both of it I'm not even sure what feels better uh both both like that given to give love to yeah and and it is like we've been talking about an interesting question well there's some of that whether one day we'll be able to love a toaster okay it's some small I wasn't quite thinking about that the toaster yeah okay I was thinking about Brad Pitt all right well uh I think we we started on love and ended on love um this was an incredible conversation Ron thank you so much you're an incredible person thank you for everything you're doing in in AI in in the space of uh just caring about Humanity human emotion about love and being an inspiration to a huge number of people in robotics in AI in science in the world in general so thank you for talking it's an honor to having me and you know I'm a big fan of yours as well so it's been a pleasure thanks for listening to this conversation with Rhonda Elko yubi to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Helen Keller the best the most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched they must be felt with the heart thank you for listening and hope to see you next time