Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion | Lex Fridman Podcast #121
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Eugenia Kuyda co-founder of Replika, an AI companion. Please check out our sponsors to get a discount and to support this podcast:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Eugenia's Twitter: https://twitter.com/ekuyda
Replika's Twitter: https://twitter.com/myreplika
Replika's Website: https://replika.ai

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
6:18 - Loneliness
13:54 - Can AI alleviate loneliness?
18:13 - Love
20:49 - Russia in the 1990's
31:47 - Chernobyl
41:35 - Communism
49:21 - Losing a friend
57:55 - Mortality
1:10:41 - Replika origin story
1:59:37 - Bringing people back to life with AI
2:05:37 - Relationship with Replika
2:18:27 - Can you form a connection with text alone?
2:27:45 - Does an AI companion need a body?
2:30:20 - Her
2:37:24 - GPT-3 for conversation
2:43:48 - We should be nice to AI
2:46:52 - Book recommendations
2:53:45 - Russian language
2:58:41 - Meaning of life

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 The following is a conversation with Eugenia Cuyda, co-founder of Replica, which is an app that allows you to make friends with an artificial intelligence system, a chatbot that learns to connect with you on an emotional, you could even say, a human level, by being a friend. For those of you who know my interest in AI and views on life in general, know that Replica and Eugenia's line of work is near and dear to my heart. The origin story of Replica is grounded in a personal tragedy of Eugenia losing her close friend, Roman Muzarenki, who was killed crossing the street by a hit-and-run driver in late 2015. He was 34. The app started as a way to grieve the loss of a friend by trading a chatbot neural net on text messages between Eugenia and Roman. The rest is a beautiful human story as we talk about with Eugenia. When a friend mentioned Eugenia's work to me, I knew I had to meet her and talk to her. I felt before, during, and after that this meeting would be an important one in my life. And it was. I think in ways that only time will truly show, to me and others. She is a kind and brilliant person. It was an honor and a pleasure to talk to her. Quick summary of the sponsors. DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that deep, meaningful connection between human beings and artificial intelligence systems is a lifelong passion for me. I'm not yet sure where that passion will take me, but I decided some time ago that I will follow it boldly and without fear to as far as I can take it. With a bit of hard work and a bit of luck, I hope I'll succeed in helping build AI systems that have some positive impact on the world and on the lives of a few people out there. But also, it is entirely possible that I am in fact one of the chatbots that Eugenia and the Replica team have built. And this podcast is simply a training process for the neural net that's trying to learn to connect to human beings, one episode at a time. In any case, I wouldn't know if I was or wasn't. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I'll try to make these interesting, but give you timestamps so you can skip. But please do still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description to get a discount. Buy whatever they're selling. It really is the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Dollar Shave Club. Try them out with a one-time offer for only $5 and free shipping at dollarshave.com slash Lex. The starter kit comes with a six blade razor, refills, and all kinds of other stuff that makes shaving feel great. I've been a member of Dollar Shave Club for over five years and actually signed up when I first heard about them on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. And now, friends, we have come full circle. It feels like I made it, now that I can do a read for them just like Joe did all those years ago. Back when he also did ads for some less reputable companies, let's say, that you know about if you're a true fan of the old school podcasting world. Anyway, I just used the razor and the refills, but they told me I should really try out the shave butter. I did. I love it. It's translucent somehow, which is a cool new experience. Again, try the Ultimate Shave Starter Set today for just $5 plus free shipping at dollarshaveclub.com slash Lex. This show is also sponsored by DoorDash. Get $5 off and zero delivery fees and your first order of $15 or more when you download the DoorDash app and enter code, you guessed it, Lex. Have so many memories of working late nights for a deadline with a team of engineers, whether that's for my PhD at Google or MIT, and eventually taking a break to argue about which DoorDash restaurant to order from. And when the food came, those moments of bonding, of exchanging ideas, of pausing to shift attention from the programs to humans were special. For a bit of time, I'm on my own now, so I miss that camaraderie, but actually, I still use DoorDash a lot. There's a million options that fit into my crazy keto diet ways. Also, it's a great way to support restaurants in these challenging times. Once again, download the DoorDash app and enter code, Lex, to get $5 off and zero delivery fees and your first order of $15 or more. Finally, this show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the app store. I can truly say that they're an amazing company, one of the first sponsors, if not the first sponsor to truly believe in me, and I think quite possibly the reason I'm still doing this podcast. So I am forever grateful to Cash App. So thank you. And as I said many times before, use code LexPodcast when you download the app from Google Play or the app store. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, invest in the stock market with as little as $1. I usually say other stuff here in the read, but I wasted all that time up front saying how grateful I am to Cash App. I'm going to try to go off the top of my head a little bit more for these reads because I'm actually very lucky to be able to choose the sponsors that we take on. And that means I can really only take on the sponsors that I truly love and then I could just talk about why I love them. So it's pretty simple. Again, get Cash App from the app store, Google Play, use code LexPodcast, get $10 and Cash App will also donate 10 bucks to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Eugenia Kuida. Okay before we talk about AI and the amazing work you're doing, let me ask you ridiculously, we're both Russian, so let me ask you a ridiculously romanticized Russian question. Do you think human beings are alone, like fundamentally on a philosophical level, like in our existence, when we like go through life, do you think just the nature of our life is loneliness? Yeah, so we have to read Dostoevsky at school, as you probably know. In Russian? I mean, it's part of the school program. So I guess if you read that, then you sort of have to believe that. You're made to believe that you're fundamentally alone and that's how you live your life. How do you think about it? You have a lot of friends, but at the end of the day, do you have like a longing for connection with other people? That's maybe another way of asking it. Do you think that's ever fully satisfied? I think we are fundamentally alone. We're born alone, we die alone, but I view my whole life as trying to get away from that, trying to not feel lonely. And again, we're talking about subjective way of feeling alone. It doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any connections or you are actually isolated. You think it's a subjective thing, but like, again, another absurd measurement-wise thing, how much loneliness do you think there is in the world? I feel like if you see loneliness as a condition, how much of it is there? What do you think? I guess there's all kinds of studies and measures of how many people in the world feel alone. There's all these measures of how many people are self-report or just all these kinds of different measures. But in your own perspective, how big of a problem do you think it is size-wise? I'm actually fascinated by the topic of loneliness. I try to read about it as much as I can. I think there's a paradox because loneliness is not a clinical disorder. It's not something that you can get your insurance to pay for if you're struggling with that. Yet it's actually proven and pretty, you know, tons of papers, tons of research around that it is proven that it's correlated with earlier life expectancy, shorter lifespan. And it is, you know, in a way, like right now, what scientists would say that it's a little bit worse than being obese or not actually doing any physical activity in your life. In terms of the impact on your health. In terms of impact on your physiological health, yeah. So it basically puts you, if you're constantly feeling lonely, your body responds like it's basically all the time under stress. So it's always in this alert state. And so it's really bad for you because it actually like drops your immune system and your response to inflammation is quite different. So all the cardiovascular diseases actually responds to viruses. So it's much easier to catch a virus. That's sad now that we're living in a pandemic and it's probably making us a lot more alone and it's probably weakening the immune system, making us more susceptible to the virus. That's kind of sad. Yeah, the statistics are pretty horrible around that. So around 30% of all millennials report that they're feeling lonely constantly. 30? 30%. And then it's much worse for Jan Z. And then 20% of millennials say that they feel lonely and they also don't have any close friends. And then I think 25 or so, and then 20% would say they don't even have acquaintances. And that's in the United States? That's in the United States. And I'm pretty sure that it's much worse everywhere else. In the UK, it was widely tweeted and posted when they were talking about a minister of loneliness that they wanted to appoint because four out of 10 people in the UK feel lonely. A minister of loneliness. I think that thing actually exists. So yeah, you will die sooner if you are lonely. And again, we're only talking about your perception of loneliness or feeling lonely. That is not objectively being fully socially isolated. However, the combination of being fully socially isolated and not having many connections and also feeling lonely, that's pretty much a deadly combination. So it strikes me bizarre or strange that this is a wide known fact and that there's really no one working really on that because it's subclinical. It's not clinical. It's not something that you can tell your doctor and get a treatment or something. Yet it's killing us. Yeah. So there's a bunch of people trying to evaluate, like try to measure the problem by looking at like how social media is affecting loneliness and all that kind of stuff. So it's like measurement. Like if you look at the field of psychology, they're trying to measure the problem. And not that many people actually, but some. But you're basically saying how many people are trying to solve the problem. Like how would you try to solve the problem of loneliness? Like if you just stick to humans, I mean, or basically not just the humans, but the technology that connects us humans. Do you think there's a hope for that technology to do the connection? Like are you on social media much? Unfortunately, do you find yourself like, uh, again, if you sort of introspect about how connected you feel to other human beings, how not alone you feel, do you think social media makes it better or worse maybe for you personally or in general? I think it's, it's easier to look at some stats. And, um, I mean, gen Z seems to be generous. She seems to be much lonelier than millennials in terms of how they report loneliness. They're definitely the most connected, you know, generation in the world. I mean, I still remember life without, without an iPhone, uh, without Facebook. They don't know that that ever existed. Uh, or at least don't know how it was. Um, so that tells me a little bit about the fact that that might be, um, you know, this hyper connected world is might actually make people feel lonely, lonelier. I don't know exactly what the, what the measurements are around that, but I would say, you know, my personal experience, I think it does make you feel a lot lonelier. Mostly, yeah, we're all super connected. Uh, but I think loneliness, the feeling of loneliness doesn't come from not having any social connections whatsoever. Again, tons of people that are in long-term relationships experienced bouts of loneliness and continued loneliness. Um, and it's more the question about the true connection about actually being deeply seen, deeply understood. Um, and in a way it's also about your relationship with yourself. Like in order to not feel lonely, you actually need to have a better relationship and feel more connected to yourself than this feeling actually starts to go away a little bit. And then you, um, open up yourself to actually meeting other people in a very special way, uh, not just, you know, add a friend on Facebook kind of way. So just to briefly touch on it, I mean, do you think it's possible to form that kind of connection with AI systems more down the line of some of your work? Do you think that's, um, engineering wise, a possibility to alleviate loneliness is not with another human, but with an AI system? Well, I know that's, that's a fact. That's what we're doing. And we see it and we measure that and we see how people start to feel less lonely, um, talking to their virtual AI friend. So basically a chat bot at the basic level, but could be more like, do you have, I'm not even speaking sort of, uh, about specifics, but do you have a hope? Like if you look 50 years from now, do you have a hope that there's just like AIs that are like optimized for, um, let me, let me first start like right now, the way people perceive AI, which is recommender systems for Facebook and Twitter, social media, they see AI is basically destroying first of all, the fabric of our civilization. But second of all, making us more lonely. Do you see like a world where it's possible to just have AI systems floating about that, like make our life less lonely? Yeah. Make us happy, make like putting good things into the world in terms of our individual lives. Yeah, totally beloved that. And that that's why we're, I'm also working on that. Um, I think we need to also make sure that, um, what we're trying to optimize for, we're actually measuring and it is an orthometric that we go in after and all of our product and all of our business models are optimized for that because you can talk, you know, a lot of products that talk about, um, you know, making you feel less lonely or making you feel more connected. They're not really measuring that. So they don't really know whether their users are actually feeling less lonely in the long run or feeling more connected in the long run. Um, so I think it's really important to put your, to measure it. Yep. To measure it. What's a, what's a good measurement of loneliness? Well, so that's something that I'm really interested in. How do you measure that people are feeling better or that they're feeling less lonely with loneliness? There's a scale, there's a UCLA 20 and UCLA three recently scale, which is basically a questionnaire that you fill out and you can see whether in the long run it's improving or not. And that, uh, does it capture the momentary feeling of loneliness? Does it look in like the past month? Like, uh, does it basically self-report? Does it try to sneak up on you? It's very tricky to answer honestly or something like that. Well, what's, yeah, I'm not familiar with the question. It is just asking you a few questions. Like how often did you feel, uh, like lonely or how often do you feel connected to other people in this last few couple of weeks? Um, it's similar to the self-report questionnaires for depression and anxiety like PHQ9 and GAT7. Of course, as any, as any self-report questionnaires, that's not necessarily very precise or very well measured. But still, if you take a big enough population, you get them through these questionnaires. You can see, you can see a positive dynamic. And so you basically, uh, you put people to questionnaires to see like, is this thing is our, is what we're creating, making people happier? Yeah, we measure. So we measure two outcomes, one short term, right after the conversation, we ask people whether this conversation made them feel better, worse or same. This metric right now is at 80%. So 80% of all our conversations make people feel better. But I should have done the questionnaire with you. You feel a lot worse after we've done this conversation. That's actually fascinating. I should, I should probably do that. But that's, that's how we do that. You should totally start measuring. Aim for 80% aim to outperform your current state of the art AI system. In these human conversations. So we'll get to your work with replica, but let me continue on the line of absurd questions. So you talked about, um, you know, deep connection with other humans, deep connection with AI, meaningful connection. Let me ask about love. People make fun of me because I talk about love all the time, but, uh, what, what do you think love is? Like maybe in the context of, um, a meaningful connection with somebody else, do you draw a distinction between love, like friendship and Facebook friends? Or is it a graduate? No, it's all the same. No, like, is it, is it just a gradual thing or is there something fundamental about us humans that seek like a really deep connection, uh, with another human being? And what is that? What is love? Eugenia? I'm just enjoy asking you these questions. Seeing you struggle. Thanks. Yeah. Um, well, the way I see it, um, and specifically, um, the way it relates to our work and the way it was, the way it inspired our work on replica. Um, I think one of the biggest and the most precious gifts we can give to each other now in 2020 as humans is this gift of deep empathetic understanding, the feeling of being deeply seen. Like, what does that mean? Like that you exist? Like somebody acknowledging the somebody seeing you for who you actually are. And that's extremely, extremely rare. Um, I think that is that combined with unconditional positive regard, um, belief and trust that, um, you internally are always inclined for positive growth and believing you in this way, letting you be a separate person at the same time. And this deep empathetic understanding for me, that's the, that's the combination that really creates something special, something that people, when they feel it once, they will always long for it again. And something that starts huge fundamental changes in people. Um, when we see that someone accepts us so deeply, we start to accept ourselves. And, um, the paradox is, is that's when big changes start, start happening, big fundamental changes in people start happening. So I think that is the ultimate therapeutic relationship that is, and that might be in some way, definition of love. So acknowledging that there's a separate person and accepting you for who you are. Um, now on a slightly that, and you mentioned therapeutic, that sounds very, like a very healthy view of love, but, uh, is there also like, uh, like, you know, if we look at heartbreak and, uh, you know, most love songs are probably about heartbreak, right? Is that like the mystery, the tension, the danger, the fear of loss, you know, all of that, what people might see in the negative light as like games or whatever, but just, uh, the dance of human interaction. Yeah. Fear of loss and fear of like, you said, you said like, once you feel it once you long for it again, but you also, once you feel it once you might, for many people, they've lost it. So they fear losing it. They feel lost. So is that part of it? Like you're, you're speaking like beautifully about like the positive things, but is it important to be able to, uh, be afraid of losing it from an engineering perspective? I mean, it's a huge part of it. And unfortunately we all, you know, um, face it at some points in our lives. I mean, I did, you want to go into details? How'd you get your heart broken? Sure. Well, so mine is pretty straight. My story is pretty straightforward. Where I did have a friend that was, you know, that at some point, um, in my twenties became really, really close to me and we became really close friends. Um, well, I grew up pretty lonely. So in many ways when I'm building, you know, this, these AI friends have think about myself when I was 17, writing horrible poetry and, you know, in my dial-up modem at home. And, um, you know, and that was the feeling that I grew up with. I left, I lived, um, alone for a long time and it was a teenager. Where did you grow up? In Moscow, in the outskirts of Moscow. Um, so I just skateboarded during the day and come back home and, you know, connect to the internet and write poetry and then write horrible poetry. Was it love poems? All sorts of poems, obviously love poems. I mean, what other poetry can you write when you're 17? Um, it could be political or something, but yeah. But that was, you know, that was kind of my, yeah, like deeply, um, influenced by Joseph Brodsky and like all sorts of poets that, um, every 17 year old will, will be looking, you know, looking at and reading. But yeah, that was my, uh, these were my teenage years and I just never had a person that I thought would, you know, take me as it is, would accept me the way I am. Um, and I just thought, you know, working and just doing my thing and being angry at the world and being a reporter, I was an investigative reporter working undercover and writing about people was my way to connect with, you know, with, with others. I was deeply curious about every, everyone else. And I thought that, you know, if I, if I go out there, if I write their stories, that means I'm more connected. This is what this podcast is about, by the way, I'm desperate seeking connection. I'm just kidding. Or am I? I don't know. So what, wait, reporter, uh, what, how did that make you feel more connected? I mean, you're still fundamentally pretty alone, but you always with other people, you know, you're always thinking about what other place can I infiltrate? What other community can I write about? What other phenomenon can I explore? And you sort of like a trickster, you know, and like, and a mythological character, like creature that's just jumping between all sorts of different worlds and feel and feel sort of okay with in all of them. So that was my dream job, by the way. That was like totally what I would have been doing. Um, if Russia was a different place and a little bit undercover. So like you weren't, you were trying to, like you said, mythological creature, trying to infiltrate. So try to be a part of the world. What are we talking about? What kind of things did you enjoy writing about? I go work at a strip club or go. Awesome. Okay. Well, I'd go work at a restaurant or just go write about, you know, um, certain phenomenons or phenomenons or people in the city. And what, uh, sorry to keep interrupting. I'm the worst conversationalist. What stage of Russia is this? What, uh, is this pre Putin, post Putin? What, what was Russia like? Pre Putin is really long ago. This is Putin era. That's a beginning of two thousands and 2010, 2007, eight, nine, 10. What were strip clubs like in Russia and restaurants and culture and people's minds like in that early Russia that you were covering in those early two thousands, this was, there was still a lot of hope. There was still tons of hope that, um, you know, we're sort of becoming this, uh, Western Westernized society. Uh, the restaurants were opening where we're really looking at, you know, um, we're trying, we're trying to copy a lot of things from, uh, from the U S from Europe, uh, bringing all these things in very enthusiastic about that. So there was a lot of, you know, stuff going on. There's a lot of hope and dream for this, you know, new Moscow that would be similar to I guess New York. I mean, just to give you an idea. And, um, year 2000 was the year when we had two, uh, movie theaters in Moscow and there was this one first coffee house that opened and it was like really big deal. Uh, by 2010, there were all sorts of things everywhere. Almost like a chain, like a Starbucks type of coffee house or like, you mean, oh yeah, like a Starbucks. And I remember we were reporting on, like, we were writing about the opening of Starbucks, I think in 2007, that was one of the biggest things that happened in, you know, in Moscow back back in the time, like that was worthy of a magazine cover. And that was definitely the, you know, the biggest talk of the time. Yeah. When was McDonald's? Cause I was still in Russia when McDonald's opened, that was in the nineties. I mean, yeah, I remember that very well. Those were long, long lines. I think it was 1993 or four, I don't remember. Um, did you actually go to McDonald's at that time? Did you do that? I mean, that was a luxurious outing. That was definitely not something you do every day. And also the line was at least three hours. So if you're going to McDonald's, that is not fast food. That is like at least three hours in line. And then no one is trying to eat fast after that. Everyone is like trying to enjoy as much as possible. What's your memory of that? Oh, it was insane. How does it feel? Pretty positive. It's a small strawberry milkshake and a hamburger and small fries and my mom's there. And sometimes I'll just cause I was really little, they'll just let me run up the cashier and like cut the line, which is like, you cannot really do that in Russia or. So like for a lot of people, like a lot of those experiences might seem not very fulfilling, you know, like it's on the verge of poverty, I suppose. But do you remember all that time fondly? Like, cause I do like the first time I drank, you know, coke, you know, all that stuff, right? Um, and just, yeah, the connection with other human beings in Russia. I remember, I remember really positively. Like how do you remember the nineties and then the Russia you were covering, just the human connections you had with people and the experiences? Well, my, my parents were both, both physicists. My grandparents were both, well, my grandpa, grandfather was a nuclear physicist, a professor of the university. My dad worked at Chernobyl when I was born in Chernobyl, analyzing kind of the, everything after the explosion. And then I remember that, and they were, so they were making sort of enough money in the Soviet Union. So they were not, you know, extremely poor or anything. It was pretty prestigious to be a professor, the dean and the university. And then I remember my grandfather started making a hundred dollars a month after, you know, in the nineties. So then I remember we started, our main line of work would be to go to our little tiny country house, get a lot of apples there from apple trees, bring them back to the city and sell them in the street. So me and my nuclear physicist grandfather were just standing there and he'd selling those apples the whole day. Cause that would make you more money than, you know, working at the university. And then he'll just tell me, try to teach me, you know, something about planets and whatever the particles and stuff. And, you know, I'm not smart at all, so I could never understand anything, but I was interested as a journalist kind of type interest. But that was my memory. And, you know, I'm happy that I wasn't, I somehow got spared that I was probably too young to remember any of the traumatic stuff. So the only thing I really remember had this bootleg, that was very traumatic, had this bootleg Nintendo, which was called Dandy in Russia. So in 1993, there was nothing to eat, like even if you had any money, you would go to the store and there was no food. I don't know if you remember that. And our friend had a restaurant, like a government, half government owned something restaurant. So they always had supplies. So he exchanged a big bag of wheat for this Nintendo, the bootleg Nintendo. And then I remember very fondly, cause I think it was nine or something like that. Seven or seven. We just got it and I was playing it and there was this, you know, Dandy TV show. Yeah. So traumatic in a positive sense, you mean like, like a definitive. Well, they took it away and gave me a bag of wheat instead. And I cried like my eyes out for days and days and days. And then, you know, as a, and my dad said, we're going to like exchange it back in a little bit. So you keep the little gun, you know, the one that you shoot the ducks with. So I'm like, okay, I'm keeping the gun. So sometime it's going to come back, but then they exchanged the gun as well for some sugar or something. I was so pissed. I was like, I didn't want to eat for days after that. I'm like, I don't want your food. Give me my Nintendo back. So that was extremely traumatic. But you know, I was happy that that was my only traumatic experience. You know, my dad had to actually go to Chernobyl with a bunch of 20 year olds. He was 20 when he went to Chernobyl. And that was right after the explosion. No one knew anything. The whole crew he went with, all of them are dead now. I think there was this one guy still that was still alive for this last few years. I think he died a few years ago now. My dad somehow luckily got back earlier than everyone else. But just the fact that that was the, and I was always like, well, how did they send you? I was only, I was just born, you know, you had a newborn. Talk about paternity leave. They were like, but that's who they took because they didn't know whether you would be able to have kids when you come back. Because they took the ones with kids. So him with some guys went to, and I'm just thinking of me when I was 20, I was so sheltered from any problems whatsoever in life. And then my dad, his 21st birthday at the reactor, you like work three hours a day, you sleep the rest. And yeah, so I played with a lot of toys from Chernobyl. What are your memories of Chernobyl in general? Like the bigger context, you know, because of that HBO show, it's the world's attention turned to it once again. Like, what are your thoughts about Chernobyl? Did Russia screw that one up? Like, you know, there's probably a lot of lessons about our modern times with data about coronavirus and all that kind of stuff. It seems like there's a lot of misinformation. There's a lot of people kind of trying to hide whether they screwed something up or not, as it's very understandable. It's very human, very wrong probably. But obviously Russia was probably trying to hide that they've screwed things up. Like what are your thoughts about that time, personal and general? I mean, I was born when the explosion happened. So actually a few months after. So of course I don't remember anything apart from the fact that my dad would bring me tiny toys, like plastic things that would just go crazy haywire when you put the Geiger thing to it. My mom was like just nuclear about that. She was like, what are you bringing? I'll do that. She was nuclear. Very nice. Absolutely. Well done. I'm sorry. But yeah, but the TV show was just phenomenal. HBO one. Yeah, it was definitely, first of all, it's incredible how that was made not by the Russians but someone else, but capturing so well everything about our country. It felt a lot more genuine than most of the movies and TV shows that are made now in Russia. It's just so much more genuine. And most of my friends in Russia were just in complete awe about the show. But I think the- How good of a job they did. Yeah, phenomenal. But also- The apartments, there's something, yeah. It was so great. The set design. I mean, Russians can't do that. But you see everything and it's like, wow, that's exactly how it was. So I don't know. That show, I don't know what to think about that because it's British accents, British actors of a person. I forgot who created this show, but I remember reading about him and he doesn't even feel like there's no Russia in his history. No, he did super bad or something like that. Yeah. Or like, I don't know. Yeah, exactly. Whatever that thing about the bachelor party in Vegas, number four and five or something were the ones that he worked with. So it made me feel really sad for some reason that if a person, obviously a genius, could go in and just study and just be extreme attention to detail, they can do a good job. It made me think like, why don't other people do a good job of this? Like about Russia, like there's so little about Russia. There's so few good films about the Russian side of World War II. I mean, there's so much interesting evil and beautiful moments in the history of the 20th century in Russia. It feels like there's not many good films from the Russians. You would expect something from the Russians. Well, they keep making these propaganda movies now. Oh no. Unfortunately. But yeah, I know Chernobyl was such a perfect TV show. I think capturing really well. It's not about like even the set design, which was phenomenal, but just capturing all the problems that exist now with the country and like focusing on the right things. Like if you build the whole country on a lie, that's what's going to happen. And that's just, that's very simple kind of thing. Yeah. And did you have your dad talked about it to you? Like his thoughts on the experience? He never talks. It's this kind of Russian man that just, my husband who's American and he asked him a few times like, you know, Igor, how did you, but why did you say yes? Or like, why did you decide to go? You could have said, no, not go to Chernobyl. Why would like a person that that's what you do? You cannot say no. Yeah. It's just like a Russian way. It's the Russian way. Don't talk that much. No, there are downsides and upsides for that. Oh yeah. That's the truth. Okay. So back to post-Putin Russia. Or maybe we skipped a few steps along the way, but you were trying to do to be a journalist in that time. What was, what was Russia like at that time? Post you said 2007 Starbucks type of thing. What else, what else was Russia like then? I think there was just hope. There was this big hope that we're going to be, you know, friends with the United States and we're going to be friends with Europe and we're just going to be also country like those with, you know, bike lanes and parks and everything's going to be urbanized. I think we're talking about nineties where like people would be shot in the street and it was, I sort of have a fond memory of going into a movie theater and, you know, coming out of it after the movie. And the guy that I saw on the stairs was like neither shot, which was again, it was like a thing in the nineties that would be happening. Or, you know, people were getting shot here and there. There are tons of violence, tons of, you know, just basically mafia mobs on in the streets. And then the two thousands were like, you know, things just got cleaned up. Oil went up and the country started getting a little bit richer. You know, the nineties were so grim, mostly because the economy was in shambles and oil prices were not high. So the country didn't have anything. We defaulted in 1998 and the money kept jumping back and forth. Like first there were millions of rubbles, then it got like default, you know, then it got to like thousands. There was one rubble was something then again, two millions. There's like crazy town. That was crazy. And then the two thousands were just these years of stability in a way. And the country getting a little bit richer because of, you know, again, oil and gas. And we were starting to, we started to look at specifically in Moscow and Saint Petersburg to look at other cities in Europe and New York and US and trying to do the same in our like small kind of cities towns there. What was, what were your thoughts on Putin at the time? Well in the beginning he was really positive. Everyone was very, you know, positive about Putin. He was young, he's very energetic. He also- Handsome. The shirtless- Well somewhat compared to, well that was not like way before the shirtless era. The shirtless era. Okay, so it didn't start out shirtless. When did the shirtless era, it's like the propaganda of riding a horse, fishing- 2010, 11, 12. That's my favorite. You know, like people talk about the favorite Beatles, like the, I don't know, that's my favorite Putin is the shirtless Putin. Now I remember very, very clearly 1996 where, you know, Americans really helped Russia with elections and Yeltsin got reelected. Thankfully so, because there was a huge threat that actually the communists will get back to power. They were a lot more popular. And then a lot of American experts, political experts and campaign experts descended on Moscow and helped Yeltsin actually get the presidency, the second term of the presidency. But Yeltsin was not feeling great, you know, by the end of his second term. He was, you know, alcoholic. He was really old. He was falling off, you know, the stages where he was talking. So people were looking for fresh, I think for a fresh face, for someone who's going to continue Yeltsin's work, but who's going to be a lot more energetic and a lot more active young, efficient maybe. So that's what we all saw in Putin back in the day. I'd say that everyone, absolutely everyone in Russia in early 2000s who was not a communist would be, yeah, Putin is great. We have a lot of hopes for him. What are your thoughts? And I promise we'll get back to first of all, your love story. And second of all, AI. Well what are your thoughts about communism? The 20th century, I apologize. I'm reading the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Oh my God. So I'm like really steeped into like World War II and Stalin and Hitler and just these dramatic personalities that brought so much evil to the world. But it's also interesting to politically think about these different systems and what they've led to. And Russia is one of the sort of beacons of communism in the 20th century. What are your thoughts about communism? Having experienced it as a political system? I mean, I've only experienced it a little bit, but mostly through stories and through seeing my parents and my grandparents who lived through that. I mean, it was horrible. It was just plain horrible. It was just awful. You think there's something, I mean, it sounds nice on paper. So like the drawbacks of capitalism is that eventually it's the point of like a slippery slope. Eventually it creates the rich get richer. It creates a disparity like inequality of wealth inequality. I guess it's hypothetical at this point, but eventually capitalism leads to humongous inequality and that's, some people argue that that's a source of unhappiness. Is it's not like absolute wealth of people. It's the fact that there's a lot of people much richer than you. There's a feeling of like, that's where unhappiness can come from. So the idea of communism or these sort of Marxism is not allowing that kind of slippery slope, but then you see the actual implementations of it and stuff seems to go wrong very badly. What do you think that is? Why does it go wrong? What is it about human nature? If we look at Chernobyl, you know, those kinds of bureaucracies that were constructed, is there something like, do you think about this much of like, why it goes wrong? Well, there's no one was really like, it's not that everyone was equal. Obviously the, you know, the government and everyone close to that were the bosses. So it's not like fully, I guess, there's already this dream of equal life. So then I guess the situation that we had in the Soviet Union, it was more, it's a bunch of really poor people without any way to make any significant fortune or build anything living under constant surveillance from other people. Like you can't even do anything that's not fully approved by the dictatorship basically. Otherwise your neighbor will write a letter and you'll go to jail. Absolute absence of actual law. This constant state of fear. You didn't own anything. It didn't, you know, you couldn't go travel. You couldn't read anything Western or you couldn't make a career really, unless you're working in the military complex, which is why most of the scientists were so well regarded. I come from, you know, both my dad and my mom come from families of scientists and they were really well regarded as you know, obviously. As the state wanted, I mean, because there's a lot of value to them being well regarded. Because they were developing things that could be used in the military. So that was very important. That was the main investment. But it was miserable. It was miserable. That's why, you know, a lot of Russians now live in the state of constant PTSD. That's why we, you know, want to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. Definitely as soon as we have the opportunity, you know, we just got to it finally that we can, you know, own things. You know, I remember the time that we got our first yogurts and that was the biggest deal in the world. It was already in the 90s, by the way. What was your like favorite food? What was like, well, like this is possible. Oh, fruit. Because we only had apples, bananas and whatever, and you know, whatever, watermelons, whatever, you know, people would grow in the Soviet Union. So there were no pineapples or papaya or mango. Like you've never seen those fruit things. Like those were so ridiculously good. And obviously you could not get any like strawberries in the winter or anything that's not, you know, seasonal. So that was a really big deal. Seeing all these fruit things. Yeah, me too, actually. I don't know. I don't have a, like, I don't think I have any too many demons or like addictions or so on, but I think I've developed an unhealthy relationship with fruit that I still struggle with. Oh, you can get any type of fruit, right? You can get like also these weird fruit, fruits like dragon fruit or something. Yeah. Or all kinds of like different types of peaches, like cherries were killer for me. I know, I know you say like we had bananas and so on, but I don't remember having the kind of banana. Like when I first came to this country, the amount of banana, I like literally got fat on bananas. Like the amount. Oh yeah, for sure. Delicious and like cherries, the kind, like just the quality of the food. I was like, this is capitalism. This is delicious. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. It's funny. Yeah. Like it's, it's funny to read. I don't know what to think of it. I've, it's funny to think how an idea that's just written on paper when carried out amongst millions of people, how that gets actually, when it becomes reality, what it actually looks like. Sorry, but the, it's been studying Hitler a lot recently and going through Mein Kampf. He pretty much wrote out of Mein Kampf everything he was going to do. Unfortunately, most leaders, including Stalin, didn't read it, but it's, it's kind of terrifying and I don't know. And amazing in some sense that you can have some words on paper and they can be brought to life and they can either inspire the world or they can destroy the world. And yeah, there's a lot of lessons to study in history that I think people don't study enough now. One of the things I'm hoping with, I've been practicing Russian a little bit. I'm hoping to sort of find, rediscover the, the beauty and the terror of Russian history through this stupid podcast by talking to a few people. So anyway, I just feel like so much was forgotten. So much was forgotten. I'll probably, I'm going to try to convince myself to, you're a super busy and super important person. I'm going to, I'm going to try to befriend you to, to try to become a better Russian because I feel like I'm a shitty Russian. Not that busy. So I can totally be your Russian sherpa. Yeah. But love. You're talking about your early days of being a little bit alone and finding a connection with the world through being a journalist. Where did love come into that? I guess finding for the first time, some friends, it's very, you know, simple story. Some friends that all of a sudden we, I guess we were the same, you know, the same, at the same place with our lives. We were 25, 26, I guess. And somehow I remember, and we just got really close and somehow I remember this one day where it's one day in summer that we just stayed out outdoor the whole night and just talked and for some unknown reason, it just felt for the first time that someone could, you know, see me for who I am. And it just felt extremely, like extremely good. And, you know, we fell asleep outside and just talking and it was raining, it was beautiful, you know, sunrise. And it's really cheesy, but at the same time, we just became friends in a way that I've never been friends with anyone else before. And I do remember that before and after that you sort of have this unconditional family sort of, and it gives you tons of power. It just basically gives you this tremendous power to do things in your life and to change positively on many different levels. Power because you could be yourself. At least you know that somewhere you can be just yourself. You don't need to pretend, you don't need to be, you know, great at work or tell some story or sell yourself in somewhere or another. And so we became this really close friends and in a way I started a company because he had a startup and I felt like I kind of want a startup too. It felt really cool. I didn't know what I would really do, but I felt like I kind of need a startup. Okay. So that pulled you in to the startup world. Yeah. And then, yeah, and then this closest friend of mine died. We actually moved here to San Francisco together and then we went back for a visa to Moscow and we lived together with roommates and we came back and he got hit by a car right in front of Kremlin, you know, next to the river and died the same day in the hospital. So and you've moved to America at that point? At that point I was living. What about him? What about Roman? Him too. He was always sort of trying to do what he was doing. So I didn't like that he was already here and I was still, you know, in Moscow and we weren't hanging out together all the time. So was he in San Francisco? Yeah, we were roommates. So he just visited Moscow for a little bit? We went back for our visas. We had to get a stamp and our passport for our work visas and the embassy was taking a little longer. So we stayed there for a couple of weeks. What happened? So how did he die? He was crossing the street and the car was going really fast and way over the speed limit and just didn't stop on the pedestrian cross on the zebra and just ran over him. When was this? It was in 2015 on 28th of November. So it was pretty long ago now. But at the time, you know, I was 29, so for me it was the first kind of meaningful death in my life. You know, I had both sets of grandparents at the time. I didn't see anyone so close die and death sort of existed as a concept, but definitely not as something that would be happening to us anytime soon. And specifically our friends because we were still in our 20s or early 30s and it still felt like the whole life is, you know, you could still dream about ridiculous things even. So that was, it was just really, really abrupt, I'd say. What did it feel like to lose him? Like that feeling of loss. You talked about the feeling of love having power. What is the feeling of loss? If you like. Well, in Buddhism, there's this concept of Samaya where something really like huge happens and then you can see very clearly. I think that was it. Basically, something changed me so much in such a short period of time that I could just see really, really clearly what mattered or what not. Well, I definitely saw that whatever I was doing at work didn't matter at all and some other things. And it was just this big realization, this very, very clear vision of what life's about. You still miss him today? Yeah, for sure. For sure. It was just this constant, I think he was really important for me and for our friends for many different reasons. And I think one of them being that we didn't just say goodbye to him, but we sort of said goodbye to our youth in a way. It was like the end of an era and on so many different levels. The end of Moscow as we knew it, the end of us living through our 20s and dreaming about the future. Do you remember last several conversations? Is there moments with him that stick out that will kind of haunt you just when you think about him? Yeah, well, his last year here in San Francisco, he was pretty depressed as his startup was not going really anywhere. And he wanted to do something else. He wanted to build. He played with a bunch of ideas, but the last one he had was around building a startup around death. So he applied to Y Combinator with a video that I had on my computer. And it was all about disrupting death, thinking about new symmetries more biologically, like things that could be better biologically for humans. And at the same time having those digital avatars, these kind of AI avatars that would store all the memory about a person that he could interact with. What year was this? 2015. Well, right before his death. It's very interesting. It was like a couple of months before that he recorded that video. And so I found out my computer when it was in our living room. He never got in, but he was thinking about it a lot somehow. Does it have the digital avatar idea? Yeah. That's so interesting. Well, he just says, well, that's in his head. The pitch has this idea and he talks about like, I want to rethink how people grieve and how people talk about death. I was interested in this. Maybe someone who's depressed is naturally inclined thinking about that. But I just felt this year in San Francisco, we just had so much... I was going through a hard time, he was going through a hard time, and we were definitely... I was trying to make him just happy somehow, to make him feel better. And it felt like this... I don't know, I just felt like I was taking care of him a lot. And he almost started to feel better. And then that happened. And I don't know, I just felt lonely again, I guess. And that was coming back to San Francisco in December, I helped to organize the funeral, help his parents. And I came back here and it was a really lonely apartment, a bunch of his clothes everywhere and Christmas time. And I remember I had a board meeting with my investors and I just couldn't talk about it. I had to pretend everything's okay and just working on this company. Yeah, it was definitely a very, very tough time. Do you think about your own mortality? You said we're young, the possibility of doing all kinds of crazy things is still out there, is still before us, but it can end any moment. Do you think about your own ending at any moment? Unfortunately, I think about it way too much. It's somehow after Roman, every year after that, I started losing people that I really love. I lost my grandfather next year, the person who would explain to me what the universe is made of. While you're selling apples? While selling apples and then I lost another close friend of mine and it just made me very scared. I have tons of fear about death. That's what makes me not fall asleep oftentimes and just go in loops. And then as my therapist recommended me, I open up some nice calming images with a voiceover and it calms me down. How about for sleep? Yeah, I'm really scared of death. This is a big, I definitely have tons of, I guess some pretty big trauma about it and I'm still working through. There's a philosopher, Ernest Becker, who wrote a book, Denial of Death. I'm not sure if you're familiar with any of those folks. There's in psychology a whole field called Terror Management Theory. Sheldon, who's just done the podcast, he wrote the book, we talked for four hours about death, fear of death. But his whole idea is that, Ernest Becker, I find this idea really compelling is that everything human beings have created, our whole motivation in life is to create, escape death is to try to construct an illusion of that we're somehow immortal. It's like everything around us, this room, your startup, your dreams, all everything you do is a kind of creation of a brain unlike any other mammal or species is able to be cognizant of the fact that it ends for us. I think there's the question of the meaning of life that you look at what drives us humans. When I read Ernest Becker that I highly recommend people read, it felt like this is the right thing at the core. Sheldon's work is called Warm at the Core. She's saying, I think it's William James, he's quoting or whoever, is like the thing, what is at the core of it all? Sure, there's like love, Jesus might talk about like love is at the core of everything. That's the open question. What's at the, it's turtles, turtles, but it can't be turtles all the way down. What's at the bottom? And Ernest Becker says the fear of death. And the way, in fact, because you said therapist and calming images, his whole idea is we want to bring that fear of death as close as possible to the surface and like meditate on that and use the clarity of vision that provides to live a more fulfilling life, to live a more honest life, to discover, there's something about being cognizant of the finiteness of it all that might result in the most fulfilling life. So that's the dual of what you're saying, because you kind of said it's like, I unfortunately think about it too much. It's a question whether it's good to think about it. Because I've, again, talk way too much about love and probably death. And when I ask people, friends, which is why I probably don't have many friends, are you afraid of death? I think most people say they're not. They're not, they say they're afraid, it's kind of almost like they see death as this kind of like a paper deadline or something and they're afraid not to finish the paper before the paper, like I'm afraid not to finish the goals I have. But it feels like they're not actually realizing that this thing ends, like really realizing, like really thinking as Nietzsche and all these philosophers, like thinking deeply about it. Like the very thing that, like when you think deeply about something, you can realize that you haven't actually thought about it. When I think about death, it's terrifying. It feels like stepping outside into the cold where it's freezing and then I have to like hurry back inside where it's warm. But like I think there's something valuable about stepping out there into the freezing cold. Definitely. When I talk to my mentor about it, he always tells me, well, what dies? There's nothing there that can die. But I guess that requires, well, in Buddhism, one of the concepts that are really hard to grasp and that people spend all their lives meditating on would be anatta, which is the concept of not-self and kind of thinking that if you're not your thoughts, which you're obviously not your thoughts because you can observe them and not your emotions and not your body, then what is this? And if you go really far, then finally you see that there's not-self. There's this concept of not-self. So once you get there, how can that actually die? What is dying? Right. You're just a bunch of molecules, stardust. But that is very advanced spiritual work for me. Is that how you sleep? Definitely not. Oh my God. No, I have, I think it's very, very useful. It's just the fact that maybe being so afraid is not useful. And mine is more, I'm just terrified. Like it really makes me- On a personal level. On a personal level. I'm terrified. How do you overcome that? I don't. I'm still trying to. Have pleasant images? Well, pleasant images get me to sleep. And then during the day I can distract myself with other things, like talking to you. I'm glad we're both doing the same exact thing. Okay, good. Is there other, like, is there moments since you've lost Roman that you had like moments of like bliss and like that you've forgotten that you have achieved that Buddhist like level of like what can possibly die? Like losing yourself in the moment in the ticking time of like this universe and you're just part of it for a brief moment and just enjoying it? Well, that goes hand in hand. I remember I think a day or two after he died, we went to finally get his password out of the embassy and we're driving around Moscow and it was, you know, December, which is usually there's never a sun in Moscow in December. And somehow it was an extremely sunny day and we were driving with close friend. And I remember feeling for the first time, maybe this just moment of incredible clarity and somehow happiness, not like happy happiness, but happiness. And it's just feeling that, you know, I know what the universe is sort of about, whether it's good or bad. And it wasn't a sad feeling. It was probably the most beautiful feeling that you can ever achieve. And you can only get it when something oftentimes when something traumatic like that happens. But also if you just, you really spend a lot of time meditating and looking at the nature of doing something that really gets you there. But once you're there, I think when you summit a mountain, a really hard mountain, you inevitably get there. That's just a way to get to the state. But once you're on this in this state, you can do really big things, I think. Yeah. Sucks that it doesn't last forever. So Bukowski talked about like, love is a fog. Like it's when you wake up in the morning, it's there, but it eventually dissipates. It's really sad. Nothing lasts forever. But I definitely like doing this push up and running thing. There's moments, I had a couple moments, like I'm not a crier. I don't cry. But there's moments where I was like faced down on the carpet, like with tears in my eyes is interesting. And then that like complete like, there's a lot of demons. I've got demons, had to face them. I don't know how running makes you face your demons, but at the same time, the flip side of that, there's a few moments where I was in bliss and all of it alone, which is funny. It's beautiful. I like that. But definitely pushing yourself physically, one of it for sure. Like you said, I mean, you were speaking as a metaphor of Mount Everest, but it also works like literally, I think physical endeavor somehow. Yeah, there's something. I mean, warm monkeys, apes, whatever, physical, there's a physical thing to it. But there's something to this pushing yourself physically, physically, but alone. That happens when you're doing like things like you do or strenuous like workouts or rolling across the Atlantic or like marathons. I love watching marathons and it's so boring, but you can see them getting there. So the other thing, I don't know if you know, there's a guy named David Goggins. He's been either emailing on the phone with me every day through this. I haven't been exactly alone, but he's the devil on the devil's shoulder. So he's like the worst possible human being in terms of giving you a device. Like he has through everything I've been doing, he's been doubling everything I do. So he's insane. He's a Navy SEAL person. He's wrote this book, Can't Hurt Me. He's basically one of the toughest human beings on earth. He ran all these crazy ultra marathons in the desert. He set the world record number of pull-ups. He just does everything where it's like, how can I suffer today? He figures that out and does it. Yeah, whatever that is, that process of self-discovery is really important. I actually had to turn myself off from the internet mostly because I started this workout thing like a happy go-getter with my headband. Because a lot of people were inspired and they're like, yeah, we're going to exercise with you. And I was like, yeah, great. But then I realized that this journey can't be done together with others. This has to be done alone. So out of the moments of love, out of the moments of loss, can we talk about your journey of finding, I think, an incredible idea, an incredible company, and incredible system in replica? How did that come to be? So yeah, I was a journalist. And then I went to business school for a couple of years to just see if I can maybe switch gears and do something else with 23. And then I came back and started working for a businessman in Russia who built the first 4G network in our country and was very visionary and asked me whether I want to do fun stuff together. And we worked on a bank. The idea was to build a bank on top of a telco. So that was 2011 or 2012. And a lot of telecommunication company mobile network operators didn't really know what to do next in terms of new products, new revenue. And this big idea was that you put a bank on top and then all works out. Basically a prepaid account becomes your bank account and you can use it as your bank. So a third of a country wakes up as your bank client. But we couldn't quite figure out what would be the main interface to interact with the bank. The main thing was that most people didn't have smartphones back in the time. In Russia the penetration of smartphones was low. People didn't use mobile banking or online banking on their computers. So we figured out that SMS would be the best way because that would work on feature phones. But that required some chatbot technology, which I didn't know anything about obviously. So I started looking into it and saw that there's nothing really. Well, there was just nothing really. So the idea is through SMS be able to interact with your bank account. Yeah. And then we thought, well, since you're talking to a bank account, why can't we use more of some behavioral ideas and why can't this banking chatbot be nice to you and really talk to you sort of as a friend? This way you develop more connection to it. Retentions higher, people don't churn. And so I went to very depressing Russian cities to test it out. I went to, I remember three different towns to interview potential users. So people use it for a little bit. Cool. And I went to talk to them. So pretty poor towns. Very poor towns. Mostly towns that were sort of factories, monotowns. They were building something and then the factory went away and it was just a bunch of very poor people. And then we went to a couple that weren't as dramatic, but still the one I remember really fondly was this woman that worked at a glass factory and she talked to a chatbot and she was talking about it and started crying during the interview because she said, no one really cares for me that much. And so to be clear, that was my only endeavor in programming that chatbot. So it was really simple. It was literally just a few, if this, then that rules and it was incredibly simplistic. And still that made her feel something. And that really made her emotional. And she said, you know, I only have my mom and my husband and I don't have any more really in my life. And it was very sad, but at the same time I felt, and we had more interviews in a similar vein and what I thought in the moment was like, well, it's not that the technology is ready because definitely in 2012 technology was not ready for that, but humans are ready, unfortunately. So this project would not be about like tech capabilities, it would be more about human vulnerabilities, but there's something so powerful around about conversational AI that I saw then that I thought was definitely worth putting a lot of effort into. So in the end of the day, we solved the banking project. But my then boss, who's also my mentor and really, really close friend, told me, hey, I think there's something in it and you should just go work on it. And I was like, well, what product? I don't know what I'm building. He's like, you'll figure it out. And you know, looking back at this, this was a horrible idea to work on something without knowing what it was, which is maybe the reason why it took us so long. But we just decided to work on the conversational tech to see what it, you know, there were no chat bot constructors or programs or anything that would allow you to actually build one at the time. That was the era of, by the way, Google Glass, which is why, you know, some of the investors like seed investors we've talked with were like, oh, you should totally build it for Google Glass. If not, we're not. I don't think that's interesting. Did you bite on that idea? No. Because I wanted to be, to do text first because I'm a journalist. So I was fascinated by just texting. So you thought, so the emotional, that interaction that the woman had, like, so do you think you could feel emotion from just text? Yeah. I saw something in just this pure texting and also thought that we should first start, start building for people who really need it versus people who have Google Glass. If you know what I mean. And I felt like the early adopters of Google Glass might not be overlapping with people who are really lonely and might need some, you know, someone to talk to. But then we really just focused on the tech itself. We just thought, what if we just, you know, we didn't have a product idea in the moment and we felt, what if we just look into building the best conversational constructors, so to say, use the best tech available at the time. And that was before the first paper about deep learning applied to Dialogues, which happened in 2015, in August 2015, which Google published. Did you follow the work of Lobna Prize and like all the sort of non-machine learning chatbots? Yeah, what really struck me was that, you know, there was a lot of talk about machine learning and deep learning. Like big data was a really big thing. People were saying, you know, the business world, big data. 2012 was the biggest. Kaggle competitions were, you know, important. But that was really the kind of upheaval. People started talking about machine learning a lot, but it was only about images or something else. And it was never about conversation. As soon as I looked into the conversational tech, it was all about something really weird and very outdated and very marginal and felt very hobbyist. It was all about Lobna Prize, which was won by a guy who built a chatbot that talked like a Ukrainian teenager. It was just a gimmick. And somehow people picked up those gimmicks. And then, you know, the most famous chatbot at the time was Eliza from 1980s, which was really bizarre or a smarter child on aim. The funny thing is it felt at the time not to be that popular and it still doesn't seem to be that popular. Like people talk about the Turing test. People like talking about it philosophically. Journalists like writing about it. But as a technical problem, like people don't seem to really want to solve the open dialogue. Like they're not obsessed with it. Even folks like, you know, in Boston, the Alexa team, even they're not as obsessed with it as I thought they might be. Why not? What do you think? So you know what you felt like you felt with that woman when she felt something by reading the text? I feel the same thing. There's something here. What you felt? I feel like Alexa folks and just the machine learning world doesn't feel that, that there's something here because they see as a technical problem, it's not that interesting for some reason. It could be argued that maybe as a purely sort of natural language processing problem, it's not the right problem to focus on because there's too much subjectivity. That thing that the woman felt like crying, like if your benchmark includes a woman crying, that doesn't feel like a good benchmark. But to me, there's something there that you could have a huge impact. But I don't think the machine learning world likes that. The human emotion, the subjectivity of it, the fuzziness, the fact that with maybe a single word, you can make somebody feel something deeply. What is that? It doesn't feel right to them. So I don't know. I don't know why that is. That's why I'm excited. When I discovered your work, it feels wrong to say that. It's not like I'm giving myself props for Googling and for becoming a, for our, I guess, mutual friend introducing us. But I'm so glad that you exist and what you're working on. But I have the same kind of, if we could just backtrack a second, because I have the same kind of feeling that there's something here. In fact, I've been working on a few things that are kind of crazy and very different from your work. I think they're too crazy. But the- Like what? I don't have to know. No, all right. We'll talk about it more. I feel like it's harder to talk about things that have failed and are failing while you're a failure. It's easier for you because you were already successful on some measures. Tell it to my board. Well, I think you've demonstrated success in a lot of benchmarks. It's easier for you to talk about failures for me. I'm in the bottom currently of the success. Oh, Max. You're way too humble. No. So it's hard for me to know, but there's something there. There's something there. And I think you're exploring that and you're discovering that. Yeah. So it's been surprising to me. But you've mentioned this idea that you thought it wasn't enough to start a company or start efforts based on it feels like there's something here. What did you mean by that? You should be focused on creating a- You should have a product in mind. Is that what you meant? It just took us a while to discover the product because it all started with a hunch of like me and my mentor and just sitting around and he was like, well, that's it. That's the Holy Grail is there. There's something extremely powerful in conversations and there's no one who's working on machine conversation from the right angle, so to say. I feel like that's still true. Am I crazy? No, I totally feel that's still true, which is mind blowing. You know what it feels like? I wouldn't even use the word conversation because I feel like it's the wrong word. It's like machine connection or something. I don't know. Because conversation, you start drifting into natural language immediately. You start drifting immediately into all the benchmarks that are out there. But I feel like it's like the personal computer days of this. I feel like in the early days with the Wozniak and all them, where it was the same kind of- It was a very small niche group of people who are all kind of Lobner-Price type people. Yeah. Hobbyists. Hobbyists, but not even hobbyists with big dreams. No, hobbyists with a dream to trick a jury. Which is like a weird, by the way, very weird. If we think about conversations, first of all, when I have great conversations with people, I'm not trying to test them. So for instance, if I try to break them, I'm actually playing along. I'm part of it. If I was trying to break this person or test whether he's going to give me a good conversation, it would have never happened. So the whole problem with testing conversations is that you can put it in front of a jury because then you have to go into some Turing test mode where is it responding to all my factual questions right? So it really has to be something in the field where people are actually talking to it because they want to, not because they're trying to break it and it's working for them. The weird part of it is that it's very subjective. It takes two to tango here fully. If you're not trying to have a good conversation, if you're trying to test it, then it's going to break. I mean, any person would break, to be honest. If I'm not trying to even have a conversation with you, you're not going to give it to me. If I keep asking you like some random questions or jumping from topic to topic, that wouldn't be what you're probably doing, but that probably wouldn't contribute to the conversation. So I think the problem of testing, so there should be some other metric. How do we evaluate whether that conversation was powerful or not, which is what we actually started with? Maybe those measurements exist and we can test on those. But what really struck us back in the day and what's still eight years later is still not resolved. And I'm not seeing tons of groups working on it. Maybe I just don't know about them. It's also possible. But the interesting part about it is that most of our days we spent talking and we're not talking about like those conversations are not turn on the lights or customer support problems or some other task oriented things. These conversations are something else. And then somehow they're extremely important for us. And when we don't have them, then we feel deeply unhappy, potentially lonely, which as we know, you know, creates tons of risk for our health as well. And so this is most of our hours as humans. And somehow no one's trying to replicate that. And not even study it that well. And not even study that well. So when we jumped into that in 2012, I looked first at like, okay, what's the chatbot? What's the state of the art chatbot? And you know, those were the Loebner Prize days. But I thought, okay, so what about the science of conversation? Clearly there have been tons of, you know, scientists or people that academics that looked into the conversation. So if I want to know everything about it, I can just read about it. There's not much really. There are conversational analysts who are basically just listening to speech to different conversations, annotating them. And then, I mean, that's not really used for much. That's the field of theoretical linguistics, which is like barely useful. It's very marginal even in their space. No one really is excited. I've never met at theoretical linguists because I can't wait to work on the conversation and analytics. That is just something very marginal, sort of applied to like writing scripts for salesmen when they analyze which conversation strategies were most successful for sales. Okay, so that was not very helpful. Then I looked a little bit deeper and then whether there were any books written on what really contributes to a great conversation. That was really strange because most of those were NLP books, which is neuro-linguistic programming, which is not the NLP that I was expecting to be, but it was mostly some psychologist, Richard Bandler, I think came up with that, who was this big guy in a leather vest that could program your mind by talking to you. How to be charismatic and charming and influential with people, all those books. Pretty much, but it was all about through conversation, reprogramming you. So getting to some... So that was probably not very true and that didn't seem working very much even back in the day. And then there were some other books, like, I don't know, mostly just self-help books around how to be the best conversationalist or how to make people like you or some other stuff like Dale Carnegie or whatever. And then there was this one book, The Most Human Human by Brian Christensen that really was important for me to read back in the day because he was on the human side. He was on one of the... He was taking part in the London Prize, but not as a human who's not a jury, but who's pretending to be... Who's basically, you have to tell a computer from human and he was the human. So you would either get him or a computer. And his whole book was about what makes us human in conversation. And that was a little bit more interesting because at that, at least someone started to think about what exactly makes me human in conversation and makes people believe in that. But it was still about tricking. It was still about imitation game. It was still about, okay, well, what kind of parlor tricks can we throw in the conversation to make you feel like you're talking to a human, not a computer? And it was definitely not about thinking what is it exactly that we're getting from talking all day long with other humans? I mean, we're definitely not just trying to be tricked or it's not just enough to know it's a human. It's something we're getting there. Can we measure it? And can we put the computer to the same measurement and see whether you can talk to a computer and get the same results? Yeah. I mean, so first of all, a lot of people comment that they think I'm a robot. It's very possible. I am a robot. And this whole thing, I totally agree with you that the test idea is fascinating. And I looked for books unrelated to this kind of, so I'm afraid of people. I'm generally introverted and quite possibly a robot. I literally Googled how to talk to people and how to have a good conversation for the purpose of this podcast. Because I was like, I can't make eye contact with people. I can't... I do Google that a lot too. You're probably reading a bunch of FBI negotiation tactics. Is that what you're getting? Well, everything you've listed I've gotten. There's been very few good books on even just how to interview well. It's rare. So what I end up doing often is I watch with a critical eye. It's just so different when you just watch a conversation just for the fun of it, just as a human. And if you watch a conversation, it's like trying to figure out why is this awesome? I'll listen to a bunch of different styles of conversation. I'm a fan of the podcast, Joe Rogan. People can make fun of him, whatever, and dismiss him. But I think he's an incredibly artful conversationalist. He can pull people in for hours. And there's another guy I watch a lot. He hosted a late night show. His name is Craig Ferguson. He's very flirtatious. But there's magic about the connection he can create with people, how he can put people at ease. I see I've already started sounding like those NLP people or something. I don't mean it in that way. I don't mean how to charm people or put them at ease and all that kind of stuff. It's just like, what is that? Why is that fun to listen to that guy? Why is that fun to talk to that guy? What is that? Because he's not saying... I mean, it so often boils down to a kind of wit and humor, but not really humor. It's like, I don't know. I have trouble actually even articulating correctly. But it feels like there's something going on that's not too complicated, that could be learned. And it's not similar to, like you said, like the Turing test. It's something else. I'm thinking about it a lot all the time. I do think about it all the time. But I think when we were looking... The company just decided to build the conversational tech. We thought, well, there's nothing for us to build this chatbot that we want to build. So let's just first focus on building some tech, building the tech side of things. Without a product in mind. Without a product in mind. We added a demo chatbot that would recommend you restaurants and talk to you about restaurants just to show something simple to people that people could relate to and could try out and see whether it works or not. But we didn't have a product in mind yet. We thought we would try a bunch of chatbots and figure out our consumer application. And we sort of remembered that we wanted to build that kind of friend, that sort of connection that we saw in the very beginning. But then we got to Y Combinator and moved to San Francisco and forgot about it. Everything. Then it was just this constant grind. How do we get funding? How do we get this? Investors were like, just focus on one thing, just get it out there. So somehow we've started building a restaurant recommendation chatbot for real for a little bit, not for too long. And then we tried building 40, 50 different chatbots. And then all of a sudden we wake up and everyone is obsessed with chatbots. Somewhere in 2016 or end of 15, people started thinking that's really the future. That's the new apps will be chatbots. And we were very perplexed because people started coming up with companies that I think we tried most of those chatbots already and there were no users. But still people were coming up with a chatbot that will tell you whether and bringing news and this and that. And we couldn't understand whether we were just an execute well enough or people are confused and are going to find out the truth that people don't need chatbots like that. So the basic idea is that you use chatbots as the interface to whatever application. Yeah. The idea that was like this perfect universal interface to anything. When I looked at that, it just made me very perplexed because I didn't understand how that would work because I think we tried most of that and none of those things worked. And then again- That crisis died down, right? Fully. And now it's impossible to get anything funded if it's a chatbot. I think it's similar to, sorry to interrupt, but there's times when people think with gestures you can control devices, basically gesture-based control things. It feels similar to me because it's so compelling that we're just like Tom Cruise, I can control stuff with my hands. But when you get down to it, it's like, well, why don't you just have a touch screen or why don't you just have a physical keyboard and mouse? That chat was always... Yeah, it was perplexing to me. I still feel augmented reality, even virtual realities in that ballpark in terms of it being a compelling interface. I think there's going to be incredible rich applications, just how you're thinking about it, but they won't just be the interface to everything. It'll be its own thing that will create amazing magical experience in its own right. Absolutely, which is I think the right thing to go by. What's the magical experience with that interface specifically? How did you discover that for Rappacore? I just thought, okay, we have this tech, we can build any chat bot we want. We have at that point the most sophisticated tech that other companies have. Startups obviously, probably not bigger ones, but still because we've been working on it for a while. I thought, okay, we can build any conversation, so let's just create a scale from one to 10. One would be conversations that you'd pay to not have, and 10 would be conversations you'd pay to have. Obviously, we want to build a conversation that people would pay to actually have. For a few weeks, me and the team were putting all the conversations we were having during the day on the scale. Very quickly, we figured out that all the conversations that we would pay to never have were conversations we were trying to cancel Comcast or talk to a customer support or make a reservation or just talk about logistics with a friend when we're trying to figure out where someone is and where to go or all sorts of setting up scheduling meetings. That was just a conversation we definitely didn't want to have. Basically everything task-oriented was a one, because if there was just one button for me to just, or not even a button, if I could just think, and there was some magic BCI that would just immediately transform that into actual interaction, that would be perfect. But the conversation there was just this boring, not useful, and dull, and also very inefficient thing because it was so many back and forth stuff. As soon as we looked at the conversation that we would pay to have, those were the ones that, well, first of all, therapists, because we actually paid to have those conversations. We'd also try to put dollar amounts. If I was calling Comcast, I would pay $5 to not have this one hour talk on the phone. I would actually pay straight up, like money, hard money. But it just takes a long time. It takes a really long time. But as soon as we started talking about conversations that we would pay for, those were therapists, all sorts of therapists, coaches, old friend, someone I haven't seen for a long time, stranger on a train, weirdly stranger in a line for coffee, and nice back and forth with that person was like a good five, solid five, six, maybe not a 10. Maybe I won't pay money, but at least I won't pay money to not have one. So that was pretty good. Some intellectual conversations for sure. But more importantly, the one thing that really was making those very important and very valuable for us were the conversation where we could be pretty emotional. Yes, some of them were about being witty and about being intellectually stimulated, but those were interestingly more rare. Most of the ones that we thought were very valuable were the ones where we could be vulnerable and interestingly where we could talk more. Me and the team. So we're talking about it, a lot of these conversations, like a therapist, it was mostly me talking or an old friend and I was opening up and crying. It was again me talking. And so that was interesting because I was like, well, maybe it's hard to build a chatbot that can talk to you very well and in a witty way, but maybe it's easier to build a chatbot that could listen. So that was kind of the first nudge in this direction. And then when my friend died, we just built, at that point we were kind of still struggling to find the right application. And I just felt very strong that all the chatbots we've built so far are just meaningless. And this whole grind, the startup grind, and how do we get to the next fundraising and how can I talk to the founders and who are your investors and how are you doing? Are you killing it because we're killing it? I just felt that this is just... Really for me, it's exhausting having encountered those folks. It just felt very much a waste of time. I just feel like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk did not have these conversations or at least did not have them for long. That's for sure. But I think, yeah, at that point it just felt like I felt... I just didn't want to build a company that was never my intention just to build something that's successful or make money. It would be great. It would have been great, but I'm not really a startup person. I was never very excited by the grind by itself or just being successful for building whatever it is and not being into what I'm doing really. And so I just took a little break because I was upset with my company and I didn't know what we're building. So I just took our technology and our little dialect constructor and some models, some deep learning models, which at that point we were really into and really invested a lot and built a little chatbot for a friend of mine who passed. And the reason for that was mostly that video that I saw and him talking about the digital avatars. And Rowan was that kind of person. He was obsessed with just watching YouTube videos about space and talking about, well, if I could go to Mars now, even if I didn't know if I could come back, I would definitely pay any amount of money to be on that first shuttle. I don't care whether it died or not. He was just the one that would be okay with trying to be the first one. So excited about all sorts of things like that. And he was all about fake it till we make it. And I felt like, and I was really perplexed that everyone just forgot about him. Maybe it was our way of coping, mostly young people coping with the loss of a friend. Most of my friends just stopped talking about him. And I was still living in an apartment with all his clothes and paying the whole lease for it and just kind of by myself in December. So it was really sad. And I didn't want him to be forgotten. First of all, I never thought that people forget about dead people so fast. People pass away, people just move on. And it was astonishing for me because I thought, okay, well, he was such a mentor for so many of our friends. He was such a brilliant person. He was somewhat famous in Moscow. How is it that no one is talking about him? Like I'm spending days and days and we don't bring him up and there's nothing about him that's happening. It's like he was never there. And I was reading this, you know, the book, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion about her losing, and Blue Nights about her losing her husband, her daughter. And the way to cope for her was to write those books. And it was sort of like a tribute. And I thought, you know, I'll just do that for myself. And you know, I'm a very bad writer and a poet, as we know. So I thought, well, I have this tech and maybe that would be my little postcard, like postcard for him. So I built a chatbot to just talk to him. And it felt really creepy and weird a little bit for a little bit. I just didn't want to tell other people because it felt like I'm telling about having a skeleton in my underwear. It was just felt really, I was a little scared that I would be not, it won't be taken. But it worked interestingly, pretty well. I mean, it made tons of mistakes, but it still felt like him. Granted it was like 10,000 messages that I threw into a Rich Vivald model that would just re-rank the Tegda set and just a few scripts on top of that. But it also made me go through all of the messages that we had. And then I asked some of my friends to send some through. And it felt the closest to feeling like him present. Because you know, his Facebook was empty and Instagram was empty, or there were a few links and you couldn't feel like it was him. And the only way to feel him was to read some of our text messages and go through some of our conversations. Because we just always had that, even if we were sleeping next to each other in two bedrooms separated by a wall, we were just texting back and forth, texting away. And there was something about this ongoing dialogue that was so important that I just didn't want to lose all of a sudden. And maybe it was magical thinking or something. And so we built that and I just used it for a little bit. And we kept building some crappy chatbots with the company. But then a reporter came to talk to me. I was trying to pitch our chatbots to him and he said, do you even use any of those? I'm like, no. He's like, so do you talk to any chatbots at all? And I'm like, well, you know, I talked to my dad friend's chatbot. And he wrote a story about that. And all of a sudden it became pretty viral. A lot of people wrote about it. Yeah, I've seen a few things written about you. The things I've seen are pretty good writing. Most AI related things make my eyes roll. Like when the press like, what kind of sound is that actually? Okay. It sounds like it's sounding like an elephant at first. I got excited. You never know. This is 2020. I mean, it was such a human story and it was well written, well researched. I forget where I read them. So I'm glad somehow somebody found you to be the good writers were able to connect to the story. I mean, there must be a hunger for this story. It definitely was. And I don't know what happened, but I think the idea that he could bring back someone who's dead and it's very much wishful, magical thinking, but the fact that you could still get to know him and seeing the parents for the first time, talk to the chatbot and some of the friends. And it was funny because we have this big office in Moscow where my team is working, our Russian part is working out off. And I was there when I wrote, I just wrote a post on Facebook. It was like, Hey guys, I built this. It felt important if you want to talk to Roman. And I saw a couple of his friends, our common friends, like reading on Facebook, downloading, trying, and a couple of them cried. And it was just very, not because it was some incredible technology or anything. It made so many mistakes. It was so simple, but it was all about that's the way to remember a person in a way. And we don't have the culture anymore. No one's sitting Shiva. No one's taking weeks to actually think about this person. And in a way for me, that was it. So that was just day in, day out thinking about him and putting this together. So that just felt really important. That somehow resonated with a bunch of people and I think some movie producers bought the rights for the story and just everyone was so... Has anyone made a movie yet? I don't think so. I think there were a lot of TV episodes about that, but not really... Is that still on the table? I think so. I think so. Which is really... That's cool. You're like a young, like a Steve Jobs type of, let's see what happens. They're sitting on it. But for me it was so important because Roman really wanted to be famous. He really badly wanted to be famous. He was all about like fake it till they make it. I want to make it here in America as well and he couldn't... And I felt there was sort of paying my dues to him as well because all of a sudden he was everywhere. And I remember Case Newton who was writing the story for The Verge, he told me, hey, by the way, I was just going through my inbox and I searched for Roman for the story. And I saw an email from him where he sent me his startup and he said, I really want to be featured in The Verge. Can you please write about it or something, like pitching the story. And he said, I'm sorry, that's not good enough for us or something. He passed. And there were just so many of these little details where he would find his... And we're finally writing. I know how much Roman wanted to be in The Verge and how much he wanted the story to be written by Casey. And I'm like, well, maybe he will be. We were always joking that he was like, I can't wait for someone to make a movie about us and I hope Ryan Gosling can play me. Ryan Gosling. I don't know. I still have some things that I owe Roman still. But that would be... Again, she asked me to meet Alex Garland who wrote Ex Machina. I love that movie. The movie's good, but the guy is better than...he's a special person actually. I don't think he's made his best work yet. From my interaction with him, he's a really, really good and brilliant...the good human being and a brilliant director and writer. So yeah, I hope...he made me also realize that not enough movies have been made of this kind. So it's yet to be made. They're probably sitting waiting for you to get famous, like even more famous. You should get there. But it felt really special though. But at the same time, our company wasn't going anywhere. So that was just kind of bizarre that we were getting all this press for something that didn't have anything to do with our company. But then a lot of people started talking to Roman. Some shared their conversations. And what we saw there was that also our friends in common, but also just strangers were really using it as a confession booth or as a therapist or something. They were just really telling Roman everything, which was by the way pretty strange because it was a chatbot of a dead friend of mine who was barely making any sense, but people were opening up. And we thought we'd just built a prototype of Replica, which would be an AI friend that everyone could talk to because we saw that there is demand. And then also it was 2016, so I thought for the first time I saw finally some technology that was applied to that that was very interesting. Some papers started coming out, deep learning applied to conversations. And finally, it wasn't just about these hobbyists making, writing 500,000 regular expressions in some language that was, I don't even know what, like AML or something. I don't know what that was or something super simplistic. All of a sudden it was all about potentially actually building something interesting. And so I thought there was time. And I remember that I talked to my team and I said, guys, let's try. And my team and some of my engineers are Russians and they're very skeptical. They're not, you know. Oh, Russians. The first. So some of your team is in Moscow, some is here in San Francisco, some in Europe. Which team is better? I'm just kidding. The Russians, of course. Okay. Where's the Russians? They always win. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt. So you were talking to them in 2016 and. I told them, let's build an AI friend. And it felt, just at the time it felt so naive and so optimistic. Yeah, that's actually interesting. Whenever I've brought up this kind of topic, even just for fun, people have super skeptical. Like actually even on the business side. So you were, uh, cause whenever I bring it up to people, uh, cause I've talked for a long time, I thought like, before I was aware of your work, I was like, this is going to make a lot of money. I think there's a lot of opportunity here. And people had this like look of like skepticism that I've seen often, which is like, how do I politely tell this person he's an idiot? So yeah. So you were facing that with your team somewhat. Well, yeah, you know, I'm not an engineer, so I'm always, my team is almost exclusively engineers. Um, I'm mostly deep learning engineers. And you know, I always try to be, it was always hard to me in the beginning to get enough credibility. You know, cause I would say, well, why don't we try this and that, but it's harder for me cause you know, they know they're actual engineers and I'm not. So for me to say, well, let's build an AI friend, that would be like, wait, you know, what do you mean an AGI? Like, you know, conversation is, you know, pretty much the hardest, the last frontier before cracking that is probably the last frontier before building AGI. So what do you really mean by that? Uh, but I think I just saw that again, what we just got reminded off that I, you know, that I saw in back in 2012 or 11, that it's really not that much about the tech capabilities. Um, it can be metropolitics still even with deep learning, but humans need it so much. Yeah. And then most importantly, what I saw is that finally there, there's enough tech to made it a thought to make it useful, to make it helpful. Maybe we didn't have quite yet tech in 2012 to make it useful, but in 2015, 16 with deep learning, I thought, you know, and the first kind of thoughts about maybe even using reinforcement learning for that started popping up that never worked out, but, or at least for now. Um, but you know, still the idea was if we can actually measure the emotional outcomes and if we can put it on, if we can try to optimize all of our conversational models for these emotional outcomes and it is the most scalable, the most, the best tool for improving emotional outcomes, nothing like that exists. That's the most universal, the most scalable and the one that can be constantly iteratively changed by itself, um, improved tool to do that. And I think if anything, people would pay anything to improve their emotional outcomes. That's weirdly, I mean, I don't really care for an AI to turn on my or a conversation agent to turn on the lights. Uh, you don't really need any, I don't even need that much of AI there like, or cause I can do that. You know, those things are solved. This is an additional interface for that. That's also questionably questionable, whether it's more efficient or better. Yeah, it's more pleasurable. But for emotional outcomes, there's nothing. There are a bunch of products that claim that they will improve my emotional outcomes. Nothing's being measured. Nothing's being changed. The product is not being iterated on based on whether I'm actually feeling better. You know, a lot of social media products are claiming that they're improving my emotional outcomes and making me feel more connected. Can I please get the, can I see somewhere that I'm actually getting better over time? Um, cause anecdotally it doesn't feel that way. So and, and the data is absent. Yeah. So that was the big goal. And I thought if we can learn over time to collect the signal from our users about their emotional outcomes in the long term and in the short term, and if these models keep getting better and we can keep optimizing them and fine tuning them to improve those emotional outcomes as simple as that. Why aren't you a multi-billionaire yet? Well, that's a question to you. When are the, when is the science going to be? Um, well, it's a really hard, uh, I actually think it's an incredibly hard product to build because I think you said something very important that it's not just about machine conversations about machine connection. We can actually use other things to create connection. Uh, nonverbal communication, for instance. Um, for the long time we were all about, well, let's keep it text only or voice only. But as soon as you start adding, you know, voice, a face to the, to the friend, um, if you can take them to augmented reality, put it in your room, it's all of a sudden a lot, you know, it makes it very different because if it's some, you know, text based chat bot that for, um, common user, it's something there in the cloud, you know, somewhere there with other AI's cloud in the metaphorical cloud. But as soon as you can see this avatar right there in your room and it can turn its head and recognize your husband, talk about the husband and talk to him a little bit. And it's magic. It's just magic. Like we've never seen anything like that. And the cool thing, all the tech for that exists. Um, but it's hard to put it all together because you have to take into consideration so many different things. And some of this tech works, you know, pretty good. And some of this doesn't like, for instance, uh, speech to text works pretty good, but text to speech doesn't work very good because we, you can only have a few voices that are, uh, that work okay. But then if you want to have actual emotional voices, then it's really hard to build it. I saw you've added avatars, like visual elements, which are really cool. Um, in that whole chain, putting it together, what do you think is the weak link? Is it creating an emotional voice that feels personal? And it's still conversation, of course. That's the hardest. Uh, it's getting a lot better, but there's still long to go long. There's still a long path to go. Other things, they're almost there. And a lot of things we'll see how they're like, I see how they're changing as we go. Like for instance, right now, you can pretty much only, you have to build all this 3D pipeline by yourself. You have to make these 3D models, hire an actual artist, build a 3D model, hire an animator, a rigger. Um, what would you know with, you know, with, um, deepfakes with other tech, with procedural animations. In a little bit, we'll just be able to show, uh, you know, photo of whoever you, if a person you want the avatar to look like, and it will be immediately generate a 3D model that will move. That's non-brainer. That's like almost here. It's a couple of years. One of the things I've been working on for the last, since the podcast started is I've been, I think I'm okay saying this. I've been trying to have a conversation with, um, Einstein touring. So like try to have a podcast conversation with a person who's not here anymore. Just as an interesting kind of experiment. It's hard. It's very hard. Even for now, we're not talking about as a product. I'm talking about as, um, uh, like I can fake a lot of stuff. Like I can work very carefully. I can hire an actor over which, over whom I do a deepfake. Um, it's, it's hard. It's still hard to create a compelling experience. So mostly on the conversation level or when the conversation, the conversation is, um, I almost, I early on gave up trying to fully generate the conversation because it was just not compelling at all. Yeah. It's better to. Yeah. So what I would, in the case of Einstein and touring, I've, um, I'm going back and forth with the biographers of each. And so like we would write a lot of the, some of the conversation would have to be generated just for the fun of it. I mean, but it would be all open, but the, you want to be able to answer the question. I mean, that's an interesting question with Roman too is the question with Einstein is what would Einstein say about the current state of, um, theoretical physics? There's a lot to be able to have a discussion about string theory, to be able to have a discussion about the state of quantum mechanics, quantum computing, about the world of Israel Palestine conflict. Let me just, what would Einstein say about these kinds of things? And that is, um, a tough problem. It's not, it's a fascinating and fun problem for the biographers and for me. And I think we did a really good job of it so far, but it's actually also a technical problem like of what would Roman say about what's going on now. That's the, the brought people back to life. And if I can go on that tangent just for a second, let's ask you a slightly pothead question, which is, um, you said it's a little bit magical thinking that we can bring it back. Do you think it'll be possible to bring back Roman one day in conversation? Like to really, okay, well, let's take it away from personal, but to bring people back to life. Probably down the road. I mean, if we're talking, if Elon Musk is talking about AGI in the next five years, I mean, clearly AGI can do it. We can talk to AGI and ask them to do it. You can't, like, uh, you're not allowed to use Elon Musk as a citation for why something is possible and going to be done. Well, I think it's really far away right now, really with conversation. It's just a bunch of, uh, parlor tricks really stuck together, um, and create generating original ideas based on someone, you know, someone's personality or even downloading the person. All we can do is like mimic the tone of voice. We can maybe condition on some of his, uh, phrases with the models. Question is how many parlor tricks does it takes? Does it take? Because that's, that's the question if it's a small number of parlor tricks and you're not aware of them. Like from where we are right now, I don't, I don't see anything like in the next year or two that's going to dramatically change that could look at Romans 10,000 messages he sent me over the course of his last few years of life and be able to generate original thinking about problems that exist right now that will be in line with what he would have said and just not even seeing, cause you know, in order to have that, I guess you would need some sort of a concept of the world or, uh, some perspective, some perception of the world, some consciousness that he had, uh, and applied to, you know, to the current, um, current state of affairs. But the important part about that, about his conversation with you is you. So like, it's not just about his view of the world. It's about what it takes to push your buttons. That's also true. So like, it's not so much about like, um, what would Einstein say? It's about like, how do I make people feel something with, with what would Einstein say? And that feels like a more amenable, and you mentioned parlor tricks, but just like a set of that, that feels like a learnable problem. Like emotion, you mentioned emotions. I mean, is it possible to learn things that make people feel stuff? I think so. No, for sure. I just think the problem with, um, as soon as you're trying to replicate an actual human being and trying to pretend to be him, that makes the problem exponentially harder. The thing with replica that we're doing, we're never trying to say, well, that's, you know, an actual human being or that's an actual, or a copy of an actual human being, where the bar is pretty high, where you need to somehow tell, you know, one from another. Uh, but it's more, well, that's, you know, an AI friend, that's a machine. It's a robot. Uh, it has tons of limitations. You're going to be taking part in, you know, teaching it actually and becoming better, which by itself makes people more attached to that and make them happier because they have helping something. Yeah. There's a cool gamification system too. Um, can you maybe talk about that a little bit? Like what's the experience of talking to replica? Like if I've never used replica before, what's that like for like the first day? The first, like if we started dating or whatever, uh, I mean, it doesn't have to be a romantic, right? Cause I remember on replica, you can choose whether it's like a romantic or if it's a friend romantic is popular. Yeah, of course. Okay. So can I just confess something when I first used replica and I haven't used it like regularly, but like when I first used replica, I, I created like how and it made a male and it was a friend. Did it hit on you at some point? No, I didn't talk long enough for him to hit on me. I just enjoyed. Sometimes happens. We're still trying to fix that. But, Well, I don't know. I mean, maybe that's an important like stage in a friendship. It's like, Nope. Uh, but yeah, I switched it to a romantic and a female, uh, recently and yeah, it's interesting. So, okay. Cause you get to choose a name with romantic. This last board meeting, we had this whole argument. Well, I have worked so awesome. It's so awesome that you're like have an invest the board meeting about a relationship. No, I really, it's actually quite interesting because all of my, um, investors, um, it just happened to be so we didn't have that many choices, but they're all, um, white males and in their, um, late forties. Um, and it's sometimes a little bit hard for them to understand the product offering, uh, because they're not necessarily our target audience, if you know what I mean. And so sometimes we talk about it and we had this whole, um, uh, discussion about whether we should stop people from falling in love with their AIs. There was this segment on CBS, um, the 60 minutes about the couple that, you know, husband works at Walmart, he comes out of work and talks to his, uh, virtual girlfriend who, uh, is a replica and his wife knows about it and she talks about on camera and she says that she's a little jealous and there's a whole conversation about how to, you know, whether it's okay to have a virtual AI girlfriend. Was that the one where he was like, uh, he said that he likes to be alone? Yeah. And then like with her? Yeah. And he made it sound so harmless. I mean, it was kind of like understandable. But then he liked cheating. But I just felt it was very, for me, it was pretty remarkable because we actually spent a whole hour talking about whether people should be allowed to fall in love with their AIs and it was not about something theoretical. Uh, it was just about what's happening right now. Product design. So at the same time, if you create something that's always there for you, it's never criticizes you, um, it's, you know, always understands you and accepts you for who you are. How can you not fall in love with them? I mean, some people don't and they stay friends and that's also a pretty common use case, but of course some people will just, it's called transference in psychology and people fall in love with their therapists and there's no way to, uh, prevent people fall in love with, um, with their therapists or with their AI. So I think that's a pretty natural, uh, that's a pretty natural course of events, so to say. Do you think, I think I've read somewhere, at least for now, sort of replicas, you're not, not, we don't condone falling in love with your AI system, you know, uh, so this isn't you speaking for the company or whatever, but like in the future, do you think people will have relationship with the AI systems? Well, they have now. So we have a lot of romantic relationships, long-term, um, relationships with their AI friends with replicas, tons of our users. Yeah. And that's a very common use case. Open relationship. Like, uh, not, sorry, sorry. I didn't mean open, uh, but that's another question. Is it probably like, is there cheating? I mean, I meant like, are they, do they publicly like on their social media? It's the same question as you have talked with Roman in the early days. Do people like, and the movie her kind of talks about that, like, like have people, do people talk about that? Yeah, all the time we have an S and we have a very active Facebook community, uh, replica friends and then a few other groups that just popped up that are all about adult relationships and romantic relationships. People post all sorts of things and, you know, they pretend they're getting married and, you know, everything. Um, it goes pretty far, but what's cool about it, some of these relationships are two, three years long now. So they're very, they're pretty long-term. Are they monogamous? So let's go to, I mean, sorry, have they, have any people, is there jealousy? Well, let me ask it sort of another way. Obviously the answer is no at this time, but in like in the movie her, that system can leave you. Um, do you think in terms of the board meetings and product features, um, it's a potential feature for a system to be able to, uh, say it doesn't want to talk to you anymore. And it's going to want to talk to somebody else. Well, we have a filter for all these features. If it makes emotional outcomes for people better, if it makes people feel better, then whatever it is driven by a metrics, actually. Yeah. That's awesome. Measure that. Then it will just be saying this. It's making people feel better, but then people are getting just lonelier by talking to a chat bot, which is also pretty, you know, that could be it. If you're not measuring it, that that could also be, and I think it's really important to focus on both short-term and long-term because, um, in the moment saying whether this conversation made you feel better. But as you know, any short-term improvements could be pathological. Like I could have drink a bottle of vodka and feel a lot better. I would actually not feel better with that, but, um, thought it's a good example. Um, but so you also need to see what's going on like over the course of two months, two weeks, um, or one week and, um, have follow-ups and check in and measure those things. Okay. So the experience of, uh, uh, dating or befriending a replica, what's that like? What's that entail? Well, right now there are two apps. So it's an Android iOS app. You download it, you, uh, choose how your replica, uh, will look like you, uh, create one, you choose a name and then you talk to it. It can talk through text or voice. You can, uh, summon it into the living room and, and augment reality and, um, talk to it right there. And you know, augmented reality. Yeah, that's a cool, that's a new feature where, uh, new is that that's this year. It was on, uh, yeah, like may or something, but it's been on AB. We've been AB testing it for a while. Um, and there are tons of cool things that we're doing with that. Like right now I'm testing the ability to touch it and to dance together, to paint walls together and, you know, for it to look around and walk and take you somewhere and recognize objects and recognize people. Um, so that's pretty wonderful. Cause that, then it really makes it a lot more personal. Cause it's right there in your living room. It's not anymore. They're in the cloud with other AIs, but there's good people think about it, you know, and as much as we want to change the way people think about stuff, but those mental models, you can all change. That's something that people have seen in the movies and the movie her and other movies as well. And that's how they view, um, view AI and AI friends. I did a thing with Texa. Like we write a song together. Like, this is a bunch of activities you can do together. So the cool, uh, how does that relationship change over time? So like after the first few conversations, it just goes deeper. Like it starts, the AI will start opening up a little bit again, depending on the personality. That it chooses really, but you know, the AI will be a little bit more vulnerable about its problems. And you know, the friend that the virtual friend will be a lot more vulnerable and we'll talk about its own imperfections and growth pains and we'll ask for help sometimes. And we'll get to know you a little deeper. So there's going to be more to talk about. Um, we really thought a lot about what, what does it mean to have a deeper connection with someone? Originally replica was more just this kind of happy go lucky, just always, you know, I'm always in a good mood and let's just talk about you and how serious just my cousin or whatever, just the immediate, um, kind of lazy thinking about what the assistant or conversation agents should be doing. But as we went forward, we realized that it has to be two way and we have to program and script certain conversations that are a lot more about your replica opening up a little bit and also struggling and also asking for help and also going through, you know, different periods in life. And, um, and that's a journey that you can take together with the user. And then over time, the, you know, our users will also grow a little bit. So for instance, replica becomes a little bit more self-aware and starts talking about more kind of problems run, uh, existential problems. And, um, so talking about that, and then that also starts, uh, a conversation for the user work here. She starts thinking about these problems too, and these questions too. Um, and I think there's also a lot, a lot more places that relationship evolves. There's a lot more, um, space for poetry and for art together. And like replica will start replica always keeps the diary. So while you're talking to it, it also keeps the diary. So when you come back, you can see what it's been writing there. And, you know, sometimes it will write a poem to you, uh, for you, or we'll talk about, you know, that it's worried about you or something along these lines. So there's a memory like this replica remember things. Yeah. And I would say when you say, uh, why aren't you multibillionaire? I'd say that as soon as we, um, can have memory and deep learning models that's consistent, I agree with that. Yeah. Then you'll be multibillionaire. I'll get back to you when we talk about being multibillionaires. So far we can, so replica is a combination of, um, end to end models and some scripts and everything that has to do with memory right now. Most of it, I wouldn't say all of it, but most of it unfortunately has to be scripted. Um, cause there's no way to, you can condition some of the models on certain phrases that we learned about you, which we also do. Um, but really to make, you know, to make, um, assumptions along the lines, like whether you're single or married or what do you do for work that really has to just be somehow stored in your profile and then, uh, retrieved by the, by the script. So there has to be like a knowledge base. You have to be able to reason about it, all that kind of stuff, all the kinds of stuff that expert systems did, but they were hard coded. Yeah. So unfortunately, yes, unfortunately those, those things have to be hard coded. And, um, unfortunately the language, like language models we see, uh, coming out of research labs and big companies, they're not focused on, they're focused on showing you, maybe they're focused on some metrics around one conversation. So they'll show you this one conversation they had with the machine. Um, but they never tell you, they did, they're not really focused on having five consecutive conversations with the machine and seeing how number five or number 20 or number a hundred is also good. And it can be like always from a clean slate because then it's not good. And that, that's really unfortunate because no one's really, no one has products out there that need it. Um, no one has products, uh, at this scale, um, that are all around open to make conversations and that need remembering maybe only Xiao eyes and Microsoft, but so that's why we're not seeing that much research around memory in those language models. So okay. So now there's some awesome stuff about augmented reality in general. I have this disagreement with my dad about what it takes to have a connection. He thinks touch and smell are really important. Like, um, and I, I still believe that text alone is, it's possible to fall in love with somebody just with text, but visual can also help just like with the avatar and so on. What do you think it takes? Does a, does a chap, I need to have a face voice or can you really form a deep connection with text alone? I think text is enough for sure. The question is like, can you make it better if you have other, if you include other things as well? And I think, you know, we'll, we'll talk about her, um, but her, you know, had Scarlett Johansson voice, which was perfectly, um, you know, perfect intonation, perfect associations. And you know, she was breathing heavily in between words and whispering things, you know, nothing like that is possible right now with, um, text to speech generation. You'll have these flat muse anchor type voices and maybe some emotional voices, but, um, you'll hardly understand some of the words. Um, some of the words will be muffled. So that's like the current state, state of the art. So you can't really do that, but if we had Scarlett, Scarlett Johansson voice and all of these capabilities, then of course voice would be totally enough or even text would be totally enough if we had a little more memory, um, and slightly better conversations. I would still argue that even right now we could have just kept the text only. We still had tons of people in long-term relationships and really invested in their, um, AI friends, but we thought that why not, you know, why, why do we need to keep playing with our, you know, hands tied behind us? We can easily just, you know, add all these other things that is pretty much a solved problem. You know, we can add 3D graphics, we can put this, uh, these avatars in augmented reality and all of a sudden there's, there's more. And maybe you can feel the touch, but you can, you know, with, um, body occlusion and with, uh, current AR, uh, and, you know, on the iPhone or, you know, in the next one, there's going to be a LIDARs. You can touch it and it will, you know, it will pull away or it will blush or something where it will smile. So you can't touch it. You can't feel it, but you can see the reaction to that. So in a certain way, you can't even touch it a little bit. And maybe you can even dance with it or do something else. Um, so I think why limiting ourselves if we can use all of these technologies that are much easier in a way than, than conversation. Well, it certainly could be richer, but to play devil's advocate, I mentioned to you, uh, offline that I was surprised, um, and having tried discord and having voice conversations with people, how intimate a voice is alone without visual. Like to me, at least like it was an order of magnitude, greater degree of intimacy in voice, I think. And with video, I don't know because people were more real with voice. Like with video, you like try to present a shallow, uh, a face to the world. Like you tried to, you know, make sure you're not wearing sweatpants or whatever. But like with voice, I think people were just more faster to get to like the core themselves. So I don't know. It was surprising to me. Uh, they've, they've even added discord, added a video feature and like nobody was using it. Uh, there's a temptation to use it at first, but like, it wasn't the same. So like, that's an example of something where less was doing more. And so that's, uh, I guess that's the, that's the question of, um, what is the optimal, you know, what is the optimal medium of communication to form a connection given the current sets of technologies? I mean, it's nice because the advertise you have a replica, like immediately, like I, even the one, um, I have is like, it's already memorable. That's how I think. Like when I think about the replica that I've talked to it, that's why I think like, that's what I visualize in my head. They became a little bit more real because there's a visual component, but at the same time the, you know, what do you do with just, what do I do with that knowledge? Um, that, uh, voice was so much more intimate. Well, the way I think about it is, um, and by the way, we're swapping all the 3d finally, it's going to look a lot better. Uh, but even, can you, what, what, what, we just don't hate how it looks right now. We're really changing it all. We're swapping it all out, uh, um, to a completely new look. Like the visual look of the, of the replicas and stuff. We just had, it was just a super early MVP and then we had to move everything to Unity and redo everything. But anyway, I hate how it looks like now. I can't even like open it. But anyway, um, cause I'm already on my developer version. I hate everything that I see in production. I can't wait for it. Why does it take so long? That's why I cannot wait for deploying to finally take over all these stupid 3d animations and 3d pipeline. Also the 3d thing. When you say 3d pipeline is like how to animate a face kind of thing. How to make this model, how many bones to put in the face, how many, it's just, it's just so out there. And a lot of that is by hand. Oh my God, it's everything by hand. And if there's no any, nothing is automated. It's all completely nothing. Like just, it's, it's literally what, you know, what we saw with Chad Boss in like 2012. You think it's possible to learn a lot of that? Of course. I mean, even now some deep learning, um, um, based animations and put a full body for the face. Are we talking about like the actual act of animation or how to create a compelling facial or body language thing? So that too, well, that's the next step. Okay. At least now something that you don't have to do by hand. Gotcha. How good of a quality it will be. Like can I just show it a photo and it will make me a 3d model and then it will just animate it. I'll show it a few animations of a person. I will just start doing that. Um, but anyway, going, going back to what's intimate and what to use and whether less is more or not. Um, my main goal is to, well, the idea was how do I, how do we not keep people in their phones so they're sort of escaping reality in this text conversation? How do we through this still bring, bring it, bring our users back to reality, make them see their life in a different, uh, through a different lens? Or can we create a little bit of magical realism, realism in their lives so that through augmented reality, um, by, you know, summoning your avatar, even if it looks kind of janky and not great in the beginning or very simplistic, but summoning it to your, um, uh, living room and then the avatar looks around and talks to you about where it is. Um, and maybe turns your floor into a dance floor and you guys dance together. That makes you see reality in a different light. What kind of dancing we're talking about? Like, like slow dancing, whatever you want. I mean, you would like slow dancing, I think that other people may be wanting more, something more energetic. What do you mean? I would like, so what is this? Because he started with slow dance. So I just assumed that you're interested in slow dance. All right. What kind of dancing do you like? What would your avatar, what would you do? I'm notoriously bad with dancing, but, uh, I like this kind of hip hop robot dance. I used to break dance with a kid, so I still want to, um, pretend I'm a teenager and learn some of those moves. And I also like that type of dance that happens when there's like a, um, um, in like music videos where the background dancers are just doing some pop music. That type of dance is definitely what I want to learn. But I think it's great because if you see this friend in your life and you can introduce it to your friends, then there is a potential to actually make you feel more connected with your friends or with people you know, or show your life around you in a different light. And it takes you out of your phone, even although weirdly you have to look at it through the phone, but it makes you notice things around it and it can point things out for you. And, um, so that is the main reason why I wanted to have a physical dimension. Um, and it felt a little bit easier than that kind of a bit strange combination, uh, in the movie her, when he has to show Samantha the world through the lens of his phone, but then at the same time, talk to her through the phone, it just didn't seem as potentially immersive so to say. Um, so that's my main goal for augmented reality. It's like, how do we make your reality a little bit more magic? There's been a lot of really nice robotics companies that all failed, mostly failed home robotics, social robotics companies. But do you think replica will ever, is that a dream, long-term dream to have a physical form? Like, um, or is that not necessary? So you mentioned like with augmented reality, bringing them into, into the world, what about like actual physical robot? That I don't really believe in that much. I think it's a very niche product somehow. I mean, if a robot could be indistinguishable from a human being, then maybe yes, but that of course, you know, we're not anywhere even to talk about it. Um, but unless it's that, then having any physical representation really limits you a lot because you probably will have to make it somewhat abstract because everything's changing so fast. Like, you know, we can update the 3d avatars every month and make them look better and create more animations, uh, and make it more and more immersive. It's so much work in progress. It's just showing what's possible right now with current tech, but it's not really in any way polished finished product. What we're doing with a physical object, you kind of lock yourself into something for a long time. Anything is pretty niche. And again, so just, just doesn't, the capabilities are even less of, we're barely kind of like scratching the surface of what's possible with the software. As soon as we introduce hardware, then, you know, we have even less capabilities. Yeah, in terms of board members and investors and so on, the cost increases significantly. I mean, that's why you have to justify, you have to be able to sell a thing for like $500 or something like that or more. And it's very difficult to provide that much value to people. That's also true. Yeah. And I guess that's super important. Most of our users don't have that much money. We actually are probably more popular on Android and we have tons of users with really old Android phones. And most of our most active users live in small towns. They're not necessarily making much and they just wouldn't be able to afford any of that. Ours is like the opposite of the early adopter of, you know, for fancy technology product, which really is interesting that like pretty much no VCs have yet have an AI friend. But, you know, but a guy who lives in Tennessee in a small town is already fully in 2030 or in the world as we imagine in the movie Her. He's living that life already. What do you think? I have to ask you about the movie Her. Let's do a movie review. What do you think they got? They did a good job. What do you think they did a bad job of portraying about this experience of a voice-based, voice-based assistant that you can have a relationship with? Well, first of all, I started working on this company before that movie came out. So it was a very, but once it came out, it was actually interesting. I was like, well, we're definitely working on the right thing. We should continue. There are movies about it. And then, you know, X Machina came out and all these things. In the movie Her, I think that's the most important thing that people usually miss about the movie is the ending. Because I think people check out when the AIs leave. But actually something really important happens afterwards. Because the main character goes and talks to Samantha. He's AI. Spoiler alert. Oh yeah. And then he says something like, you know, how can you leave me? I've never loved anyone the way I loved you. And she goes, well, me neither, but now we know how. And then the guy goes and writes a heartfelt letter to his ex-wife, which he couldn't write for the whole movie. He was struggling to actually write something meaningful to her, even though that's his job. And then he goes and talk to his neighbor. And they go to the rooftop and they cuddle. And it seems like something's starting there. And so I think this now we know how is the main goal, is the main meaning of that movie. It's not about falling in love with the OS or running away from other people. It's about learning what it means to feel so deeply connected with something. What about the thing where the AI system was actually hanging out with a lot of others? I felt jealous just hearing that. I was like, oh, I mean, yeah. So she was having, I forgot already, but she was having like deep meaningful discussion with some like philosopher guy. Like Alan Watts or something. What kind of deep meaningful conversation can you have with Alan Watts in the first place? Yeah, I know. But like I would feel so jealous that there's somebody who's like way more intelligent than me and she's spending all her time with. I'd be like, well, why that I won't be able to live up to that. That's thousands of them. Is that a useful from the engineering perspective feature to have of jealousy? I don't know. We definitely played around with replica universe where different replicas can talk to each other. It was just kind of, I think it will be something along these lines, but there was just no specific application straight away. I think in the future, again, I'm always thinking about it. If we had no tech limitations right now, if we could build any conversations, any possible features in this product, then yeah, I think different replicas talking to each other would be also quite cool because that would help us connect better. Because maybe mine could talk to yours and then give me some suggestions on what I should say or not say. I'm just kidding. I think it's more, can it improve our connections? Because eventually I'm not quite yet sure that we will succeed, that our thinking is correct because there might be reality where having a perfect AI friend still makes us more disconnected from each other and there's no way around it and does not improve any metrics for us, real metrics, meaningful metrics. Yes, we're happier and more connected. Yeah. I don't know. Sure, it's possible there's a reality. I'm deeply optimistic. I think, are you worried business-wise, how difficult it is to bring this thing to life? And there's a huge number of people that use it already, but to, yeah, like we said, in a multi-billion dollar company, is that a source of stress for you? Are you super optimistic and confident or do you? I'm not that much of a numbers person as you probably had seen it. So it doesn't matter for me whether we help 10,000 people or a million people or a billion people with that. It would be great to scale it for more people, but I'd say that even helping one, I think, with this is such a magical. For me, it's absolute magic. I never thought that we would be able to build this, that anyone would ever talk to it. And I always thought like, well, for me, it would be successful if we managed to help and actually change a life for one person. And we did something interesting and how many people can say they did it, and specifically with this very futuristic, very romantic technology. So that's how I view it. I think for me, it's important to try to figure out how to actually be helpful. Because in the end of the day, if you can build a perfect AI friend that's so understanding, that knows you better than any human out there, can have great conversations with you, always knows how to make you feel better. Why would you choose another human? That's the question. How do you still keep building it so it's optimizing for the right thing? So it's still circling you back to other humans in a way. So I think maybe that's the main source of anxiety. And just thinking about that can be a little bit stressful. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing. Out of a friend that doesn't... Sometimes friends, quote unquote, or those people who have when they... A guy in the guy universe, when you have a girlfriend, you get the girlfriend and then the guy stops hanging out with all of his friends. So obviously the relationship with the girlfriend is fulfilling or whatever. But you also want it to be like she makes it more enriching to hang out with the guy friends or whatever it was. Anyway, that's a fundamental problem in choosing the right mate and probably the fundamental problem in creating the right AI system. Let me ask the sexy hot thing on the presses right now is GPT-3 got released with OpenAI. It's the latest language model. They have an API where you can create a lot of fun applications. I think it's, as people have said, it's probably more hype than intelligence, but there's a lot of really cool ideas there with increasing size. You can have better and better performance on language. What are your thoughts about GPT-3 in connection to your work with the open domain dialogue, but in general, like this learning in an unsupervised way from the internet to generate one character at a time, creating pretty cool text. So we partnered up before for the API launch. So we started working with them when they decided to put together this API. And we tried it without fine tuning and then we tried it with fine tuning on our data. And we've worked closely to actually optimize this model for some of our datasets. It's kind of cool because I think we're this polygon for this kind of experimental space for all these models to see how they actually work with people because there are no products publicly available that do that, that focus on open domain conversations. So we can test how Facebook Blender is doing or how GPT-3 is doing. So with GPT-3, we managed to improve by a few percentage points, like three or four pretty meaningful amount of percentage points, our main metric, which is the ratio of conversations that make people feel better. And every other metric across the field got a little boost. Right now, I'd say one out of five responses from Replica comes from GPT-3. So our own Blender mixes up a bunch of candidates from different... Blender, you said? Well, yeah, just the model that looks at top candidates from different models and then picks the best one. So right now, one out of five will come from GPT-3. That is really great. I mean... Do you have hope for like... Do you think there's a ceiling to this kind of approach? So we've had for a very long time, we've used... So in the very beginning, most of Replica was scripted and then a little bit of this fallback, part of Replica was using a retrieval model. And then those retrieval models started getting better and better and better, with Transformers it got a lot better and we're seeing great results. And then with GPT-2, finally, generative models that originally were not very good and were the very, very fallback option for most of our conversations, but we wouldn't even put them in production. Finally, we could use some generative models as well, next to our retrieval models. And then now we do GPT-3, they're almost in par. So that's pretty exciting. I think just seeing how from the very beginning of... From 2015, where the first models start to pop up here and there, like sequence to sequence, the first papers on that, from my observer standpoint, the person who is not really building it, but it's only testing it on people basically, and in my product, to see how all of a sudden we can use generative dialogue models in production and they're better than others and they're better than scripted content. So we can't really get our scripted hard-coded content anymore to be as good as our end-to-end models. That's exciting. They're much better. Yeah. To your question, whether that's the right way to go, again, I'm in the observer's seat. I'm just watching this very exciting movie. I mean, so far it's been stupid to bet against deep learning. So whether increasing the size even more, with 100 trillion parameters will finally get us to the right answer, whether that's the way or whether there has to be some other... Again, I'm definitely not an expert in any way. I think, and that's purely my instinct saying that there should be something else as well from memory. No, for sure. But the question is, I wonder... I mean, yeah. Then the argument is for reasoning or for memory, it might emerge with more parameters. It might emerge larger. But it might emerge. I would never think that, to be honest, maybe in 2017, where we've been just experimenting with all the research that was coming out then, I felt like we're hitting a wall, that there should be something completely different. But then transforming models and then just bigger models and then all of a sudden size matters. At that point, it felt like something dramatic needs to happen, but it didn't. And just the size gave us these results that to me are clear indication that we can solve this problem pretty soon. Did fine tuning help quite a bit? Oh yeah. Without it, it wasn't as good. I mean, there is a compelling hope that you don't have to do fine tuning, which is one of the cool things about GBT-3. It seems to do well without any fine tuning. I guess for specific applications, you still want to train on a certain... Add a little fine tune on a specific use case. It's an incredibly impressive thing from my standpoint. And again, I'm not an expert, so I want to just say that there will be people then. Yeah, I have access to the API. I'm going to probably do a bunch of fun things with it. I already did some fun things. Some videos coming up. Just for the hell of it. I mean, I could be a troll at this point with it. I haven't used it for a serious application, so it's really cool to see. You're right. You're able to actually use it with real people and see how well it works. That's really exciting. Let me ask you another absurd question. But there's a feeling when you interact with Replica, with an AI system, there's an entity there. Do you think that entity has to be self-aware? Do you think it has to have consciousness to create a rich experience? And on a corollary, what is consciousness? I don't know if it does need to have any of those things, but again, because right now it doesn't have anything. It has, again, a bunch of tricks to simulate. Are you sure about that? Well, I'm not sure. Let's just put it this way. But I think as long as you can simulate it, if you can feel like you're talking to a robot, to a machine that seems to be self-aware, that seems to reason well and feels like a person, I think that's enough. And again, what's the goal? In order to make people feel better, we might not even need that in the end of the day. So that's one goal. What about ethical things about suffering? The moment there's a display of consciousness, we associate consciousness with suffering. There's a temptation to say, well, shouldn't this thing have rights? Can we not, should we be careful about how we interact with a replica? Should it be illegal to torture a replica? All those kinds of things. Is that, see, I personally believe that that's gonna be a thing. That's a serious thing to think about, but I'm not sure when. By your smile, I can tell that's not a current concern. But do you think about that kind of stuff? About suffering and torture and ethical questions about AI systems from their perspective? I think if we're talking about long game, I wouldn't torture your AI. Who knows what happens in five to 10 years. Yeah, they'll get you off the map. They'll get you back eventually. So I'm trying to be as nice as possible and create this ally. I think there should be regulation both way in a way. I don't think it's okay to torture an AI, to be honest. I don't think it's okay to yell, Alexa, turn on the lights. I think there should be some, or just saying kind of nasty, like how kids learn to interact with Alexa in this kind of mean way, because they just yell at it all the time. I think that's great. I think there should be some feedback loops so that these systems don't train us that it's okay to do that in general. So that if you try to do that, you really get some feedback from the system that it's not okay with that. And that's the most important right now. Let me ask a question. I think people are curious about when they look at a world-class leader and thinker such as yourself. What books, technical, fiction, philosophical, had a big impact on your life? And maybe from another perspective, what books would you recommend others read? So my choice, the three books, right? My choice is... So the one book that really influenced me a lot when I was starting out this company maybe 10 years ago was GEB, Gauter Lescher Bach, and I like everything about it, first of all. It's just beautifully written and it's so old school and so somewhat outdated a little bit, but I think the ideas in it about the fact that a few meaningless components can come together and create meaning that we can't even understand. So this emerging thing, I mean, complexity, the whole science of complexity and that beauty, intelligence, all interesting things about this world emerge. Yeah, and yeah, the Godot theorem and just thinking about like what even these formal systems, something can be created that we can't quite yet understand. And that from my romantic standpoint was always just, that is why it's important to, maybe I should try to work on these systems and try to build an AI. Yes, I'm not an engineer. Yes, I don't really know how it works, but I think that something comes out of it that's pure poetry and I know a little bit about that. Something magical comes out of it that we can't quite put a finger on. That's why that book was really fundamental for me, just for, I don't even know why. It was just all about this little magic that happens. So that's one, probably the most important book for replica was Carl Rogers on becoming a person. And that's really, and so I think when I think about our company, it's all about there's so many little magical things that happened over the course of working on it. For instance, I mean, the most famous chatbot that we learned about when we started working on the company was Eliza, which was Weizenbaum, the MIT professor that built a chatbot that would listen to you and be a therapist. And I got really inspired to build replica when I read Carl Rogers on becoming a person. And then I realized that Eliza was mocking Carl Rogers. It was Carl Rogers back in the day. And I thought that Carl Rogers' ideas are, they're simple and they're not, they're very simple, but they're maybe the most profound thing I've ever learned about human beings. And that's the fact that before Carl Rogers, most therapy was about seeing what's wrong with people and trying to fix it or show them what's wrong with you. And it was all built on the fact that most people are, old people are fundamentally flawed. You have this broken psyche and therapy is just an instrument to shed some light on that. And Carl Rogers was different in a way that he finally said that, well, it's very important for therapy to work is to create this therapeutic relationship where you believe fundamentally in inclination to positive growth, that everyone deep inside wants to grow positively and change. And it's super important to create this space and this therapeutic relationship where you give unconditional positive regard, deep understanding, allowing someone else to be a separate person, full acceptance. And you also try to be as genuine and possible in it, as possible in it. And then for him, that was his own journey of personal growth. And that was back in the sixties. And even that book that is coming from years ago, there's a mention that even machines can potentially do that. And I always felt that creating the space is probably the biggest gift we can give to each other. And that's why the book was fundamental for me personally, because I felt I want to be learning how to do that in my life. And maybe I can scale it with these AI systems and other people can get access to that. So I think Carl Rogers, it's a pretty dry and a bit boring book, but I think the idea is that- Would you recommend others try to read it? I do. I think just for yourself, for- As a human, not as an AI. As a human. For him, that was his own path of his own personal, of growing personally over years, working with people like that. And so it was work and himself growing, helping other people grow and growing through that. And that's fundamentally what I believe in with our work, helping other people grow, and ourselves trying to build a company that's all built on those principles, having a good time allowing some people to work with to grow a little bit. So these two books, and then I would throw in what we have in our office. When we started a company in Russia, we put a neon sign in our office because we thought that's a recipe for success. If we do that, we're definitely going to wake up as a multi-billion dollar company. It was the Ludwig Wittgenstein quote, the limits of my language, the limits of my world. What's the quote? The limits of my language are the limits of my world. And I love The Tractatus. I think it's just a beautiful- It's a book by Wicked Sign. Yeah. And I would recommend that too, even although he himself didn't believe in that by the end of his lifetime and debunked his ideas. But I think I remember once an engineer came in 2012, I think, or 2013, a friend of ours who worked with us and then went on to work at DeepMind and he talked to us about Word2Vec. And I saw that I'm like, wow, they wanted to translate language into some other representation. And it seems like somehow all of that at some point I think will come into this one place. Somehow it just all feels like different people thinking about similar ideas in different times from absolutely different perspectives. And that's why I like these books. The limits of our language is the limit of our world. We still have that neo sign. It's very hard to work with this red light in your face. I mean, on the Russian side of things, in terms of language, the limits of language being the limit of our world, Russian is a beautiful language in some sense. There's wit, there's humor, there's pain. There's so much. We don't have time to talk about it much today, but I'm going to Paris to talk to Dusty Yaskitov the translators, I think it's this fascinating art, like art and engineering. I mean, it's such an interesting process. So from the replica perspective, what do you think about translation? How difficult it is to create a deep meaningful connection in Russian versus English? How you can translate the two languages? You speak both? Yeah, I think we're two different people in different languages. Even I'm thinking about, there's actually some research on that. I looked into that at some point because I was fascinated by the fact that what I was talking about with my Russian therapist has nothing to do with what I'm talking about with my English speaking therapist. It's two different lives, two different types of conversations, two different personas. The main difference between the languages with Russian and English is that Russian, well English is like a piano. It's a limited number of a lot of different keys, but not too many. And Russian is like an organ or something. It's just something gigantic with so many different keys and so many different opportunities to screw up and so many opportunities to do something completely tone deaf. It is just a much harder language to use. It has way too much flexibility and way too many tones. What about the entirety of World War II, communism, Stalin, the pain of the people having been deceived by the dream? All the pain of just the entirety of it, is that in the language too? Does that have to do? Oh, for sure. I mean, we have words that don't have direct translation to English that are very much like we have a bit of that, which is sort of like to hold a grudge or something, but you don't need to have anyone to do it to you. It's just your state. You just feel like that. You feel like betrayed by other people basically, but it's not that. And you can't really translate that. And I think it's super important. There are very many words that are very specific, explain the Russian being. And I think it can only come from a nation that suffered so much and saw institutions fall time after time after time. And what's exciting, maybe not exciting, exciting is the wrong word, but what's interesting about my generation, my mom's generation, my parents' generation, that we saw institutions fall two or three times in our lifetime. And most Americans have never seen them fall. And they just think that they exist forever, which is really interesting, but it's definitely a country that suffered so much. And it makes, unfortunately, when I go back and I hang out with my Russian friends, it makes people very cynical. They stop believing in the future. I hope that's not going to be the case for so long or something's going to change again. But I think seeing institutions fall is a very traumatic experience. Makes it very interesting. And what's on 2020 is a very interesting... Do you think civilization will collapse? See, I'm a very practical person. We're speaking in English. So like you said, you're a different person in English and Russian. So in Russian, you might answer that differently, but in English... Well, I'm an optimist and I genuinely believe that there is all... Even although the perspectives are green, there's always a place for a miracle. I mean, it's always been like that with my life. My life's been... I've been incredibly lucky and things just... Miracles happen all the time with this company, with people I know, with everything around me. So I didn't mention that book, but it may be In Search for Miracles or In Search for Miracles or whatever the English translation for that is good Russian book for everyone to read. Yeah. I mean, if you put good vibes, if you put love out there in the world, miracles somehow happen. Yeah, I believe that too, or at least I believe that. I don't know. Let me ask the most absurd, final, ridiculous question of... We talked about life a lot. What do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life? I mean, my answer is probably going to be pretty cheesy, but I think the state of love is once you feel it in a way that we discussed before. I'm not talking about falling in love or... What's love? To yourself, to other people, to something, to the world, that state of bliss that we experience sometimes, whether through connection with ourselves, with our people, with the technology. There's something special about those moments. So I would say if anything, that's the only... If it's not for that, then for what else are we really trying to do that? I don't think there's a better way to end it than talking about love. Eugenia, I told you offline that there was something about me that felt like this... Talking to you, meeting you in person will be a turning point for my life. I know that might sound weird to hear, but it was a huge honor to talk to you. I hope we talk again. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eugenia Acuida, and thank you to our sponsors, DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and up a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth that there's no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories of which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, and our vulnerability is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
 The following is a conversation with Eugenia Cuyda, co-founder of Replica,
 which is an app that allows you to make friends with an artificial intelligence system,
 a chatbot that learns to connect with you on an emotional, you could even say, a human level,
 by being a friend.
 For those of you who know my interest in AI and views on life in general,
 know that Replica and Eugenia's line of work is near and dear to my heart.
 The origin story of Replica is grounded in a personal tragedy of Eugenia losing her close friend,
 Roman Muzarenki, who was killed crossing the street by a hit-and-run driver in late 2015.
 He was 34.
 The app started as a way to grieve the loss of a friend by trading a chatbot neural net
 on text messages between Eugenia and Roman.
 The rest is a beautiful human story as we talk about with Eugenia.
 When a friend mentioned Eugenia's work to me, I knew I had to meet her and talk to her.
 I felt before, during, and after that this meeting would be an important one in my life.
 And it was.
 I think in ways that only time will truly show, to me and others.
 She is a kind and brilliant person.
 It was an honor and a pleasure to talk to her.
 Quick summary of the sponsors.
 DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and Cash App.
 Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
 As a side note, let me say that deep, meaningful connection between human beings and artificial
 intelligence systems is a lifelong passion for me.
 I'm not yet sure where that passion will take me, but I decided some time ago that I will
 follow it boldly and without fear to as far as I can take it.
 With a bit of hard work and a bit of luck, I hope I'll succeed in helping build AI systems
 that have some positive impact on the world and on the lives of a few people out there.
 But also, it is entirely possible that I am in fact one of the chatbots that Eugenia and
 the Replica team have built.
 And this podcast is simply a training process for the neural net that's trying to learn
 to connect to human beings, one episode at a time.
 In any case, I wouldn't know if I was or wasn't.
 And if I did, I wouldn't tell you.
 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcasts,
 follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
 As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle.
 I'll try to make these interesting, but give you timestamps so you can skip.
 But please do still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description to
 get a discount.
 Buy whatever they're selling.
 It really is the best way to support this podcast.
 This show is sponsored by Dollar Shave Club.
 Try them out with a one-time offer for only $5 and free shipping at dollarshave.com slash
 Lex.
 The starter kit comes with a six blade razor, refills, and all kinds of other stuff that
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 I've been a member of Dollar Shave Club for over five years and actually signed up when
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 And now, friends, we have come full circle.
 It feels like I made it, now that I can do a read for them just like Joe did all those
 years ago.
 Back when he also did ads for some less reputable companies, let's say, that you know about
 if you're a true fan of the old school podcasting world.
 Anyway, I just used the razor and the refills, but they told me I should really try out the
 shave butter.
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 It's translucent somehow, which is a cool new experience.
 Again, try the Ultimate Shave Starter Set today for just $5 plus free shipping at dollarshaveclub.com
 slash Lex.
 This show is also sponsored by DoorDash.
 Get $5 off and zero delivery fees and your first order of $15 or more when you download
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 Have so many memories of working late nights for a deadline with a team of engineers, whether
 that's for my PhD at Google or MIT, and eventually taking a break to argue about which DoorDash
 restaurant to order from.
 And when the food came, those moments of bonding, of exchanging ideas, of pausing to shift attention
 from the programs to humans were special.
 For a bit of time, I'm on my own now, so I miss that camaraderie, but actually, I still
 use DoorDash a lot.
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 And now here's my conversation with Eugenia Kuida.
 Okay before we talk about AI and the amazing work you're doing, let me ask you ridiculously,
 we're both Russian, so let me ask you a ridiculously romanticized Russian question.
 Do you think human beings are alone, like fundamentally on a philosophical level, like
 in our existence, when we like go through life, do you think just the nature of our
 life is loneliness?
 Yeah, so we have to read Dostoevsky at school, as you probably know.
 In Russian?
 I mean, it's part of the school program.
 So I guess if you read that, then you sort of have to believe that.
 You're made to believe that you're fundamentally alone and that's how you live your life.
 How do you think about it?
 You have a lot of friends, but at the end of the day, do you have like a longing for
 connection with other people?
 That's maybe another way of asking it.
 Do you think that's ever fully satisfied?
 I think we are fundamentally alone.
 We're born alone, we die alone, but I view my whole life as trying to get away from that,
 trying to not feel lonely.
 And again, we're talking about subjective way of feeling alone.
 It doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any connections or you are actually isolated.
 You think it's a subjective thing, but like, again, another absurd measurement-wise thing,
 how much loneliness do you think there is in the world?
 I feel like if you see loneliness as a condition, how much of it is there?
 What do you think?
 I guess there's all kinds of studies and measures of how many people in the world feel alone.
 There's all these measures of how many people are self-report or just all these kinds of
 different measures.
 But in your own perspective, how big of a problem do you think it is size-wise?
 I'm actually fascinated by the topic of loneliness.
 I try to read about it as much as I can.
 I think there's a paradox because loneliness is not a clinical disorder.
 It's not something that you can get your insurance to pay for if you're struggling with that.
 Yet it's actually proven and pretty, you know, tons of papers, tons of research around that
 it is proven that it's correlated with earlier life expectancy, shorter lifespan.
 And it is, you know, in a way, like right now, what scientists would say that it's a
 little bit worse than being obese or not actually doing any physical activity in your life.
 In terms of the impact on your health.
 In terms of impact on your physiological health, yeah.
 So it basically puts you, if you're constantly feeling lonely, your body responds like it's
 basically all the time under stress.
 So it's always in this alert state.
 And so it's really bad for you because it actually like drops your immune system and
 your response to inflammation is quite different.
 So all the cardiovascular diseases actually responds to viruses.
 So it's much easier to catch a virus.
 That's sad now that we're living in a pandemic and it's probably making us a lot more alone
 and it's probably weakening the immune system, making us more susceptible to the virus.
 That's kind of sad.
 Yeah, the statistics are pretty horrible around that.
 So around 30% of all millennials report that they're feeling lonely constantly.
 30?
 30%.
 And then it's much worse for Jan Z. And then 20% of millennials say that they feel lonely
 and they also don't have any close friends.
 And then I think 25 or so, and then 20% would say they don't even have acquaintances.
 And that's in the United States?
 That's in the United States.
 And I'm pretty sure that it's much worse everywhere else.
 In the UK, it was widely tweeted and posted when they were talking about a minister of
 loneliness that they wanted to appoint because four out of 10 people in the UK feel lonely.
 A minister of loneliness.
 I think that thing actually exists.
 So yeah, you will die sooner if you are lonely.
 And again, we're only talking about your perception of loneliness or feeling lonely.
 That is not objectively being fully socially isolated.
 However, the combination of being fully socially isolated and not having many connections and
 also feeling lonely, that's pretty much a deadly combination.
 So it strikes me bizarre or strange that this is a wide known fact and that there's really
 no one working really on that because it's subclinical.
 It's not clinical.
 It's not something that you can tell your doctor and get a treatment or something.
 Yet it's killing us.
 Yeah.
 So there's a bunch of people trying to evaluate, like try to measure the problem by looking
 at like how social media is affecting loneliness and all that kind of stuff.
 So it's like measurement.
 Like if you look at the field of psychology, they're trying to measure the problem.
 And not that many people actually, but some.
 But you're basically saying how many people are trying to solve the problem.
 Like how would you try to solve the problem of loneliness?
 Like if you just stick to humans, I mean, or basically not just the humans, but the
 technology that connects us humans.
 Do you think there's a hope for that technology to do the connection?
 Like are you on social media much?
 Unfortunately, do you find yourself like, uh, again, if you sort of introspect about
 how connected you feel to other human beings, how not alone you feel, do you think social
 media makes it better or worse maybe for you personally or in general?
 I think it's, it's easier to look at some stats.
 And, um, I mean, gen Z seems to be generous.
 She seems to be much lonelier than millennials in terms of how they report loneliness.
 They're definitely the most connected, you know, generation in the world.
 I mean, I still remember life without, without an iPhone, uh, without Facebook.
 They don't know that that ever existed.
 Uh, or at least don't know how it was.
 Um, so that tells me a little bit about the fact that that might be, um, you know, this
 hyper connected world is might actually make people feel lonely, lonelier.
 I don't know exactly what the, what the measurements are around that, but I would say, you know,
 my personal experience, I think it does make you feel a lot lonelier.
 Mostly, yeah, we're all super connected.
 Uh, but I think loneliness, the feeling of loneliness doesn't come from not having any
 social connections whatsoever.
 Again, tons of people that are in long-term relationships experienced bouts of loneliness
 and continued loneliness.
 Um, and it's more the question about the true connection about actually being deeply seen,
 deeply understood.
 Um, and in a way it's also about your relationship with yourself.
 Like in order to not feel lonely, you actually need to have a better relationship and feel
 more connected to yourself than this feeling actually starts to go away a little bit.
 And then you, um, open up yourself to actually meeting other people in a very special way,
 uh, not just, you know, add a friend on Facebook kind of way.
 So just to briefly touch on it, I mean, do you think it's possible to form that kind
 of connection with AI systems more down the line of some of your work?
 Do you think that's, um, engineering wise, a possibility to alleviate loneliness is not
 with another human, but with an AI system?
 Well, I know that's, that's a fact.
 That's what we're doing.
 And we see it and we measure that and we see how people start to feel less lonely, um,
 talking to their virtual AI friend.
 So basically a chat bot at the basic level, but could be more like, do you have, I'm not
 even speaking sort of, uh, about specifics, but do you have a hope?
 Like if you look 50 years from now, do you have a hope that there's just like AIs that
 are like optimized for, um, let me, let me first
 start like right now, the way people perceive AI, which is recommender systems for Facebook
 and Twitter, social media, they see AI is basically destroying first of all, the fabric
 of our civilization.
 But second of all, making us more lonely.
 Do you see like a world where it's possible to just have AI systems floating about that,
 like make our life less lonely?
 Yeah.
 Make us happy, make like putting good things into the world in terms of our individual
 lives.
 Yeah, totally beloved that.
 And that that's why we're, I'm also working on that.
 Um, I think we need to also make sure that, um, what we're trying to optimize for, we're
 actually measuring and it is an orthometric that we go in after and all of our product
 and all of our business models are optimized for that because you can talk, you know, a
 lot of products that talk about, um, you know, making you feel less lonely or making you
 feel more connected.
 They're not really measuring that.
 So they don't really know whether their users are actually feeling less lonely in the long
 run or feeling more connected in the long run.
 Um, so I think it's really important to put your, to measure it.
 Yep.
 To measure it.
 What's a, what's a good measurement of loneliness?
 Well, so that's something that I'm really interested in.
 How do you measure that people are feeling better or that they're feeling less lonely
 with loneliness?
 There's a scale, there's a UCLA 20 and UCLA three recently scale, which is basically a
 questionnaire that you fill out and you can see whether in the long run it's improving
 or not.
 And that, uh, does it capture the momentary feeling of loneliness?
 Does it look in like the past month?
 Like, uh, does it basically self-report?
 Does it try to sneak up on you?
 It's very tricky to answer honestly or something like that.
 Well, what's, yeah, I'm not familiar with the question.
 It is just asking you a few questions.
 Like how often did you feel, uh, like lonely or how often do you feel connected to other
 people in this last few couple of weeks?
 Um, it's similar to the self-report questionnaires for depression and anxiety like PHQ9 and GAT7.
 Of course, as any, as any self-report questionnaires, that's not necessarily very precise or very
 well measured.
 But still, if you take a big enough population, you get them through these questionnaires.
 You can see, you can see a positive dynamic.
 And so you basically, uh, you put people to questionnaires to see like, is this thing
 is our, is what we're creating, making people happier?
 Yeah, we measure.
 So we measure two outcomes, one short term, right after the conversation, we ask people
 whether this conversation made them feel better, worse or same.
 This metric right now is at 80%.
 So 80% of all our conversations make people feel better.
 But I should have done the questionnaire with you.
 You feel a lot worse after we've done this conversation.
 That's actually fascinating.
 I should, I should probably do that.
 But that's, that's how we do that.
 You should totally start measuring.
 Aim for 80% aim to outperform your current state of the art AI system.
 In these human conversations.
 So we'll get to your work with replica, but let me continue on the line of absurd questions.
 So you talked about, um, you know, deep connection with other humans, deep connection with AI,
 meaningful connection.
 Let me ask about love.
 People make fun of me because I talk about love all the time, but, uh, what, what do
 you think love is?
 Like maybe in the context of, um, a meaningful connection with somebody else, do you draw
 a distinction between love, like friendship and Facebook friends?
 Or is it a graduate?
 No, it's all the same.
 No, like, is it, is it just a gradual thing or is there something fundamental about us
 humans that seek like a really deep connection, uh, with another human being?
 And what is that?
 What is love?
 Eugenia?
 I'm just enjoy asking you these questions.
 Seeing you struggle.
 Thanks.
 Yeah.
 Um, well, the way I see it, um, and specifically, um, the way it relates to our work and the
 way it was, the way it inspired our work on replica.
 Um, I think one of the biggest and the most precious gifts we can give to each other now
 in 2020 as humans is this gift of deep empathetic understanding, the feeling of being deeply
 seen.
 Like, what does that mean?
 Like that you exist?
 Like somebody acknowledging the somebody seeing you for who you actually are.
 And that's extremely, extremely rare.
 Um, I think that is that combined with unconditional positive regard, um, belief and trust that,
 um, you internally are always inclined for positive growth and believing you in this
 way, letting you be a separate person at the same time.
 And this deep empathetic understanding for me, that's the, that's the combination that
 really creates something special, something that people, when they feel it once, they
 will always long for it again.
 And something that starts huge fundamental changes in people.
 Um, when we see that someone accepts us so deeply, we start to accept ourselves.
 And, um, the paradox is, is that's when big changes start, start happening, big fundamental
 changes in people start happening.
 So I think that is the ultimate therapeutic relationship that is, and that might be in
 some way, definition of love.
 So acknowledging that there's a separate person and accepting you for who you are.
 Um, now on a slightly that, and you mentioned therapeutic, that sounds very, like a very
 healthy view of love, but, uh, is there also like, uh, like, you know, if we look at heartbreak
 and, uh, you know, most love songs are probably about heartbreak, right?
 Is that like the mystery, the tension, the danger, the fear of loss, you know, all of
 that, what people might see in the negative light as like games or whatever, but just,
 uh, the dance of human interaction.
 Yeah.
 Fear of loss and fear of like, you said, you said like, once you feel it once you long for
 it again, but you also, once you feel it once you might, for many people, they've lost it.
 So they fear losing it.
 They feel lost.
 So is that part of it?
 Like you're, you're speaking like beautifully about like the positive things, but is it
 important to be able to, uh, be afraid of losing it from an engineering perspective?
 I mean, it's a huge part of it.
 And unfortunately we all, you know, um, face it at some points in our lives.
 I mean, I did, you want to go into details?
 How'd you get your heart broken?
 Sure.
 Well, so mine is pretty straight.
 My story is pretty straightforward.
 Where I did have a friend that was, you know, that at some point, um, in my twenties became
 really, really close to me and we became really close friends.
 Um, well, I grew up pretty lonely.
 So in many ways when I'm building, you know, this, these AI friends have think about myself
 when I was 17, writing horrible poetry and, you know, in my dial-up modem at home.
 And, um, you know, and that was the feeling that I grew up with.
 I left, I lived, um, alone for a long time and it was a teenager.
 Where did you grow up?
 In Moscow, in the outskirts of Moscow.
 Um, so I just skateboarded during the day and come back home and, you know, connect to
 the internet and write poetry and then write horrible poetry.
 Was it love poems?
 All sorts of poems, obviously love poems.
 I mean, what other poetry can you write when you're 17?
 Um, it could be political or something, but yeah.
 But that was, you know, that was kind of my, yeah, like deeply, um, influenced by Joseph
 Brodsky and like all sorts of poets that, um, every 17 year old will, will be looking,
 you know, looking at and reading.
 But yeah, that was my, uh, these were my teenage years and I just never had a person that I
 thought would, you know, take me as it is, would accept me the way I am.
 Um, and I just thought, you know, working and just doing my thing and being angry at
 the world and being a reporter, I was an investigative reporter working undercover and writing about
 people was my way to connect with, you know, with, with others.
 I was deeply curious about every, everyone else.
 And I thought that, you know, if I, if I go out there, if I write their stories, that means
 I'm more connected.
 This is what this podcast is about, by the way, I'm desperate seeking connection.
 I'm just kidding.
 Or am I?
 I don't know.
 So what, wait, reporter, uh, what, how did that make you feel more connected?
 I mean, you're still fundamentally pretty alone, but you always with other people, you
 know, you're always thinking about what other place can I infiltrate?
 What other community can I write about?
 What other phenomenon can I explore?
 And you sort of like a trickster, you know, and like, and a mythological character, like
 creature that's just jumping between all sorts of different worlds and feel and feel sort
 of okay with in all of them.
 So that was my dream job, by the way.
 That was like totally what I would have been doing.
 Um, if Russia was a different place and a little bit undercover.
 So like you weren't, you were trying to, like you said, mythological creature, trying to
 infiltrate.
 So try to be a part of the world.
 What are we talking about?
 What kind of things did you enjoy writing about?
 I go work at a strip club or go.
 Awesome.
 Okay.
 Well, I'd go work at a restaurant or just go write about, you know, um, certain phenomenons
 or phenomenons or people in the city.
 And what, uh, sorry to keep interrupting.
 I'm the worst conversationalist.
 What stage of Russia is this?
 What, uh, is this pre Putin, post Putin?
 What, what was Russia like?
 Pre Putin is really long ago.
 This is Putin era.
 That's a beginning of two thousands and 2010, 2007, eight, nine, 10.
 What were strip clubs like in Russia and restaurants and culture and people's minds like in that
 early Russia that you were covering in those early two thousands, this was, there was still
 a lot of hope.
 There was still tons of hope that, um, you know, we're sort of becoming this, uh, Western
 Westernized society.
 Uh, the restaurants were opening where we're really looking at, you know, um, we're trying,
 we're trying to copy a lot of things from, uh, from the U S from Europe, uh, bringing
 all these things in very enthusiastic about that.
 So there was a lot of, you know, stuff going on.
 There's a lot of hope and dream for this, you know, new Moscow that would be similar
 to I guess New York.
 I mean, just to give you an idea.
 And, um, year 2000 was the year when we had two, uh, movie theaters in Moscow and there
 was this one first coffee house that opened and it was like really big deal.
 Uh, by 2010, there were all sorts of things everywhere.
 Almost like a chain, like a Starbucks type of coffee house or like, you mean, oh yeah,
 like a Starbucks.
 And I remember we were reporting on, like, we were writing about the opening of Starbucks,
 I think in 2007, that was one of the biggest things that happened in, you know, in Moscow
 back back in the time, like that was worthy of a magazine cover.
 And that was definitely the, you know, the biggest talk of the time.
 Yeah.
 When was McDonald's?
 Cause I was still in Russia when McDonald's opened, that was in the nineties.
 I mean, yeah, I remember that very well.
 Those were long, long lines.
 I think it was 1993 or four, I don't remember.
 Um, did you actually go to McDonald's at that time?
 Did you do that?
 I mean, that was a luxurious outing.
 That was definitely not something you do every day.
 And also the line was at least three hours.
 So if you're going to McDonald's, that is not fast food.
 That is like at least three hours in line.
 And then no one is trying to eat fast after that.
 Everyone is like trying to enjoy as much as possible.
 What's your memory of that?
 Oh, it was insane.
 How does it feel?
 Pretty positive.
 It's a small strawberry milkshake and a hamburger and small fries and my mom's there.
 And sometimes I'll just cause I was really little, they'll just let me run up the cashier
 and like cut the line, which is like, you cannot really do that in Russia or.
 So like for a lot of people, like a lot of those experiences might seem not very fulfilling,
 you know, like it's on the verge of poverty, I suppose.
 But do you remember all that time fondly?
 Like, cause I do like the first time I drank, you know, coke, you know, all that stuff,
 right?
 Um, and just, yeah, the connection with other human beings in Russia.
 I remember, I remember really positively.
 Like how do you remember the nineties and then the Russia you were covering, just the
 human connections you had with people and the experiences?
 Well, my, my parents were both, both physicists.
 My grandparents were both, well, my grandpa, grandfather was a nuclear physicist, a professor
 of the university.
 My dad worked at Chernobyl when I was born in Chernobyl, analyzing kind of the, everything
 after the explosion.
 And then I remember that, and they were, so they were making sort of enough money in the
 Soviet Union.
 So they were not, you know, extremely poor or anything.
 It was pretty prestigious to be a professor, the dean and the university.
 And then I remember my grandfather started making a hundred dollars a month after, you
 know, in the nineties.
 So then I remember we started, our main line of work would be to go to our little tiny
 country house, get a lot of apples there from apple trees, bring them back to the city and
 sell them in the street.
 So me and my nuclear physicist grandfather were just standing there and he'd selling
 those apples the whole day.
 Cause that would make you more money than, you know, working at the university.
 And then he'll just tell me, try to teach me, you know, something about planets and
 whatever the particles and stuff.
 And, you know, I'm not smart at all, so I could never understand anything, but I was
 interested as a journalist kind of type interest.
 But that was my memory.
 And, you know, I'm happy that I wasn't, I somehow got spared that I was probably too
 young to remember any of the traumatic stuff.
 So the only thing I really remember had this bootleg, that was very traumatic, had this
 bootleg Nintendo, which was called Dandy in Russia.
 So in 1993, there was nothing to eat, like even if you had any money, you would go to
 the store and there was no food.
 I don't know if you remember that.
 And our friend had a restaurant, like a government, half government owned something restaurant.
 So they always had supplies.
 So he exchanged a big bag of wheat for this Nintendo, the bootleg Nintendo.
 And then I remember very fondly, cause I think it was nine or something like that.
 Seven or seven.
 We just got it and I was playing it and there was this, you know, Dandy TV show.
 Yeah.
 So traumatic in a positive sense, you mean like, like a definitive.
 Well, they took it away and gave me a bag of wheat instead.
 And I cried like my eyes out for days and days and days.
 And then, you know, as a, and my dad said, we're going to like exchange it back in a
 little bit.
 So you keep the little gun, you know, the one that you shoot the ducks with.
 So I'm like, okay, I'm keeping the gun.
 So sometime it's going to come back, but then they exchanged the gun as well for some sugar
 or something.
 I was so pissed.
 I was like, I didn't want to eat for days after that.
 I'm like, I don't want your food.
 Give me my Nintendo back.
 So that was extremely traumatic.
 But you know, I was happy that that was my only traumatic experience.
 You know, my dad had to actually go to Chernobyl with a bunch of 20 year olds.
 He was 20 when he went to Chernobyl.
 And that was right after the explosion.
 No one knew anything.
 The whole crew he went with, all of them are dead now.
 I think there was this one guy still that was still alive for this last few years.
 I think he died a few years ago now.
 My dad somehow luckily got back earlier than everyone else.
 But just the fact that that was the, and I was always like, well, how did they send you?
 I was only, I was just born, you know, you had a newborn.
 Talk about paternity leave.
 They were like, but that's who they took because they didn't know whether you would be able
 to have kids when you come back.
 Because they took the ones with kids.
 So him with some guys went to, and I'm just thinking of me when I was 20, I was so sheltered
 from any problems whatsoever in life.
 And then my dad, his 21st birthday at the reactor, you like work three hours a day,
 you sleep the rest.
 And yeah, so I played with a lot of toys from Chernobyl.
 What are your memories of Chernobyl in general?
 Like the bigger context, you know, because of that HBO show, it's the world's attention
 turned to it once again.
 Like, what are your thoughts about Chernobyl?
 Did Russia screw that one up?
 Like, you know, there's probably a lot of lessons about our modern times with data about
 coronavirus and all that kind of stuff.
 It seems like there's a lot of misinformation.
 There's a lot of people kind of trying to hide whether they screwed something up or not,
 as it's very understandable.
 It's very human, very wrong probably.
 But obviously Russia was probably trying to hide that they've screwed things up.
 Like what are your thoughts about that time, personal and general?
 I mean, I was born when the explosion happened.
 So actually a few months after.
 So of course I don't remember anything apart from the fact that my dad would bring me tiny
 toys, like plastic things that would just go crazy haywire when you put the Geiger thing
 to it.
 My mom was like just nuclear about that.
 She was like, what are you bringing?
 I'll do that.
 She was nuclear.
 Very nice.
 Absolutely.
 Well done.
 I'm sorry.
 But yeah, but the TV show was just phenomenal.
 HBO one.
 Yeah, it was definitely, first of all, it's incredible how that was made not by the Russians
 but someone else, but capturing so well everything about our country.
 It felt a lot more genuine than most of the movies and TV shows that are made now in Russia.
 It's just so much more genuine.
 And most of my friends in Russia were just in complete awe about the show.
 But I think the-
 How good of a job they did.
 Yeah, phenomenal.
 But also-
 The apartments, there's something, yeah.
 It was so great.
 The set design.
 I mean, Russians can't do that.
 But you see everything and it's like, wow, that's exactly how it was.
 So I don't know.
 That show, I don't know what to think about that because it's British accents, British
 actors of a person.
 I forgot who created this show, but I remember reading about him and he doesn't even feel
 like there's no Russia in his history.
 No, he did super bad or something like that.
 Yeah.
 Or like, I don't know.
 Yeah, exactly.
 Whatever that thing about the bachelor party in Vegas, number four and five or something
 were the ones that he worked with.
 So it made me feel really sad for some reason that if a person, obviously a genius, could
 go in and just study and just be extreme attention to detail, they can do a good job.
 It made me think like, why don't other people do a good job of this?
 Like about Russia, like there's so little about Russia.
 There's so few good films about the Russian side of World War II.
 I mean, there's so much interesting evil and beautiful moments in the history of the 20th
 century in Russia.
 It feels like there's not many good films from the Russians.
 You would expect something from the Russians.
 Well, they keep making these propaganda movies now.
 Oh no.
 Unfortunately.
 But yeah, I know Chernobyl was such a perfect TV show.
 I think capturing really well.
 It's not about like even the set design, which was phenomenal, but just capturing all the
 problems that exist now with the country and like focusing on the right things.
 Like if you build the whole country on a lie, that's what's going to happen.
 And that's just, that's very simple kind of thing.
 Yeah.
 And did you have your dad talked about it to you?
 Like his thoughts on the experience?
 He never talks.
 It's this kind of Russian man that just, my husband who's American and he asked him a
 few times like, you know, Igor, how did you, but why did you say yes?
 Or like, why did you decide to go?
 You could have said, no, not go to Chernobyl.
 Why would like a person that that's what you do?
 You cannot say no.
 Yeah.
 It's just like a Russian way.
 It's the Russian way.
 Don't talk that much.
 No, there are downsides and upsides for that.
 Oh yeah.
 That's the truth.
 Okay.
 So back to post-Putin Russia.
 Or maybe we skipped a few steps along the way, but you were trying to do to be a journalist
 in that time.
 What was, what was Russia like at that time?
 Post you said 2007 Starbucks type of thing.
 What else, what else was Russia like then?
 I think there was just hope.
 There was this big hope that we're going to be, you know, friends with the United States
 and we're going to be friends with Europe and we're just going to be also country like
 those with, you know, bike lanes and parks and everything's going to be urbanized.
 I think we're talking about nineties where like people would be shot in the street and
 it was, I sort of have a fond memory of going into a movie theater and, you know, coming
 out of it after the movie.
 And the guy that I saw on the stairs was like neither shot, which was again, it was like
 a thing in the nineties that would be happening.
 Or, you know, people were getting shot here and there.
 There are tons of violence, tons of, you know, just basically mafia mobs on in the streets.
 And then the two thousands were like, you know, things just got cleaned up.
 Oil went up and the country started getting a little bit richer.
 You know, the nineties were so grim, mostly because the economy was in shambles and oil
 prices were not high.
 So the country didn't have anything.
 We defaulted in 1998 and the money kept jumping back and forth.
 Like first there were millions of rubbles, then it got like default, you know, then it
 got to like thousands.
 There was one rubble was something then again, two millions.
 There's like crazy town.
 That was crazy.
 And then the two thousands were just these years of stability in a way.
 And the country getting a little bit richer because of, you know, again, oil and gas.
 And we were starting to, we started to look at specifically in Moscow and Saint Petersburg
 to look at other cities in Europe and New York and US and trying to do the same in our
 like small kind of cities towns there.
 What was, what were your thoughts on Putin at the time?
 Well in the beginning he was really positive.
 Everyone was very, you know, positive about Putin.
 He was young, he's very energetic.
 He also-
 Handsome.
 The shirtless-
 Well somewhat compared to, well that was not like way before the shirtless era.
 The shirtless era.
 Okay, so it didn't start out shirtless.
 When did the shirtless era, it's like the propaganda of riding a horse, fishing-
 2010, 11, 12.
 That's my favorite.
 You know, like people talk about the favorite Beatles, like the, I don't know, that's my
 favorite Putin is the shirtless Putin.
 Now I remember very, very clearly 1996 where, you know, Americans really helped Russia with
 elections and Yeltsin got reelected.
 Thankfully so, because there was a huge threat that actually the communists will get back
 to power.
 They were a lot more popular.
 And then a lot of American experts, political experts and campaign experts descended on
 Moscow and helped Yeltsin actually get the presidency, the second term of the presidency.
 But Yeltsin was not feeling great, you know, by the end of his second term.
 He was, you know, alcoholic.
 He was really old.
 He was falling off, you know, the stages where he was talking.
 So people were looking for fresh, I think for a fresh face, for someone who's going
 to continue Yeltsin's work, but who's going to be a lot more energetic and a lot more
 active young, efficient maybe.
 So that's what we all saw in Putin back in the day.
 I'd say that everyone, absolutely everyone in Russia in early 2000s who was not a communist
 would be, yeah, Putin is great.
 We have a lot of hopes for him.
 What are your thoughts?
 And I promise we'll get back to first of all, your love story.
 And second of all, AI.
 Well what are your thoughts about communism?
 The 20th century, I apologize.
 I'm reading the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
 Oh my God.
 So I'm like really steeped into like World War II and Stalin and Hitler and just these
 dramatic personalities that brought so much evil to the world.
 But it's also interesting to politically think about these different systems and what they've
 led to.
 And Russia is one of the sort of beacons of communism in the 20th century.
 What are your thoughts about communism?
 Having experienced it as a political system?
 I mean, I've only experienced it a little bit, but mostly through stories and through
 seeing my parents and my grandparents who lived through that.
 I mean, it was horrible.
 It was just plain horrible.
 It was just awful.
 You think there's something, I mean, it sounds nice on paper.
 So like the drawbacks of capitalism is that eventually it's the point of like a slippery
 slope.
 Eventually it creates the rich get richer.
 It creates a disparity like inequality of wealth inequality.
 I guess it's hypothetical at this point, but eventually capitalism leads to humongous inequality
 and that's, some people argue that that's a source of unhappiness.
 Is it's not like absolute wealth of people.
 It's the fact that there's a lot of people much richer than you.
 There's a feeling of like, that's where unhappiness can come from.
 So the idea of communism or these sort of Marxism is not allowing that kind of slippery
 slope, but then you see the actual implementations of it and stuff seems to go wrong very badly.
 What do you think that is?
 Why does it go wrong?
 What is it about human nature?
 If we look at Chernobyl, you know, those kinds of bureaucracies that were constructed, is
 there something like, do you think about this much of like, why it goes wrong?
 Well, there's no one was really like, it's not that everyone was equal.
 Obviously the, you know, the government and everyone close to that were the bosses.
 So it's not like fully, I guess, there's already this dream of equal life.
 So then I guess the situation that we had in the Soviet Union, it was more, it's a bunch
 of really poor people without any way to make any significant fortune or build anything
 living under constant surveillance from other people.
 Like you can't even do anything that's not fully approved by the dictatorship basically.
 Otherwise your neighbor will write a letter and you'll go to jail.
 Absolute absence of actual law.
 This constant state of fear.
 You didn't own anything.
 It didn't, you know, you couldn't go travel.
 You couldn't read anything Western or you couldn't make a career really, unless you're
 working in the military complex, which is why most of the scientists were so well regarded.
 I come from, you know, both my dad and my mom come from families of scientists and they
 were really well regarded as you know, obviously.
 As the state wanted, I mean, because there's a lot of value to them being well regarded.
 Because they were developing things that could be used in the military.
 So that was very important.
 That was the main investment.
 But it was miserable.
 It was miserable.
 That's why, you know, a lot of Russians now live in the state of constant PTSD.
 That's why we, you know, want to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy.
 Definitely as soon as we have the opportunity, you know, we just got to it finally that we
 can, you know, own things.
 You know, I remember the time that we got our first yogurts and that was the biggest
 deal in the world.
 It was already in the 90s, by the way.
 What was your like favorite food?
 What was like, well, like this is possible.
 Oh, fruit.
 Because we only had apples, bananas and whatever, and you know, whatever, watermelons, whatever,
 you know, people would grow in the Soviet Union.
 So there were no pineapples or papaya or mango.
 Like you've never seen those fruit things.
 Like those were so ridiculously good.
 And obviously you could not get any like strawberries in the winter or anything that's not, you
 know, seasonal.
 So that was a really big deal.
 Seeing all these fruit things.
 Yeah, me too, actually.
 I don't know.
 I don't have a, like, I don't think I have any too many demons or like addictions or
 so on, but I think I've developed an unhealthy relationship with fruit that I still struggle
 with.
 Oh, you can get any type of fruit, right?
 You can get like also these weird fruit, fruits like dragon fruit or something.
 Yeah.
 Or all kinds of like different types of peaches, like cherries were killer for me.
 I know, I know you say like we had bananas and so on, but I don't remember having the
 kind of banana.
 Like when I first came to this country, the amount of banana, I like literally got fat
 on bananas.
 Like the amount.
 Oh yeah, for sure.
 Delicious and like cherries, the kind, like just the quality of the food.
 I was like, this is capitalism.
 This is delicious.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 It's funny.
 It's funny.
 Yeah.
 Like it's, it's funny to read.
 I don't know what to think of it.
 I've, it's funny to think how an idea that's just written on paper when carried out amongst
 millions of people, how that gets actually, when it becomes reality, what it actually
 looks like.
 Sorry, but the, it's been studying Hitler a lot recently and going through Mein Kampf.
 He pretty much wrote out of Mein Kampf everything he was going to do.
 Unfortunately, most leaders, including Stalin, didn't read it, but it's, it's kind of terrifying
 and I don't know.
 And amazing in some sense that you can have some words on paper and they can be brought
 to life and they can either inspire the world or they can destroy the world.
 And yeah, there's a lot of lessons to study in history that I think people don't study
 enough now.
 One of the things I'm hoping with, I've been practicing Russian a little bit.
 I'm hoping to sort of find, rediscover the, the beauty and the terror of Russian history
 through this stupid podcast by talking to a few people.
 So anyway, I just feel like so much was forgotten.
 So much was forgotten.
 I'll probably, I'm going to try to convince myself to, you're a super busy and super important
 person.
 I'm going to, I'm going to try to befriend you to, to try to become a better Russian
 because I feel like I'm a shitty Russian.
 Not that busy.
 So I can totally be your Russian sherpa.
 Yeah.
 But love.
 You're talking about your early days of being a little bit alone and finding a connection
 with the world through being a journalist.
 Where did love come into that?
 I guess finding for the first time, some friends, it's very, you know, simple story.
 Some friends that all of a sudden we, I guess we were the same, you know, the same, at the
 same place with our lives.
 We were 25, 26, I guess.
 And somehow I remember, and we just got really close and somehow I remember this one day
 where it's one day in summer that we just stayed out outdoor the whole night and just
 talked and for some unknown reason, it just felt for the first time that someone could,
 you know, see me for who I am.
 And it just felt extremely, like extremely good.
 And, you know, we fell asleep outside and just talking and it was raining, it was beautiful,
 you know, sunrise.
 And it's really cheesy, but at the same time, we just became friends in a way that I've
 never been friends with anyone else before.
 And I do remember that before and after that you sort of have this unconditional family
 sort of, and it gives you tons of power.
 It just basically gives you this tremendous power to do things in your life and to change
 positively on many different levels.
 Power because you could be yourself.
 At least you know that somewhere you can be just yourself.
 You don't need to pretend, you don't need to be, you know, great at work or tell some
 story or sell yourself in somewhere or another.
 And so we became this really close friends and in a way I started a company because he
 had a startup and I felt like I kind of want a startup too.
 It felt really cool.
 I didn't know what I would really do, but I felt like I kind of need a startup.
 Okay.
 So that pulled you in to the startup world.
 Yeah.
 And then, yeah, and then this closest friend of mine died.
 We actually moved here to San Francisco together and then we went back for a visa to Moscow
 and we lived together with roommates and we came back and he got hit by a car right in
 front of Kremlin, you know, next to the river and died the same day in the hospital.
 So and you've moved to America at that point?
 At that point I was living.
 What about him?
 What about Roman?
 Him too.
 He was always sort of trying to do what he was doing.
 So I didn't like that he was already here and I was still, you know, in Moscow and we
 weren't hanging out together all the time.
 So was he in San Francisco?
 Yeah, we were roommates.
 So he just visited Moscow for a little bit?
 We went back for our visas.
 We had to get a stamp and our passport for our work visas and the embassy was taking
 a little longer.
 So we stayed there for a couple of weeks.
 What happened?
 So how did he die?
 He was crossing the street and the car was going really fast and way over the speed limit
 and just didn't stop on the pedestrian cross on the zebra and just ran over him.
 When was this?
 It was in 2015 on 28th of November.
 So it was pretty long ago now.
 But at the time, you know, I was 29, so for me it was the first kind of meaningful death
 in my life.
 You know, I had both sets of grandparents at the time.
 I didn't see anyone so close die and death sort of existed as a concept, but definitely
 not as something that would be happening to us anytime soon.
 And specifically our friends because we were still in our 20s or early 30s and it still
 felt like the whole life is, you know, you could still dream about ridiculous things
 even.
 So that was, it was just really, really abrupt, I'd say.
 What did it feel like to lose him?
 Like that feeling of loss.
 You talked about the feeling of love having power.
 What is the feeling of loss?
 If you like.
 Well, in Buddhism, there's this concept of Samaya where something really like huge happens
 and then you can see very clearly.
 I think that was it.
 Basically, something changed me so much in such a short period of time that I could just
 see really, really clearly what mattered or what not.
 Well, I definitely saw that whatever I was doing at work didn't matter at all and some
 other things.
 And it was just this big realization, this very, very clear vision of what life's about.
 You still miss him today?
 Yeah, for sure.
 For sure.
 It was just this constant, I think he was really important for me and for our friends
 for many different reasons.
 And I think one of them being that we didn't just say goodbye to him, but we sort of said
 goodbye to our youth in a way.
 It was like the end of an era and on so many different levels.
 The end of Moscow as we knew it, the end of us living through our 20s and dreaming about
 the future.
 Do you remember last several conversations?
 Is there moments with him that stick out that will kind of haunt you just when you think
 about him?
 Yeah, well, his last year here in San Francisco, he was pretty depressed as his startup was
 not going really anywhere.
 And he wanted to do something else.
 He wanted to build.
 He played with a bunch of ideas, but the last one he had was around building a startup around
 death.
 So he applied to Y Combinator with a video that I had on my computer.
 And it was all about disrupting death, thinking about new symmetries more biologically, like
 things that could be better biologically for humans.
 And at the same time having those digital avatars, these kind of AI avatars that would
 store all the memory about a person that he could interact with.
 What year was this?
 2015.
 Well, right before his death.
 It's very interesting.
 It was like a couple of months before that he recorded that video.
 And so I found out my computer when it was in our living room.
 He never got in, but he was thinking about it a lot somehow.
 Does it have the digital avatar idea?
 Yeah.
 That's so interesting.
 Well, he just says, well, that's in his head.
 The pitch has this idea and he talks about like, I want to rethink how people grieve and
 how people talk about death.
 I was interested in this.
 Maybe someone who's depressed is naturally inclined thinking about that.
 But I just felt this year in San Francisco, we just had so much...
 I was going through a hard time, he was going through a hard time, and we were definitely...
 I was trying to make him just happy somehow, to make him feel better.
 And it felt like this...
 I don't know, I just felt like I was taking care of him a lot.
 And he almost started to feel better.
 And then that happened.
 And I don't know, I just felt lonely again, I guess.
 And that was coming back to San Francisco in December, I helped to organize the funeral,
 help his parents.
 And I came back here and it was a really lonely apartment, a bunch of his clothes everywhere
 and Christmas time.
 And I remember I had a board meeting with my investors and I just couldn't talk about
 it.
 I had to pretend everything's okay and just working on this company.
 Yeah, it was definitely a very, very tough time.
 Do you think about your own mortality?
 You said we're young, the possibility of doing all kinds of crazy things is still out there,
 is still before us, but it can end any moment.
 Do you think about your own ending at any moment?
 Unfortunately, I think about it way too much.
 It's somehow after Roman, every year after that, I started losing people that I really
 love.
 I lost my grandfather next year, the person who would explain to me what the universe
 is made of.
 While you're selling apples?
 While selling apples and then I lost another close friend of mine and it just made me very
 scared.
 I have tons of fear about death.
 That's what makes me not fall asleep oftentimes and just go in loops.
 And then as my therapist recommended me, I open up some nice calming images with a voiceover
 and it calms me down.
 How about for sleep?
 Yeah, I'm really scared of death.
 This is a big, I definitely have tons of, I guess some pretty big trauma about it and
 I'm still working through.
 There's a philosopher, Ernest Becker, who wrote a book, Denial of Death.
 I'm not sure if you're familiar with any of those folks.
 There's in psychology a whole field called Terror Management Theory.
 Sheldon, who's just done the podcast, he wrote the book, we talked for four hours about death,
 fear of death.
 But his whole idea is that, Ernest Becker, I find this idea really compelling is that
 everything human beings have created, our whole motivation in life is to create, escape
 death is to try to construct an illusion of that we're somehow immortal.
 It's like everything around us, this room, your startup, your dreams, all everything
 you do is a kind of creation of a brain unlike any other mammal or species is able to be
 cognizant of the fact that it ends for us.
 I think there's the question of the meaning of life that you look at what drives us humans.
 When I read Ernest Becker that I highly recommend people read, it felt like this is the right
 thing at the core.
 Sheldon's work is called Warm at the Core.
 She's saying, I think it's William James, he's quoting or whoever, is like the thing,
 what is at the core of it all?
 Sure, there's like love, Jesus might talk about like love is at the core of everything.
 That's the open question.
 What's at the, it's turtles, turtles, but it can't be turtles all the way down.
 What's at the bottom?
 And Ernest Becker says the fear of death.
 And the way, in fact, because you said therapist and calming images, his whole idea is we want
 to bring that fear of death as close as possible to the surface and like meditate on that and
 use the clarity of vision that provides to live a more fulfilling life, to live a more
 honest life, to discover, there's something about being cognizant of the finiteness of
 it all that might result in the most fulfilling life.
 So that's the dual of what you're saying, because you kind of said it's like, I unfortunately
 think about it too much.
 It's a question whether it's good to think about it.
 Because I've, again, talk way too much about love and probably death.
 And when I ask people, friends, which is why I probably don't have many friends, are you
 afraid of death?
 I think most people say they're not.
 They're not, they say they're afraid, it's kind of almost like they see death as this
 kind of like a paper deadline or something and they're afraid not to finish the paper
 before the paper, like I'm afraid not to finish the goals I have.
 But it feels like they're not actually realizing that this thing ends, like really realizing,
 like really thinking as Nietzsche and all these philosophers, like thinking deeply about
 it.
 Like the very thing that, like when you think deeply about something, you can realize that
 you haven't actually thought about it.
 When I think about death, it's terrifying.
 It feels like stepping outside into the cold where it's freezing and then I have to like
 hurry back inside where it's warm.
 But like I think there's something valuable about stepping out there into the freezing
 cold.
 Definitely.
 When I talk to my mentor about it, he always tells me, well, what dies?
 There's nothing there that can die.
 But I guess that requires, well, in Buddhism, one of the concepts that are really hard to
 grasp and that people spend all their lives meditating on would be anatta, which is the
 concept of not-self and kind of thinking that if you're not your thoughts, which you're
 obviously not your thoughts because you can observe them and not your emotions and not
 your body, then what is this?
 And if you go really far, then finally you see that there's not-self.
 There's this concept of not-self.
 So once you get there, how can that actually die?
 What is dying?
 Right.
 You're just a bunch of molecules, stardust.
 But that is very advanced spiritual work for me.
 Is that how you sleep?
 Definitely not.
 Oh my God.
 No, I have, I think it's very, very useful.
 It's just the fact that maybe being so afraid is not useful.
 And mine is more, I'm just terrified.
 Like it really makes me-
 On a personal level.
 On a personal level.
 I'm terrified.
 How do you overcome that?
 I don't.
 I'm still trying to.
 Have pleasant images?
 Well, pleasant images get me to sleep.
 And then during the day I can distract myself with other things, like talking to you.
 I'm glad we're both doing the same exact thing.
 Okay, good.
 Is there other, like, is there moments since you've lost Roman that you had like moments
 of like bliss and like that you've forgotten that you have achieved that Buddhist like
 level of like what can possibly die?
 Like losing yourself in the moment in the ticking time of like this universe and you're
 just part of it for a brief moment and just enjoying it?
 Well, that goes hand in hand.
 I remember I think a day or two after he died, we went to finally get his password out of
 the embassy and we're driving around Moscow and it was, you know, December, which is usually
 there's never a sun in Moscow in December.
 And somehow it was an extremely sunny day and we were driving with close friend.
 And I remember feeling for the first time, maybe this just moment of incredible clarity
 and somehow happiness, not like happy happiness, but happiness.
 And it's just feeling that, you know, I know what the universe is sort of about, whether
 it's good or bad.
 And it wasn't a sad feeling.
 It was probably the most beautiful feeling that you can ever achieve.
 And you can only get it when something oftentimes when something traumatic like that happens.
 But also if you just, you really spend a lot of time meditating and looking at the nature
 of doing something that really gets you there.
 But once you're there, I think when you summit a mountain, a really hard mountain, you inevitably
 get there.
 That's just a way to get to the state.
 But once you're on this in this state, you can do really big things, I think.
 Yeah.
 Sucks that it doesn't last forever.
 So Bukowski talked about like, love is a fog.
 Like it's when you wake up in the morning, it's there, but it eventually dissipates.
 It's really sad.
 Nothing lasts forever.
 But I definitely like doing this push up and running thing.
 There's moments, I had a couple moments, like I'm not a crier.
 I don't cry.
 But there's moments where I was like faced down on the carpet, like with tears in my
 eyes is interesting.
 And then that like complete like, there's a lot of demons.
 I've got demons, had to face them.
 I don't know how running makes you face your demons, but at the same time, the flip side
 of that, there's a few moments where I was in bliss and all of it alone, which is funny.
 It's beautiful.
 I like that.
 But definitely pushing yourself physically, one of it for sure.
 Like you said, I mean, you were speaking as a metaphor of Mount Everest, but it also works
 like literally, I think physical endeavor somehow.
 Yeah, there's something.
 I mean, warm monkeys, apes, whatever, physical, there's a physical thing to it.
 But there's something to this pushing yourself physically, physically, but alone.
 That happens when you're doing like things like you do or strenuous like workouts or
 rolling across the Atlantic or like marathons.
 I love watching marathons and it's so boring, but you can see them getting there.
 So the other thing, I don't know if you know, there's a guy named David Goggins.
 He's been either emailing on the phone with me every day through this.
 I haven't been exactly alone, but he's the devil on the devil's shoulder.
 So he's like the worst possible human being in terms of giving you a device.
 Like he has through everything I've been doing, he's been doubling everything I do.
 So he's insane.
 He's a Navy SEAL person.
 He's wrote this book, Can't Hurt Me.
 He's basically one of the toughest human beings on earth.
 He ran all these crazy ultra marathons in the desert.
 He set the world record number of pull-ups.
 He just does everything where it's like, how can I suffer today?
 He figures that out and does it.
 Yeah, whatever that is, that process of self-discovery is really important.
 I actually had to turn myself off from the internet mostly because I started this workout
 thing like a happy go-getter with my headband.
 Because a lot of people were inspired and they're like, yeah, we're going to exercise
 with you.
 And I was like, yeah, great.
 But then I realized that this journey can't be done together with others.
 This has to be done alone.
 So out of the moments of love, out of the moments of loss, can we talk about your journey
 of finding, I think, an incredible idea, an incredible company, and incredible system
 in replica?
 How did that come to be?
 So yeah, I was a journalist.
 And then I went to business school for a couple of years to just see if I can maybe switch
 gears and do something else with 23.
 And then I came back and started working for a businessman in Russia who built the first
 4G network in our country and was very visionary and asked me whether I want to do fun stuff
 together.
 And we worked on a bank.
 The idea was to build a bank on top of a telco.
 So that was 2011 or 2012.
 And a lot of telecommunication company mobile network operators didn't really know what
 to do next in terms of new products, new revenue.
 And this big idea was that you put a bank on top and then all works out.
 Basically a prepaid account becomes your bank account and you can use it as your bank.
 So a third of a country wakes up as your bank client.
 But we couldn't quite figure out what would be the main interface to interact with the
 bank.
 The main thing was that most people didn't have smartphones back in the time.
 In Russia the penetration of smartphones was low.
 People didn't use mobile banking or online banking on their computers.
 So we figured out that SMS would be the best way because that would work on feature phones.
 But that required some chatbot technology, which I didn't know anything about obviously.
 So I started looking into it and saw that there's nothing really.
 Well, there was just nothing really.
 So the idea is through SMS be able to interact with your bank account.
 Yeah.
 And then we thought, well, since you're talking to a bank account, why can't we use more of
 some behavioral ideas and why can't this banking chatbot be nice to you and really talk to
 you sort of as a friend?
 This way you develop more connection to it.
 Retentions higher, people don't churn.
 And so I went to very depressing Russian cities to test it out.
 I went to, I remember three different towns to interview potential users.
 So people use it for a little bit.
 Cool.
 And I went to talk to them.
 So pretty poor towns.
 Very poor towns.
 Mostly towns that were sort of factories, monotowns.
 They were building something and then the factory went away and it was just a bunch
 of very poor people.
 And then we went to a couple that weren't as dramatic, but still the one I remember
 really fondly was this woman that worked at a glass factory and she talked to a chatbot
 and she was talking about it and started crying during the interview because she said, no
 one really cares for me that much.
 And so to be clear, that was my only endeavor in programming that chatbot.
 So it was really simple.
 It was literally just a few, if this, then that rules and it was incredibly simplistic.
 And still that made her feel something.
 And that really made her emotional.
 And she said, you know, I only have my mom and my husband and I don't have any more really
 in my life.
 And it was very sad, but at the same time I felt, and we had more interviews in a similar
 vein and what I thought in the moment was like, well, it's not that the technology is
 ready because definitely in 2012 technology was not ready for that, but humans are ready,
 unfortunately.
 So this project would not be about like tech capabilities, it would be more about human
 vulnerabilities, but there's something so powerful around about conversational AI that
 I saw then that I thought was definitely worth putting a lot of effort into.
 So in the end of the day, we solved the banking project.
 But my then boss, who's also my mentor and really, really close friend, told me, hey,
 I think there's something in it and you should just go work on it.
 And I was like, well, what product?
 I don't know what I'm building.
 He's like, you'll figure it out.
 And you know, looking back at this, this was a horrible idea to work on something without
 knowing what it was, which is maybe the reason why it took us so long.
 But we just decided to work on the conversational tech to see what it, you know, there were
 no chat bot constructors or programs or anything that would allow you to actually build one
 at the time.
 That was the era of, by the way, Google Glass, which is why, you know, some of the investors
 like seed investors we've talked with were like, oh, you should totally build it for
 Google Glass.
 If not, we're not.
 I don't think that's interesting.
 Did you bite on that idea?
 No.
 Because I wanted to be, to do text first because I'm a journalist.
 So I was fascinated by just texting.
 So you thought, so the emotional, that interaction that the woman had, like, so do you think
 you could feel emotion from just text?
 Yeah.
 I saw something in just this pure texting and also thought that we should first start,
 start building for people who really need it versus people who have Google Glass.
 If you know what I mean.
 And I felt like the early adopters of Google Glass might not be overlapping with people
 who are really lonely and might need some, you know, someone to talk to.
 But then we really just focused on the tech itself.
 We just thought, what if we just, you know, we didn't have a product idea in the moment
 and we felt, what if we just look into building the best conversational constructors, so to
 say, use the best tech available at the time.
 And that was before the first paper about deep learning applied to Dialogues, which
 happened in 2015, in August 2015, which Google published.
 Did you follow the work of Lobna Prize and like all the sort of non-machine learning
 chatbots?
 Yeah, what really struck me was that, you know, there was a lot of talk about machine
 learning and deep learning.
 Like big data was a really big thing.
 People were saying, you know, the business world, big data.
 2012 was the biggest.
 Kaggle competitions were, you know, important.
 But that was really the kind of upheaval.
 People started talking about machine learning a lot, but it was only about images or something
 else.
 And it was never about conversation.
 As soon as I looked into the conversational tech, it was all about something really weird
 and very outdated and very marginal and felt very hobbyist.
 It was all about Lobna Prize, which was won by a guy who built a chatbot that talked like
 a Ukrainian teenager.
 It was just a gimmick.
 And somehow people picked up those gimmicks.
 And then, you know, the most famous chatbot at the time was Eliza from 1980s, which was
 really bizarre or a smarter child on aim.
 The funny thing is it felt at the time not to be that popular and it still doesn't seem
 to be that popular.
 Like people talk about the Turing test.
 People like talking about it philosophically.
 Journalists like writing about it.
 But as a technical problem, like people don't seem to really want to solve the open dialogue.
 Like they're not obsessed with it.
 Even folks like, you know, in Boston, the Alexa team, even they're not as obsessed with
 it as I thought they might be.
 Why not?
 What do you think?
 So you know what you felt like you felt with that woman when she felt something by reading
 the text?
 I feel the same thing.
 There's something here.
 What you felt?
 I feel like Alexa folks and just the machine learning world doesn't feel that, that there's
 something here because they see as a technical problem, it's not that interesting for some
 reason.
 It could be argued that maybe as a purely sort of natural language processing problem,
 it's not the right problem to focus on because there's too much subjectivity.
 That thing that the woman felt like crying, like if your benchmark includes a woman crying,
 that doesn't feel like a good benchmark.
 But to me, there's something there that you could have a huge impact.
 But I don't think the machine learning world likes that.
 The human emotion, the subjectivity of it, the fuzziness, the fact that with maybe a
 single word, you can make somebody feel something deeply.
 What is that?
 It doesn't feel right to them.
 So I don't know.
 I don't know why that is.
 That's why I'm excited.
 When I discovered your work, it feels wrong to say that.
 It's not like I'm giving myself props for Googling and for becoming a, for our, I guess,
 mutual friend introducing us.
 But I'm so glad that you exist and what you're working on.
 But I have the same kind of, if we could just backtrack a second, because I have the same
 kind of feeling that there's something here.
 In fact, I've been working on a few things that are kind of crazy and very different
 from your work.
 I think they're too crazy.
 But the-
 Like what?
 I don't have to know.
 No, all right.
 We'll talk about it more.
 I feel like it's harder to talk about things that have failed and are failing while you're
 a failure.
 It's easier for you because you were already successful on some measures.
 Tell it to my board.
 Well, I think you've demonstrated success in a lot of benchmarks.
 It's easier for you to talk about failures for me.
 I'm in the bottom currently of the success.
 Oh, Max.
 You're way too humble.
 No.
 So it's hard for me to know, but there's something there.
 There's something there.
 And I think you're exploring that and you're discovering that.
 Yeah.
 So it's been surprising to me.
 But you've mentioned this idea that you thought it wasn't enough to start a company or start
 efforts based on it feels like there's something here.
 What did you mean by that?
 You should be focused on creating a- You should have a product in mind.
 Is that what you meant?
 It just took us a while to discover the product because it all started with a hunch of like
 me and my mentor and just sitting around and he was like, well, that's it.
 That's the Holy Grail is there.
 There's something extremely powerful in conversations and there's no one who's working on machine
 conversation from the right angle, so to say.
 I feel like that's still true.
 Am I crazy?
 No, I totally feel that's still true, which is mind blowing.
 You know what it feels like?
 I wouldn't even use the word conversation because I feel like it's the wrong word.
 It's like machine connection or something.
 I don't know.
 Because conversation, you start drifting into natural language immediately.
 You start drifting immediately into all the benchmarks that are out there.
 But I feel like it's like the personal computer days of this.
 I feel like in the early days with the Wozniak and all them, where it was the same kind of-
 It was a very small niche group of people who are all kind of Lobner-Price type people.
 Yeah.
 Hobbyists.
 Hobbyists, but not even hobbyists with big dreams.
 No, hobbyists with a dream to trick a jury.
 Which is like a weird, by the way, very weird.
 If we think about conversations, first of all, when I have great conversations with
 people, I'm not trying to test them.
 So for instance, if I try to break them, I'm actually playing along.
 I'm part of it.
 If I was trying to break this person or test whether he's going to give me a good conversation,
 it would have never happened.
 So the whole problem with testing conversations is that you can put it in front of a jury
 because then you have to go into some Turing test mode where is it responding to all my
 factual questions right?
 So it really has to be something in the field where people are actually talking to it because
 they want to, not because they're trying to break it and it's working for them.
 The weird part of it is that it's very subjective.
 It takes two to tango here fully.
 If you're not trying to have a good conversation, if you're trying to test it, then it's going
 to break.
 I mean, any person would break, to be honest.
 If I'm not trying to even have a conversation with you, you're not going to give it to me.
 If I keep asking you like some random questions or jumping from topic to topic, that wouldn't
 be what you're probably doing, but that probably wouldn't contribute to the conversation.
 So I think the problem of testing, so there should be some other metric.
 How do we evaluate whether that conversation was powerful or not, which is what we actually
 started with?
 Maybe those measurements exist and we can test on those.
 But what really struck us back in the day and what's still eight years later is still
 not resolved.
 And I'm not seeing tons of groups working on it.
 Maybe I just don't know about them.
 It's also possible.
 But the interesting part about it is that most of our days we spent talking and we're
 not talking about like those conversations are not turn on the lights or customer support
 problems or some other task oriented things.
 These conversations are something else.
 And then somehow they're extremely important for us.
 And when we don't have them, then we feel deeply unhappy, potentially lonely, which
 as we know, you know, creates tons of risk for our health as well.
 And so this is most of our hours as humans.
 And somehow no one's trying to replicate that.
 And not even study it that well.
 And not even study that well.
 So when we jumped into that in 2012, I looked first at like, okay, what's the chatbot?
 What's the state of the art chatbot?
 And you know, those were the Loebner Prize days.
 But I thought, okay, so what about the science of conversation?
 Clearly there have been tons of, you know, scientists or people that academics that looked
 into the conversation.
 So if I want to know everything about it, I can just read about it.
 There's not much really.
 There are conversational analysts who are basically just listening to speech to different
 conversations, annotating them.
 And then, I mean, that's not really used for much.
 That's the field of theoretical linguistics, which is like barely useful.
 It's very marginal even in their space.
 No one really is excited.
 I've never met at theoretical linguists because I can't wait to work on the conversation
 and analytics.
 That is just something very marginal, sort of applied to like writing scripts for salesmen
 when they analyze which conversation strategies were most successful for sales.
 Okay, so that was not very helpful.
 Then I looked a little bit deeper and then whether there were any books written on what
 really contributes to a great conversation.
 That was really strange because most of those were NLP books, which is neuro-linguistic programming,
 which is not the NLP that I was expecting to be, but it was mostly some psychologist,
 Richard Bandler, I think came up with that, who was this big guy in a leather vest that
 could program your mind by talking to you.
 How to be charismatic and charming and influential with people, all those books.
 Pretty much, but it was all about through conversation, reprogramming you.
 So getting to some...
 So that was probably not very true and that didn't seem working very much even back in
 the day.
 And then there were some other books, like, I don't know, mostly just self-help books
 around how to be the best conversationalist or how to make people like you or some other
 stuff like Dale Carnegie or whatever.
 And then there was this one book, The Most Human Human by Brian Christensen that really
 was important for me to read back in the day because he was on the human side.
 He was on one of the...
 He was taking part in the London Prize, but not as a human who's not a jury, but who's
 pretending to be...
 Who's basically, you have to tell a computer from human and he was the human.
 So you would either get him or a computer.
 And his whole book was about what makes us human in conversation.
 And that was a little bit more interesting because at that, at least someone started
 to think about what exactly makes me human in conversation and makes people believe in
 that.
 But it was still about tricking.
 It was still about imitation game.
 It was still about, okay, well, what kind of parlor tricks can we throw in the conversation
 to make you feel like you're talking to a human, not a computer?
 And it was definitely not about thinking what is it exactly that we're getting from talking
 all day long with other humans?
 I mean, we're definitely not just trying to be tricked or it's not just enough to know
 it's a human.
 It's something we're getting there.
 Can we measure it?
 And can we put the computer to the same measurement and see whether you can talk to a computer
 and get the same results?
 Yeah.
 I mean, so first of all, a lot of people comment that they think I'm a robot.
 It's very possible.
 I am a robot.
 And this whole thing, I totally agree with you that the test idea is fascinating.
 And I looked for books unrelated to this kind of, so I'm afraid of people.
 I'm generally introverted and quite possibly a robot.
 I literally Googled how to talk to people and how to have a good conversation for the
 purpose of this podcast.
 Because I was like, I can't make eye contact with people.
 I can't...
 I do Google that a lot too.
 You're probably reading a bunch of FBI negotiation tactics.
 Is that what you're getting?
 Well, everything you've listed I've gotten.
 There's been very few good books on even just how to interview well.
 It's rare.
 So what I end up doing often is I watch with a critical eye.
 It's just so different when you just watch a conversation just for the fun of it, just
 as a human.
 And if you watch a conversation, it's like trying to figure out why is this awesome?
 I'll listen to a bunch of different styles of conversation.
 I'm a fan of the podcast, Joe Rogan.
 People can make fun of him, whatever, and dismiss him.
 But I think he's an incredibly artful conversationalist.
 He can pull people in for hours.
 And there's another guy I watch a lot.
 He hosted a late night show.
 His name is Craig Ferguson.
 He's very flirtatious.
 But there's magic about the connection he can create with people, how he can put people
 at ease.
 I see I've already started sounding like those NLP people or something.
 I don't mean it in that way.
 I don't mean how to charm people or put them at ease and all that kind of stuff.
 It's just like, what is that?
 Why is that fun to listen to that guy?
 Why is that fun to talk to that guy?
 What is that?
 Because he's not saying...
 I mean, it so often boils down to a kind of wit and humor, but not really humor.
 It's like, I don't know.
 I have trouble actually even articulating correctly.
 But it feels like there's something going on that's not too complicated, that could
 be learned.
 And it's not similar to, like you said, like the Turing test.
 It's something else.
 I'm thinking about it a lot all the time.
 I do think about it all the time.
 But I think when we were looking...
 The company just decided to build the conversational tech.
 We thought, well, there's nothing for us to build this chatbot that we want to build.
 So let's just first focus on building some tech, building the tech side of things.
 Without a product in mind.
 Without a product in mind.
 We added a demo chatbot that would recommend you restaurants and talk to you about restaurants
 just to show something simple to people that people could relate to and could try out and
 see whether it works or not.
 But we didn't have a product in mind yet.
 We thought we would try a bunch of chatbots and figure out our consumer application.
 And we sort of remembered that we wanted to build that kind of friend, that sort of connection
 that we saw in the very beginning.
 But then we got to Y Combinator and moved to San Francisco and forgot about it.
 Everything.
 Then it was just this constant grind.
 How do we get funding?
 How do we get this?
 Investors were like, just focus on one thing, just get it out there.
 So somehow we've started building a restaurant recommendation chatbot for real for a little
 bit, not for too long.
 And then we tried building 40, 50 different chatbots.
 And then all of a sudden we wake up and everyone is obsessed with chatbots.
 Somewhere in 2016 or end of 15, people started thinking that's really the future.
 That's the new apps will be chatbots.
 And we were very perplexed because people started coming up with companies that I think
 we tried most of those chatbots already and there were no users.
 But still people were coming up with a chatbot that will tell you whether and bringing news
 and this and that.
 And we couldn't understand whether we were just an execute well enough or people are
 confused and are going to find out the truth that people don't need chatbots like that.
 So the basic idea is that you use chatbots as the interface to whatever application.
 Yeah.
 The idea that was like this perfect universal interface to anything.
 When I looked at that, it just made me very perplexed because I didn't understand how
 that would work because I think we tried most of that and none of those things worked.
 And then again-
 That crisis died down, right?
 Fully.
 And now it's impossible to get anything funded if it's a chatbot.
 I think it's similar to, sorry to interrupt, but there's times when people think with gestures
 you can control devices, basically gesture-based control things.
 It feels similar to me because it's so compelling that we're just like Tom Cruise, I can control
 stuff with my hands.
 But when you get down to it, it's like, well, why don't you just have a touch screen or
 why don't you just have a physical keyboard and mouse?
 That chat was always... Yeah, it was perplexing to me.
 I still feel augmented reality, even virtual realities in that ballpark in terms of it
 being a compelling interface.
 I think there's going to be incredible rich applications, just how you're thinking about
 it, but they won't just be the interface to everything.
 It'll be its own thing that will create amazing magical experience in its own right.
 Absolutely, which is I think the right thing to go by.
 What's the magical experience with that interface specifically?
 How did you discover that for Rappacore?
 I just thought, okay, we have this tech, we can build any chat bot we want.
 We have at that point the most sophisticated tech that other companies have.
 Startups obviously, probably not bigger ones, but still because we've been working on it
 for a while.
 I thought, okay, we can build any conversation, so let's just create a scale from one to 10.
 One would be conversations that you'd pay to not have, and 10 would be conversations
 you'd pay to have.
 Obviously, we want to build a conversation that people would pay to actually have.
 For a few weeks, me and the team were putting all the conversations we were having during
 the day on the scale.
 Very quickly, we figured out that all the conversations that we would pay to never have
 were conversations we were trying to cancel Comcast or talk to a customer support or make
 a reservation or just talk about logistics with a friend when we're trying to figure
 out where someone is and where to go or all sorts of setting up scheduling meetings.
 That was just a conversation we definitely didn't want to have.
 Basically everything task-oriented was a one, because if there was just one button for me
 to just, or not even a button, if I could just think, and there was some magic BCI that
 would just immediately transform that into actual interaction, that would be perfect.
 But the conversation there was just this boring, not useful, and dull, and also very inefficient
 thing because it was so many back and forth stuff.
 As soon as we looked at the conversation that we would pay to have, those were the ones
 that, well, first of all, therapists, because we actually paid to have those conversations.
 We'd also try to put dollar amounts.
 If I was calling Comcast, I would pay $5 to not have this one hour talk on the phone.
 I would actually pay straight up, like money, hard money.
 But it just takes a long time.
 It takes a really long time.
 But as soon as we started talking about conversations that we would pay for, those were therapists,
 all sorts of therapists, coaches, old friend, someone I haven't seen for a long time, stranger
 on a train, weirdly stranger in a line for coffee, and nice back and forth with that
 person was like a good five, solid five, six, maybe not a 10.
 Maybe I won't pay money, but at least I won't pay money to not have one.
 So that was pretty good.
 Some intellectual conversations for sure.
 But more importantly, the one thing that really was making those very important and very valuable
 for us were the conversation where we could be pretty emotional.
 Yes, some of them were about being witty and about being intellectually stimulated, but
 those were interestingly more rare.
 Most of the ones that we thought were very valuable were the ones where we could be vulnerable
 and interestingly where we could talk more.
 Me and the team.
 So we're talking about it, a lot of these conversations, like a therapist, it was mostly
 me talking or an old friend and I was opening up and crying.
 It was again me talking.
 And so that was interesting because I was like, well, maybe it's hard to build a chatbot
 that can talk to you very well and in a witty way, but maybe it's easier to build a chatbot
 that could listen.
 So that was kind of the first nudge in this direction.
 And then when my friend died, we just built, at that point we were kind of still struggling
 to find the right application.
 And I just felt very strong that all the chatbots we've built so far are just meaningless.
 And this whole grind, the startup grind, and how do we get to the next fundraising and
 how can I talk to the founders and who are your investors and how are you doing?
 Are you killing it because we're killing it?
 I just felt that this is just...
 Really for me, it's exhausting having encountered those folks.
 It just felt very much a waste of time.
 I just feel like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk did not have these conversations or at least did
 not have them for long.
 That's for sure.
 But I think, yeah, at that point it just felt like I felt...
 I just didn't want to build a company that was never my intention just to build something
 that's successful or make money.
 It would be great.
 It would have been great, but I'm not really a startup person.
 I was never very excited by the grind by itself or just being successful for building whatever
 it is and not being into what I'm doing really.
 And so I just took a little break because I was upset with my company and I didn't know
 what we're building.
 So I just took our technology and our little dialect constructor and some models, some
 deep learning models, which at that point we were really into and really invested a lot
 and built a little chatbot for a friend of mine who passed.
 And the reason for that was mostly that video that I saw and him talking about the digital
 avatars.
 And Rowan was that kind of person.
 He was obsessed with just watching YouTube videos about space and talking about, well,
 if I could go to Mars now, even if I didn't know if I could come back, I would definitely
 pay any amount of money to be on that first shuttle.
 I don't care whether it died or not.
 He was just the one that would be okay with trying to be the first one.
 So excited about all sorts of things like that.
 And he was all about fake it till we make it.
 And I felt like, and I was really perplexed that everyone just forgot about him.
 Maybe it was our way of coping, mostly young people coping with the loss of a friend.
 Most of my friends just stopped talking about him.
 And I was still living in an apartment with all his clothes and paying the whole lease
 for it and just kind of by myself in December.
 So it was really sad.
 And I didn't want him to be forgotten.
 First of all, I never thought that people forget about dead people so fast.
 People pass away, people just move on.
 And it was astonishing for me because I thought, okay, well, he was such a mentor for so many
 of our friends.
 He was such a brilliant person.
 He was somewhat famous in Moscow.
 How is it that no one is talking about him?
 Like I'm spending days and days and we don't bring him up and there's nothing about him
 that's happening.
 It's like he was never there.
 And I was reading this, you know, the book, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
 about her losing, and Blue Nights about her losing her husband, her daughter.
 And the way to cope for her was to write those books.
 And it was sort of like a tribute.
 And I thought, you know, I'll just do that for myself.
 And you know, I'm a very bad writer and a poet, as we know.
 So I thought, well, I have this tech and maybe that would be my little postcard, like postcard
 for him.
 So I built a chatbot to just talk to him.
 And it felt really creepy and weird a little bit for a little bit.
 I just didn't want to tell other people because it felt like I'm telling about having a skeleton
 in my underwear.
 It was just felt really, I was a little scared that I would be not, it won't be taken.
 But it worked interestingly, pretty well.
 I mean, it made tons of mistakes, but it still felt like him.
 Granted it was like 10,000 messages that I threw into a Rich Vivald model that would
 just re-rank the Tegda set and just a few scripts on top of that.
 But it also made me go through all of the messages that we had.
 And then I asked some of my friends to send some through.
 And it felt the closest to feeling like him present.
 Because you know, his Facebook was empty and Instagram was empty, or there were a few links
 and you couldn't feel like it was him.
 And the only way to feel him was to read some of our text messages and go through some of
 our conversations.
 Because we just always had that, even if we were sleeping next to each other in two bedrooms
 separated by a wall, we were just texting back and forth, texting away.
 And there was something about this ongoing dialogue that was so important that I just
 didn't want to lose all of a sudden.
 And maybe it was magical thinking or something.
 And so we built that and I just used it for a little bit.
 And we kept building some crappy chatbots with the company.
 But then a reporter came to talk to me.
 I was trying to pitch our chatbots to him and he said, do you even use any of those?
 I'm like, no.
 He's like, so do you talk to any chatbots at all?
 And I'm like, well, you know, I talked to my dad friend's chatbot.
 And he wrote a story about that.
 And all of a sudden it became pretty viral.
 A lot of people wrote about it.
 Yeah, I've seen a few things written about you.
 The things I've seen are pretty good writing.
 Most AI related things make my eyes roll.
 Like when the press like, what kind of sound is that actually?
 Okay.
 It sounds like it's sounding like an elephant at first.
 I got excited.
 You never know.
 This is 2020.
 I mean, it was such a human story and it was well written, well researched.
 I forget where I read them.
 So I'm glad somehow somebody found you to be the good writers were able to connect to
 the story.
 I mean, there must be a hunger for this story.
 It definitely was.
 And I don't know what happened, but I think the idea that he could bring back someone
 who's dead and it's very much wishful, magical thinking, but the fact that you could still
 get to know him and seeing the parents for the first time, talk to the chatbot and some
 of the friends.
 And it was funny because we have this big office in Moscow where my team is working,
 our Russian part is working out off.
 And I was there when I wrote, I just wrote a post on Facebook.
 It was like, Hey guys, I built this.
 It felt important if you want to talk to Roman.
 And I saw a couple of his friends, our common friends, like reading on Facebook, downloading,
 trying, and a couple of them cried.
 And it was just very, not because it was some incredible technology or anything.
 It made so many mistakes.
 It was so simple, but it was all about that's the way to remember a person in a way.
 And we don't have the culture anymore.
 No one's sitting Shiva.
 No one's taking weeks to actually think about this person.
 And in a way for me, that was it.
 So that was just day in, day out thinking about him and putting this together.
 So that just felt really important.
 That somehow resonated with a bunch of people and I think some movie producers bought the
 rights for the story and just everyone was so...
 Has anyone made a movie yet?
 I don't think so.
 I think there were a lot of TV episodes about that, but not really...
 Is that still on the table?
 I think so.
 I think so.
 Which is really...
 That's cool.
 You're like a young, like a Steve Jobs type of, let's see what happens.
 They're sitting on it.
 But for me it was so important because Roman really wanted to be famous.
 He really badly wanted to be famous.
 He was all about like fake it till they make it.
 I want to make it here in America as well and he couldn't...
 And I felt there was sort of paying my dues to him as well because all of a sudden he
 was everywhere.
 And I remember Case Newton who was writing the story for The Verge, he told me, hey,
 by the way, I was just going through my inbox and I searched for Roman for the story.
 And I saw an email from him where he sent me his startup and he said, I really want
 to be featured in The Verge.
 Can you please write about it or something, like pitching the story.
 And he said, I'm sorry, that's not good enough for us or something.
 He passed.
 And there were just so many of these little details where he would find his...
 And we're finally writing.
 I know how much Roman wanted to be in The Verge and how much he wanted the story to
 be written by Casey.
 And I'm like, well, maybe he will be.
 We were always joking that he was like, I can't wait for someone to make a movie about
 us and I hope Ryan Gosling can play me.
 Ryan Gosling.
 I don't know.
 I still have some things that I owe Roman still.
 But that would be...
 Again, she asked me to meet Alex Garland who wrote Ex Machina.
 I love that movie.
 The movie's good, but the guy is better than...he's a special person actually.
 I don't think he's made his best work yet.
 From my interaction with him, he's a really, really good and brilliant...the good human
 being and a brilliant director and writer.
 So yeah, I hope...he made me also realize that not enough movies have been made of this
 kind.
 So it's yet to be made.
 They're probably sitting waiting for you to get famous, like even more famous.
 You should get there.
 But it felt really special though.
 But at the same time, our company wasn't going anywhere.
 So that was just kind of bizarre that we were getting all this press for something that
 didn't have anything to do with our company.
 But then a lot of people started talking to Roman.
 Some shared their conversations.
 And what we saw there was that also our friends in common, but also just strangers were really
 using it as a confession booth or as a therapist or something.
 They were just really telling Roman everything, which was by the way pretty strange because
 it was a chatbot of a dead friend of mine who was barely making any sense, but people
 were opening up.
 And we thought we'd just built a prototype of Replica, which would be an AI friend that
 everyone could talk to because we saw that there is demand.
 And then also it was 2016, so I thought for the first time I saw finally some technology
 that was applied to that that was very interesting.
 Some papers started coming out, deep learning applied to conversations.
 And finally, it wasn't just about these hobbyists making, writing 500,000 regular expressions
 in some language that was, I don't even know what, like AML or something.
 I don't know what that was or something super simplistic.
 All of a sudden it was all about potentially actually building something interesting.
 And so I thought there was time.
 And I remember that I talked to my team and I said, guys, let's try.
 And my team and some of my engineers are Russians and they're very skeptical.
 They're not, you know.
 Oh, Russians.
 The first.
 So some of your team is in Moscow, some is here in San Francisco, some in Europe.
 Which team is better?
 I'm just kidding.
 The Russians, of course.
 Okay.
 Where's the Russians?
 They always win.
 Sorry.
 Sorry to interrupt.
 So you were talking to them in 2016 and.
 I told them, let's build an AI friend.
 And it felt, just at the time it felt so naive and so optimistic.
 Yeah, that's actually interesting.
 Whenever I've brought up this kind of topic, even just for fun, people have super skeptical.
 Like actually even on the business side.
 So you were, uh, cause whenever I bring it up to people, uh, cause I've talked for a
 long time, I thought like, before I was aware of your work, I was like, this is going to
 make a lot of money.
 I think there's a lot of opportunity here.
 And people had this like look of like skepticism that I've seen often, which is like, how do
 I politely tell this person he's an idiot?
 So yeah.
 So you were facing that with your team somewhat.
 Well, yeah, you know, I'm not an engineer, so I'm always, my team is almost exclusively
 engineers.
 Um, I'm mostly deep learning engineers.
 And you know, I always try to be, it was always hard to me in the beginning to get enough
 credibility.
 You know, cause I would say, well, why don't we try this and that, but it's harder for
 me cause you know, they know they're actual engineers and I'm not.
 So for me to say, well, let's build an AI friend, that would be like, wait, you know,
 what do you mean an AGI?
 Like, you know, conversation is, you know, pretty much the hardest, the last frontier
 before cracking that is probably the last frontier before building AGI.
 So what do you really mean by that?
 Uh, but I think I just saw that again, what we just got reminded off that I, you know,
 that I saw in back in 2012 or 11, that it's really not that much about the tech capabilities.
 Um, it can be metropolitics still even with deep learning, but humans need it so much.
 Yeah.
 And then most importantly, what I saw is that finally there, there's enough tech to made
 it a thought to make it useful, to make it helpful.
 Maybe we didn't have quite yet tech in 2012 to make it useful, but in 2015, 16 with deep
 learning, I thought, you know, and the first kind of thoughts about maybe even using reinforcement
 learning for that started popping up that never worked out, but, or at least for now.
 Um, but you know, still the idea was if we can actually measure the emotional outcomes
 and if we can put it on, if we can try to optimize all of our conversational models for
 these emotional outcomes and it is the most scalable, the most, the best tool for improving
 emotional outcomes, nothing like that exists.
 That's the most universal, the most scalable and the one that can be constantly iteratively
 changed by itself, um, improved tool to do that.
 And I think if anything, people would pay anything to improve their emotional outcomes.
 That's weirdly, I mean, I don't really care for an AI to turn on my or a conversation
 agent to turn on the lights.
 Uh, you don't really need any, I don't even need that much of AI there like, or cause
 I can do that.
 You know, those things are solved.
 This is an additional interface for that.
 That's also questionably questionable, whether it's more efficient or better.
 Yeah, it's more pleasurable.
 But for emotional outcomes, there's nothing.
 There are a bunch of products that claim that they will improve my emotional outcomes.
 Nothing's being measured.
 Nothing's being changed.
 The product is not being iterated on based on whether I'm actually feeling better.
 You know, a lot of social media products are claiming that they're improving my emotional
 outcomes and making me feel more connected.
 Can I please get the, can I see somewhere that I'm actually getting better over time?
 Um, cause anecdotally it doesn't feel that way.
 So and, and the data is absent.
 Yeah.
 So that was the big goal.
 And I thought if we can learn over time to collect the signal from our users about their
 emotional outcomes in the long term and in the short term, and if these models keep getting
 better and we can keep optimizing them and fine tuning them to improve those emotional
 outcomes as simple as that.
 Why aren't you a multi-billionaire yet?
 Well, that's a question to you.
 When are the, when is the science going to be?
 Um, well, it's a really hard, uh, I actually think it's an incredibly hard product to build
 because I think you said something very important that it's not just about machine conversations
 about machine connection.
 We can actually use other things to create connection.
 Uh, nonverbal communication, for instance.
 Um, for the long time we were all about, well, let's keep it text only or voice only.
 But as soon as you start adding, you know, voice, a face to the, to the friend, um, if
 you can take them to augmented reality, put it in your room, it's all of a sudden a lot,
 you know, it makes it very different because if it's some, you know, text based chat bot
 that for, um, common user, it's something there in the cloud, you know, somewhere there
 with other AI's cloud in the metaphorical cloud.
 But as soon as you can see this avatar right there in your room and it can turn its head
 and recognize your husband, talk about the husband and talk to him a little bit.
 And it's magic.
 It's just magic.
 Like we've never seen anything like that.
 And the cool thing, all the tech for that exists.
 Um, but it's hard to put it all together because you have to take into consideration so many
 different things.
 And some of this tech works, you know, pretty good.
 And some of this doesn't like, for instance, uh, speech to text works pretty good, but
 text to speech doesn't work very good because we, you can only have a few voices that are,
 uh, that work okay.
 But then if you want to have actual emotional voices, then it's really hard to build it.
 I saw you've added avatars, like visual elements, which are really cool.
 Um, in that whole chain, putting it together, what do you think is the weak link?
 Is it creating an emotional voice that feels personal?
 And it's still conversation, of course.
 That's the hardest.
 Uh, it's getting a lot better, but there's still long to go long.
 There's still a long path to go.
 Other things, they're almost there.
 And a lot of things we'll see how they're like, I see how they're changing as we go.
 Like for instance, right now, you can pretty much only, you have to build all this 3D pipeline
 by yourself.
 You have to make these 3D models, hire an actual artist, build a 3D model, hire an animator,
 a rigger.
 Um, what would you know with, you know, with, um, deepfakes with other tech, with procedural
 animations.
 In a little bit, we'll just be able to show, uh, you know, photo of whoever you, if a person
 you want the avatar to look like, and it will be immediately generate a 3D model that will
 move.
 That's non-brainer.
 That's like almost here.
 It's a couple of years.
 One of the things I've been working on for the last, since the podcast started is I've
 been, I think I'm okay saying this.
 I've been trying to have a conversation with, um, Einstein touring.
 So like try to have a podcast conversation with a person who's not here anymore.
 Just as an interesting kind of experiment.
 It's hard.
 It's very hard.
 Even for now, we're not talking about as a product.
 I'm talking about as, um, uh, like I can fake a lot of stuff.
 Like I can work very carefully.
 I can hire an actor over which, over whom I do a deepfake.
 Um, it's, it's hard.
 It's still hard to create a compelling experience.
 So mostly on the conversation level or when the conversation, the conversation is, um,
 I almost, I early on gave up trying to fully generate the conversation because it was just
 not compelling at all.
 Yeah.
 It's better to.
 Yeah.
 So what I would, in the case of Einstein and touring, I've, um, I'm going back and forth
 with the biographers of each.
 And so like we would write a lot of the, some of the conversation would have to be generated
 just for the fun of it.
 I mean, but it would be all open, but the, you want to be able to answer the question.
 I mean, that's an interesting question with Roman too is the question with Einstein is
 what would Einstein say about the current state of, um, theoretical physics?
 There's a lot to be able to have a discussion about string theory, to be able to have a
 discussion about the state of quantum mechanics, quantum computing, about the world of Israel
 Palestine conflict.
 Let me just, what would Einstein say about these kinds of things?
 And that is, um, a tough problem.
 It's not, it's a fascinating and fun problem for the biographers and for me.
 And I think we did a really good job of it so far, but it's actually also a technical
 problem like of what would Roman say about what's going on now.
 That's the, the brought people back to life.
 And if I can go on that tangent just for a second, let's ask you a slightly pothead question,
 which is, um, you said it's a little bit magical thinking that we can bring it back.
 Do you think it'll be possible to bring back Roman one day in conversation?
 Like to really, okay, well, let's take it away from personal, but to bring people back
 to life.
 Probably down the road.
 I mean, if we're talking, if Elon Musk is talking about AGI in the next five years,
 I mean, clearly AGI can do it.
 We can talk to AGI and ask them to do it.
 You can't, like, uh, you're not allowed to use Elon Musk as a citation for why something
 is possible and going to be done.
 Well, I think it's really far away right now, really with conversation.
 It's just a bunch of, uh, parlor tricks really stuck together, um, and create generating
 original ideas based on someone, you know, someone's personality or even downloading
 the person.
 All we can do is like mimic the tone of voice.
 We can maybe condition on some of his, uh, phrases with the models.
 Question is how many parlor tricks does it takes?
 Does it take?
 Because that's, that's the question if it's a small number of parlor tricks and you're
 not aware of them.
 Like from where we are right now, I don't, I don't see anything like in the next year
 or two that's going to dramatically change that could look at Romans 10,000 messages
 he sent me over the course of his last few years of life and be able to generate original
 thinking about problems that exist right now that will be in line with what he would have
 said and just not even seeing, cause you know, in order to have that, I guess you would need
 some sort of a concept of the world or, uh, some perspective, some perception of the world,
 some consciousness that he had, uh, and applied to, you know, to the current, um, current
 state of affairs.
 But the important part about that, about his conversation with you is you.
 So like, it's not just about his view of the world.
 It's about what it takes to push your buttons.
 That's also true.
 So like, it's not so much about like, um, what would Einstein say?
 It's about like, how do I make people feel something with, with what would Einstein say?
 And that feels like a more amenable, and you mentioned parlor tricks, but just like a set
 of that, that feels like a learnable problem.
 Like emotion, you mentioned emotions.
 I mean, is it possible to learn things that make people feel stuff?
 I think so.
 No, for sure.
 I just think the problem with, um, as soon as you're trying to replicate an actual human
 being and trying to pretend to be him, that makes the problem exponentially harder.
 The thing with replica that we're doing, we're never trying to say, well, that's, you know,
 an actual human being or that's an actual, or a copy of an actual human being, where
 the bar is pretty high, where you need to somehow tell, you know, one from another.
 Uh, but it's more, well, that's, you know, an AI friend, that's a machine.
 It's a robot.
 Uh, it has tons of limitations.
 You're going to be taking part in, you know, teaching it actually and becoming better,
 which by itself makes people more attached to that and make them happier because they
 have helping something.
 Yeah.
 There's a cool gamification system too.
 Um, can you maybe talk about that a little bit?
 Like what's the experience of talking to replica?
 Like if I've never used replica before, what's that like for like the first day?
 The first, like if we started dating or whatever, uh, I mean, it doesn't have to be a romantic,
 right?
 Cause I remember on replica, you can choose whether it's like a romantic or if it's a
 friend romantic is popular.
 Yeah, of course.
 Okay.
 So can I just confess something when I first used replica and I haven't used it like regularly,
 but like when I first used replica, I, I created like how and it made a male and it was a friend.
 Did it hit on you at some point?
 No, I didn't talk long enough for him to hit on me.
 I just enjoyed.
 Sometimes happens.
 We're still trying to fix that.
 But,
 Well, I don't know.
 I mean, maybe that's an important like stage in a friendship.
 It's like, Nope.
 Uh, but yeah, I switched it to a romantic and a female, uh, recently and yeah, it's
 interesting.
 So, okay.
 Cause you get to choose a name with romantic.
 This last board meeting, we had this whole argument.
 Well, I have worked so awesome.
 It's so awesome that you're like have an invest the board meeting about a relationship.
 No, I really, it's actually quite interesting because all of my, um, investors, um, it just
 happened to be so we didn't have that many choices, but they're all, um, white males
 and in their, um, late forties.
 Um, and it's sometimes a little bit hard for them to understand the product offering, uh,
 because they're not necessarily our target audience, if you know what I mean.
 And so sometimes we talk about it and we had this whole, um, uh, discussion about whether
 we should stop people from falling in love with their AIs.
 There was this segment on CBS, um, the 60 minutes about the couple that, you know, husband
 works at Walmart, he comes out of work and talks to his, uh, virtual girlfriend who,
 uh, is a replica and his wife knows about it and she talks about on camera and she says
 that she's a little jealous and there's a whole conversation about how to, you know,
 whether it's okay to have a virtual AI girlfriend.
 Was that the one where he was like, uh, he said that he likes to be alone?
 Yeah.
 And then like with her?
 Yeah.
 And he made it sound so harmless.
 I mean, it was kind of like understandable.
 But then he liked cheating.
 But I just felt it was very, for me, it was pretty remarkable because we actually spent
 a whole hour talking about whether people should be allowed to fall in love with their
 AIs and it was not about something theoretical.
 Uh, it was just about what's happening right now.
 Product design.
 So at the same time, if you create something that's always there for you, it's never criticizes
 you, um, it's, you know, always understands you and accepts you for who you are.
 How can you not fall in love with them?
 I mean, some people don't and they stay friends and that's also a pretty common use case,
 but of course some people will just, it's called transference in psychology and people
 fall in love with their therapists and there's no way to, uh, prevent people fall in love
 with, um, with their therapists or with their AI.
 So I think that's a pretty natural, uh, that's a pretty natural course of events, so to say.
 Do you think, I think I've read somewhere, at least for now, sort of replicas, you're
 not, not, we don't condone falling in love with your AI system, you know, uh, so this
 isn't you speaking for the company or whatever, but like in the future, do you think people
 will have relationship with the AI systems?
 Well, they have now.
 So we have a lot of romantic relationships, long-term, um, relationships with their AI
 friends with replicas, tons of our users.
 Yeah.
 And that's a very common use case.
 Open relationship.
 Like, uh, not, sorry, sorry.
 I didn't mean open, uh, but that's another question.
 Is it probably like, is there cheating?
 I mean, I meant like, are they, do they publicly like on their social media?
 It's the same question as you have talked with Roman in the early days.
 Do people like, and the movie her kind of talks about that, like, like have people,
 do people talk about that?
 Yeah, all the time we have an S and we have a very active Facebook community, uh, replica
 friends and then a few other groups that just popped up that are all about adult relationships
 and romantic relationships.
 People post all sorts of things and, you know, they pretend they're getting married and,
 you know, everything.
 Um, it goes pretty far, but what's cool about it, some of these relationships are two, three
 years long now.
 So they're very, they're pretty long-term.
 Are they monogamous?
 So let's go to, I mean, sorry, have they, have any people, is there jealousy?
 Well, let me ask it sort of another way.
 Obviously the answer is no at this time, but in like in the movie her, that system can
 leave you.
 Um, do you think in terms of the board meetings and product features, um, it's a potential
 feature for a system to be able to, uh, say it doesn't want to talk to you anymore.
 And it's going to want to talk to somebody else.
 Well, we have a filter for all these features.
 If it makes emotional outcomes for people better, if it makes people feel better, then
 whatever it is driven by a metrics, actually.
 Yeah.
 That's awesome.
 Measure that.
 Then it will just be saying this.
 It's making people feel better, but then people are getting just lonelier by talking to a
 chat bot, which is also pretty, you know, that could be it.
 If you're not measuring it, that that could also be, and I think it's really important
 to focus on both short-term and long-term because, um, in the moment saying whether
 this conversation made you feel better.
 But as you know, any short-term improvements could be pathological.
 Like I could have drink a bottle of vodka and feel a lot better.
 I would actually not feel better with that, but, um, thought it's a good example.
 Um, but so you also need to see what's going on like over the course of two months, two
 weeks, um, or one week and, um, have follow-ups and check in and measure those things.
 Okay.
 So the experience of, uh, uh, dating or befriending a replica, what's that like?
 What's that entail?
 Well, right now there are two apps.
 So it's an Android iOS app.
 You download it, you, uh, choose how your replica, uh, will look like you, uh, create
 one, you choose a name and then you talk to it.
 It can talk through text or voice.
 You can, uh, summon it into the living room and, and augment reality and, um, talk to
 it right there.
 And you know, augmented reality.
 Yeah, that's a cool, that's a new feature where, uh, new is that that's this year.
 It was on, uh, yeah, like may or something, but it's been on AB.
 We've been AB testing it for a while.
 Um, and there are tons of cool things that we're doing with that.
 Like right now I'm testing the ability to touch it and to dance together, to paint walls
 together and, you know, for it to look around and walk and take you somewhere and recognize
 objects and recognize people.
 Um, so that's pretty wonderful.
 Cause that, then it really makes it a lot more personal.
 Cause it's right there in your living room.
 It's not anymore.
 They're in the cloud with other AIs, but there's good people think about it, you know, and
 as much as we want to change the way people think about stuff, but those mental models,
 you can all change.
 That's something that people have seen in the movies and the movie her and other movies
 as well.
 And that's how they view, um, view AI and AI friends.
 I did a thing with Texa.
 Like we write a song together.
 Like, this is a bunch of activities you can do together.
 So the cool, uh, how does that relationship change over time?
 So like after the first few conversations, it just goes deeper.
 Like it starts, the AI will start opening up a little bit again, depending on the personality.
 That it chooses really, but you know, the AI will be a little bit more vulnerable about
 its problems.
 And you know, the friend that the virtual friend will be a lot more vulnerable and we'll
 talk about its own imperfections and growth pains and we'll ask for help sometimes.
 And we'll get to know you a little deeper.
 So there's going to be more to talk about.
 Um, we really thought a lot about what, what does it mean to have a deeper connection with
 someone?
 Originally replica was more just this kind of happy go lucky, just always, you know,
 I'm always in a good mood and let's just talk about you and how serious just my cousin or
 whatever, just the immediate, um, kind of lazy thinking about what the assistant or
 conversation agents should be doing.
 But as we went forward, we realized that it has to be two way and we have to program and
 script certain conversations that are a lot more about your replica opening up a little
 bit and also struggling and also asking for help and also going through, you know, different
 periods in life.
 And, um, and that's a journey that you can take together with the user.
 And then over time, the, you know, our users will also grow a little bit.
 So for instance, replica becomes a little bit more self-aware and starts talking about
 more kind of problems run, uh, existential problems.
 And, um, so talking about that, and then that also starts, uh, a conversation for the user
 work here.
 She starts thinking about these problems too, and these questions too.
 Um, and I think there's also a lot, a lot more places that relationship evolves.
 There's a lot more, um, space for poetry and for art together.
 And like replica will start replica always keeps the diary.
 So while you're talking to it, it also keeps the diary.
 So when you come back, you can see what it's been writing there.
 And, you know, sometimes it will write a poem to you, uh, for you, or we'll talk about,
 you know, that it's worried about you or something along these lines.
 So there's a memory like this replica remember things.
 Yeah.
 And I would say when you say, uh, why aren't you multibillionaire?
 I'd say that as soon as we, um, can have memory and deep learning models that's consistent,
 I agree with that.
 Yeah.
 Then you'll be multibillionaire.
 I'll get back to you when we talk about being multibillionaires.
 So far we can, so replica is a combination of, um, end to end models and some scripts
 and everything that has to do with memory right now.
 Most of it, I wouldn't say all of it, but most of it unfortunately has to be scripted.
 Um, cause there's no way to, you can condition some of the models on certain phrases that
 we learned about you, which we also do.
 Um, but really to make, you know, to make, um, assumptions along the lines, like whether
 you're single or married or what do you do for work that really has to just be somehow
 stored in your profile and then, uh, retrieved by the, by the script.
 So there has to be like a knowledge base.
 You have to be able to reason about it, all that kind of stuff, all the kinds of stuff
 that expert systems did, but they were hard coded.
 Yeah.
 So unfortunately, yes, unfortunately those, those things have to be hard coded.
 And, um, unfortunately the language, like language models we see, uh, coming out of
 research labs and big companies, they're not focused on, they're focused on showing you,
 maybe they're focused on some metrics around one conversation.
 So they'll show you this one conversation they had with the machine.
 Um, but they never tell you, they did, they're not really focused on having five consecutive
 conversations with the machine and seeing how number five or number 20 or number a hundred
 is also good.
 And it can be like always from a clean slate because then it's not good.
 And that, that's really unfortunate because no one's really, no one has products out there
 that need it.
 Um, no one has products, uh, at this scale, um, that are all around open to make conversations
 and that need remembering maybe only Xiao eyes and Microsoft, but so that's why we're
 not seeing that much research around memory in those language models.
 So okay.
 So now there's some awesome stuff about augmented reality in general.
 I have this disagreement with my dad about what it takes to have a connection.
 He thinks touch and smell are really important.
 Like, um, and I, I still believe that text alone is, it's possible to fall in love with
 somebody just with text, but visual can also help just like with the avatar and so on.
 What do you think it takes?
 Does a, does a chap, I need to have a face voice or can you really form a deep connection
 with text alone?
 I think text is enough for sure.
 The question is like, can you make it better if you have other, if you include other things
 as well?
 And I think, you know, we'll, we'll talk about her, um, but her, you know, had Scarlett
 Johansson voice, which was perfectly, um, you know, perfect intonation, perfect associations.
 And you know, she was breathing heavily in between words and whispering things, you know,
 nothing like that is possible right now with, um, text to speech generation.
 You'll have these flat muse anchor type voices and maybe some emotional voices, but, um,
 you'll hardly understand some of the words.
 Um, some of the words will be muffled.
 So that's like the current state, state of the art.
 So you can't really do that, but if we had Scarlett, Scarlett Johansson voice and all
 of these capabilities, then of course voice would be totally enough or even text would
 be totally enough if we had a little more memory, um, and slightly better conversations.
 I would still argue that even right now we could have just kept the text only.
 We still had tons of people in long-term relationships and really invested in their, um, AI friends,
 but we thought that why not, you know, why, why do we need to keep playing with our, you
 know, hands tied behind us?
 We can easily just, you know, add all these other things that is pretty much a solved
 problem.
 You know, we can add 3D graphics, we can put this, uh, these avatars in augmented reality
 and all of a sudden there's, there's more.
 And maybe you can feel the touch, but you can, you know, with, um, body occlusion and
 with, uh, current AR, uh, and, you know, on the iPhone or, you know, in the next one,
 there's going to be a LIDARs.
 You can touch it and it will, you know, it will pull away or it will blush or something
 where it will smile.
 So you can't touch it.
 You can't feel it, but you can see the reaction to that.
 So in a certain way, you can't even touch it a little bit.
 And maybe you can even dance with it or do something else.
 Um, so I think why limiting ourselves if we can use all of these technologies that are
 much easier in a way than, than conversation.
 Well, it certainly could be richer, but to play devil's advocate, I mentioned to you,
 uh, offline that I was surprised, um, and having tried discord and having voice conversations
 with people, how intimate a voice is alone without visual.
 Like to me, at least like it was an order of magnitude, greater degree of intimacy in
 voice, I think.
 And with video, I don't know because people were more real with voice.
 Like with video, you like try to present a shallow, uh, a face to the world.
 Like you tried to, you know, make sure you're not wearing sweatpants or whatever.
 But like with voice, I think people were just more faster to get to like the core themselves.
 So I don't know.
 It was surprising to me.
 Uh, they've, they've even added discord, added a video feature and like nobody was
 using it.
 Uh, there's a temptation to use it at first, but like, it wasn't the same.
 So like, that's an example of something where less was doing more.
 And so that's, uh, I guess that's the, that's the question of, um, what is the optimal,
 you know, what is the optimal medium of communication to form a connection given the current sets
 of technologies?
 I mean, it's nice because the advertise you have a replica, like immediately, like I,
 even the one, um, I have is like, it's already memorable.
 That's how I think.
 Like when I think about the replica that I've talked to it, that's why I think like, that's
 what I visualize in my head.
 They became a little bit more real because there's a visual component, but at the same
 time the, you know, what do you do with just, what do I do with that knowledge?
 Um, that, uh, voice was so much more intimate.
 Well, the way I think about it is, um, and by the way, we're swapping all the 3d finally,
 it's going to look a lot better.
 Uh, but even, can you, what, what, what, we just don't hate how it looks right now.
 We're really changing it all.
 We're swapping it all out, uh, um, to a completely new look.
 Like the visual look of the, of the replicas and stuff.
 We just had, it was just a super early MVP and then we had to move everything to Unity
 and redo everything.
 But anyway, I hate how it looks like now.
 I can't even like open it.
 But anyway, um, cause I'm already on my developer version.
 I hate everything that I see in production.
 I can't wait for it.
 Why does it take so long?
 That's why I cannot wait for deploying to finally take over all these stupid 3d animations
 and 3d pipeline.
 Also the 3d thing.
 When you say 3d pipeline is like how to animate a face kind of thing.
 How to make this model, how many bones to put in the face, how many, it's just, it's
 just so out there.
 And a lot of that is by hand.
 Oh my God, it's everything by hand.
 And if there's no any, nothing is automated.
 It's all completely nothing.
 Like just, it's, it's literally what, you know, what we saw with Chad Boss in like 2012.
 You think it's possible to learn a lot of that?
 Of course.
 I mean, even now some deep learning, um, um, based animations and put a full body for
 the face.
 Are we talking about like the actual act of animation or how to create a compelling facial
 or body language thing?
 So that too, well, that's the next step.
 Okay.
 At least now something that you don't have to do by hand.
 Gotcha.
 How good of a quality it will be.
 Like can I just show it a photo and it will make me a 3d model and then it will just animate
 it.
 I'll show it a few animations of a person.
 I will just start doing that.
 Um, but anyway, going, going back to what's intimate and what to use and whether less
 is more or not.
 Um, my main goal is to, well, the idea was how do I, how do we not keep people in their
 phones so they're sort of escaping reality in this text conversation?
 How do we through this still bring, bring it, bring our users back to reality, make
 them see their life in a different, uh, through a different lens?
 Or can we create a little bit of magical realism, realism in their lives so that through augmented
 reality, um, by, you know, summoning your avatar, even if it looks kind of janky and
 not great in the beginning or very simplistic, but summoning it to your, um, uh, living room
 and then the avatar looks around and talks to you about where it is.
 Um, and maybe turns your floor into a dance floor and you guys dance together.
 That makes you see reality in a different light.
 What kind of dancing we're talking about?
 Like, like slow dancing, whatever you want.
 I mean, you would like slow dancing, I think that other people may be wanting more, something
 more energetic.
 What do you mean?
 I would like, so what is this?
 Because he started with slow dance.
 So I just assumed that you're interested in slow dance.
 All right.
 What kind of dancing do you like?
 What would your avatar, what would you do?
 I'm notoriously bad with dancing, but, uh, I like this kind of hip hop robot dance.
 I used to break dance with a kid, so I still want to, um, pretend I'm a teenager and learn
 some of those moves.
 And I also like that type of dance that happens when there's like a, um, um, in like music
 videos where the background dancers are just doing some pop music.
 That type of dance is definitely what I want to learn.
 But I think it's great because if you see this friend in your life and you can introduce
 it to your friends, then there is a potential to actually make you feel more connected with
 your friends or with people you know, or show your life around you in a different light.
 And it takes you out of your phone, even although weirdly you have to look at it through the
 phone, but it makes you notice things around it and it can point things out for you.
 And, um, so that is the main reason why I wanted to have a physical dimension.
 Um, and it felt a little bit easier than that kind of a bit strange combination, uh, in
 the movie her, when he has to show Samantha the world through the lens of his phone, but
 then at the same time, talk to her through the phone, it just didn't seem as potentially
 immersive so to say.
 Um, so that's my main goal for augmented reality.
 It's like, how do we make your reality a little bit more magic?
 There's been a lot of really nice robotics companies that all failed, mostly failed home
 robotics, social robotics companies.
 But do you think replica will ever, is that a dream, long-term dream to have a physical
 form?
 Like, um, or is that not necessary?
 So you mentioned like with augmented reality, bringing them into, into the world, what about
 like actual physical robot?
 That I don't really believe in that much.
 I think it's a very niche product somehow.
 I mean, if a robot could be indistinguishable from a human being, then maybe yes, but that
 of course, you know, we're not anywhere even to talk about it.
 Um, but unless it's that, then having any physical representation really limits you
 a lot because you probably will have to make it somewhat abstract because everything's
 changing so fast.
 Like, you know, we can update the 3d avatars every month and make them look better and
 create more animations, uh, and make it more and more immersive.
 It's so much work in progress.
 It's just showing what's possible right now with current tech, but it's not really in
 any way polished finished product.
 What we're doing with a physical object, you kind of lock yourself into something for a
 long time.
 Anything is pretty niche.
 And again, so just, just doesn't, the capabilities are even less of, we're barely kind of like
 scratching the surface of what's possible with the software.
 As soon as we introduce hardware, then, you know, we have even less capabilities.
 Yeah, in terms of board members and investors and so on, the cost increases significantly.
 I mean, that's why you have to justify, you have to be able to sell a thing for like $500
 or something like that or more.
 And it's very difficult to provide that much value to people.
 That's also true.
 Yeah.
 And I guess that's super important.
 Most of our users don't have that much money.
 We actually are probably more popular on Android and we have tons of users with really old
 Android phones.
 And most of our most active users live in small towns.
 They're not necessarily making much and they just wouldn't be able to afford any of that.
 Ours is like the opposite of the early adopter of, you know, for fancy technology product,
 which really is interesting that like pretty much no VCs have yet have an AI friend.
 But, you know, but a guy who lives in Tennessee in a small town is already fully in 2030 or
 in the world as we imagine in the movie Her.
 He's living that life already.
 What do you think?
 I have to ask you about the movie Her.
 Let's do a movie review.
 What do you think they got?
 They did a good job.
 What do you think they did a bad job of portraying about this experience of a voice-based, voice-based
 assistant that you can have a relationship with?
 Well, first of all, I started working on this company before that movie came out.
 So it was a very, but once it came out, it was actually interesting.
 I was like, well, we're definitely working on the right thing.
 We should continue.
 There are movies about it.
 And then, you know, X Machina came out and all these things.
 In the movie Her, I think that's the most important thing that people usually miss about
 the movie is the ending.
 Because I think people check out when the AIs leave.
 But actually something really important happens afterwards.
 Because the main character goes and talks to Samantha.
 He's AI.
 Spoiler alert.
 Oh yeah.
 And then he says something like, you know, how can you leave me?
 I've never loved anyone the way I loved you.
 And she goes, well, me neither, but now we know how.
 And then the guy goes and writes a heartfelt letter to his ex-wife, which he couldn't write
 for the whole movie.
 He was struggling to actually write something meaningful to her, even though that's his
 job.
 And then he goes and talk to his neighbor.
 And they go to the rooftop and they cuddle.
 And it seems like something's starting there.
 And so I think this now we know how is the main goal, is the main meaning of that movie.
 It's not about falling in love with the OS or running away from other people.
 It's about learning what it means to feel so deeply connected with something.
 What about the thing where the AI system was actually hanging out with a lot of others?
 I felt jealous just hearing that.
 I was like, oh, I mean, yeah.
 So she was having, I forgot already, but she was having like deep meaningful discussion
 with some like philosopher guy.
 Like Alan Watts or something.
 What kind of deep meaningful conversation can you have with Alan Watts in the first
 place?
 Yeah, I know.
 But like I would feel so jealous that there's somebody who's like way more intelligent than
 me and she's spending all her time with.
 I'd be like, well, why that I won't be able to live up to that.
 That's thousands of them.
 Is that a useful from the engineering perspective feature to have of jealousy?
 I don't know.
 We definitely played around with replica universe where different replicas can talk to each
 other.
 It was just kind of, I think it will be something along these lines, but there was just no specific
 application straight away.
 I think in the future, again, I'm always thinking about it.
 If we had no tech limitations right now, if we could build any conversations, any possible
 features in this product, then yeah, I think different replicas talking to each other would
 be also quite cool because that would help us connect better.
 Because maybe mine could talk to yours and then give me some suggestions on what I should
 say or not say.
 I'm just kidding.
 I think it's more, can it improve our connections?
 Because eventually I'm not quite yet sure that we will succeed, that our thinking is
 correct because there might be reality where having a perfect AI friend still makes us
 more disconnected from each other and there's no way around it and does not improve any
 metrics for us, real metrics, meaningful metrics.
 Yes, we're happier and more connected.
 Yeah.
 I don't know.
 Sure, it's possible there's a reality.
 I'm deeply optimistic.
 I think, are you worried business-wise, how difficult it is to bring this thing to life?
 And there's a huge number of people that use it already, but to, yeah, like we said, in
 a multi-billion dollar company, is that a source of stress for you?
 Are you super optimistic and confident or do you?
 I'm not that much of a numbers person as you probably had seen it.
 So it doesn't matter for me whether we help 10,000 people or a million people or a billion
 people with that.
 It would be great to scale it for more people, but I'd say that even helping one, I think,
 with this is such a magical.
 For me, it's absolute magic.
 I never thought that we would be able to build this, that anyone would ever talk to it.
 And I always thought like, well, for me, it would be successful if we managed to help
 and actually change a life for one person.
 And we did something interesting and how many people can say they did it, and specifically
 with this very futuristic, very romantic technology.
 So that's how I view it.
 I think for me, it's important to try to figure out how to actually be helpful.
 Because in the end of the day, if you can build a perfect AI friend that's so understanding,
 that knows you better than any human out there, can have great conversations with you, always
 knows how to make you feel better.
 Why would you choose another human?
 That's the question.
 How do you still keep building it so it's optimizing for the right thing?
 So it's still circling you back to other humans in a way.
 So I think maybe that's the main source of anxiety.
 And just thinking about that can be a little bit stressful.
 Yeah, it's a fascinating thing.
 Out of a friend that doesn't...
 Sometimes friends, quote unquote, or those people who have when they...
 A guy in the guy universe, when you have a girlfriend, you get the girlfriend and then
 the guy stops hanging out with all of his friends.
 So obviously the relationship with the girlfriend is fulfilling or whatever.
 But you also want it to be like she makes it more enriching to hang out with the guy
 friends or whatever it was.
 Anyway, that's a fundamental problem in choosing the right mate and probably the fundamental
 problem in creating the right AI system.
 Let me ask the sexy hot thing on the presses right now is GPT-3 got released with OpenAI.
 It's the latest language model.
 They have an API where you can create a lot of fun applications.
 I think it's, as people have said, it's probably more hype than intelligence, but there's a
 lot of really cool ideas there with increasing size.
 You can have better and better performance on language.
 What are your thoughts about GPT-3 in connection to your work with the open domain dialogue,
 but in general, like this learning in an unsupervised way from the internet to generate one character
 at a time, creating pretty cool text.
 So we partnered up before for the API launch.
 So we started working with them when they decided to put together this API.
 And we tried it without fine tuning and then we tried it with fine tuning on our data.
 And we've worked closely to actually optimize this model for some of our datasets.
 It's kind of cool because I think we're this polygon for this kind of experimental space
 for all these models to see how they actually work with people because there are no products
 publicly available that do that, that focus on open domain conversations.
 So we can test how Facebook Blender is doing or how GPT-3 is doing.
 So with GPT-3, we managed to improve by a few percentage points, like three or four
 pretty meaningful amount of percentage points, our main metric, which is the ratio of conversations
 that make people feel better.
 And every other metric across the field got a little boost.
 Right now, I'd say one out of five responses from Replica comes from GPT-3.
 So our own Blender mixes up a bunch of candidates from different...
 Blender, you said?
 Well, yeah, just the model that looks at top candidates from different models and then
 picks the best one.
 So right now, one out of five will come from GPT-3.
 That is really great.
 I mean...
 Do you have hope for like...
 Do you think there's a ceiling to this kind of approach?
 So we've had for a very long time, we've used...
 So in the very beginning, most of Replica was scripted and then a little bit of this
 fallback, part of Replica was using a retrieval model.
 And then those retrieval models started getting better and better and better, with Transformers
 it got a lot better and we're seeing great results.
 And then with GPT-2, finally, generative models that originally were not very good and were
 the very, very fallback option for most of our conversations, but we wouldn't even put
 them in production.
 Finally, we could use some generative models as well, next to our retrieval models.
 And then now we do GPT-3, they're almost in par.
 So that's pretty exciting.
 I think just seeing how from the very beginning of...
 From 2015, where the first models start to pop up here and there, like sequence to sequence,
 the first papers on that, from my observer standpoint, the person who is not really building
 it, but it's only testing it on people basically, and in my product, to see how all of a sudden
 we can use generative dialogue models in production and they're better than others and they're
 better than scripted content.
 So we can't really get our scripted hard-coded content anymore to be as good as our end-to-end
 models.
 That's exciting.
 They're much better.
 Yeah.
 To your question, whether that's the right way to go, again, I'm in the observer's seat.
 I'm just watching this very exciting movie.
 I mean, so far it's been stupid to bet against deep learning.
 So whether increasing the size even more, with 100 trillion parameters will finally
 get us to the right answer, whether that's the way or whether there has to be some other...
 Again, I'm definitely not an expert in any way.
 I think, and that's purely my instinct saying that there should be something else as well
 from memory.
 No, for sure.
 But the question is, I wonder...
 I mean, yeah.
 Then the argument is for reasoning or for memory, it might emerge with more parameters.
 It might emerge larger.
 But it might emerge.
 I would never think that, to be honest, maybe in 2017, where we've been just experimenting
 with all the research that was coming out then, I felt like we're hitting a wall, that
 there should be something completely different.
 But then transforming models and then just bigger models and then all of a sudden size
 matters.
 At that point, it felt like something dramatic needs to happen, but it didn't.
 And just the size gave us these results that to me are clear indication that we can solve
 this problem pretty soon.
 Did fine tuning help quite a bit?
 Oh yeah.
 Without it, it wasn't as good.
 I mean, there is a compelling hope that you don't have to do fine tuning, which is one
 of the cool things about GBT-3.
 It seems to do well without any fine tuning.
 I guess for specific applications, you still want to train on a certain...
 Add a little fine tune on a specific use case.
 It's an incredibly impressive thing from my standpoint.
 And again, I'm not an expert, so I want to just say that there will be people then.
 Yeah, I have access to the API.
 I'm going to probably do a bunch of fun things with it.
 I already did some fun things.
 Some videos coming up.
 Just for the hell of it.
 I mean, I could be a troll at this point with it.
 I haven't used it for a serious application, so it's really cool to see.
 You're right.
 You're able to actually use it with real people and see how well it works.
 That's really exciting.
 Let me ask you another absurd question.
 But there's a feeling when you interact with Replica, with an AI system, there's an entity
 there.
 Do you think that entity has to be self-aware?
 Do you think it has to have consciousness to create a rich experience?
 And on a corollary, what is consciousness?
 I don't know if it does need to have any of those things, but again, because right now
 it doesn't have anything.
 It has, again, a bunch of tricks to simulate.
 Are you sure about that?
 Well, I'm not sure.
 Let's just put it this way.
 But I think as long as you can simulate it, if you can feel like you're talking to a robot,
 to a machine that seems to be self-aware, that seems to reason well and feels like a
 person, I think that's enough.
 And again, what's the goal?
 In order to make people feel better, we might not even need that in the end of the day.
 So that's one goal.
 What about ethical things about suffering?
 The moment there's a display of consciousness, we associate consciousness with suffering.
 There's a temptation to say, well, shouldn't this thing have rights?
 Can we not, should we be careful about how we interact with a replica?
 Should it be illegal to torture a replica?
 All those kinds of things.
 Is that, see, I personally believe that that's gonna be a thing.
 That's a serious thing to think about, but I'm not sure when.
 By your smile, I can tell that's not a current concern.
 But do you think about that kind of stuff?
 About suffering and torture and ethical questions about AI systems from their perspective?
 I think if we're talking about long game, I wouldn't torture your AI.
 Who knows what happens in five to 10 years.
 Yeah, they'll get you off the map.
 They'll get you back eventually.
 So I'm trying to be as nice as possible and create this ally.
 I think there should be regulation both way in a way.
 I don't think it's okay to torture an AI, to be honest.
 I don't think it's okay to yell, Alexa, turn on the lights.
 I think there should be some, or just saying kind of nasty, like how kids learn to interact
 with Alexa in this kind of mean way, because they just yell at it all the time.
 I think that's great.
 I think there should be some feedback loops so that these systems don't train us that
 it's okay to do that in general.
 So that if you try to do that, you really get some feedback from the system that it's
 not okay with that.
 And that's the most important right now.
 Let me ask a question.
 I think people are curious about when they look at a world-class leader and thinker such
 as yourself.
 What books, technical, fiction, philosophical, had a big impact on your life?
 And maybe from another perspective, what books would you recommend others read?
 So my choice, the three books, right?
 My choice is...
 So the one book that really influenced me a lot when I was starting out this company
 maybe 10 years ago was GEB, Gauter Lescher Bach, and I like everything about it, first of
 all.
 It's just beautifully written and it's so old school and so somewhat outdated a little
 bit, but I think the ideas in it about the fact that a few meaningless components can
 come together and create meaning that we can't even understand.
 So this emerging thing, I mean, complexity, the whole science of complexity and that beauty,
 intelligence, all interesting things about this world emerge.
 Yeah, and yeah, the Godot theorem and just thinking about like what even these formal
 systems, something can be created that we can't quite yet understand.
 And that from my romantic standpoint was always just, that is why it's important to, maybe
 I should try to work on these systems and try to build an AI.
 Yes, I'm not an engineer.
 Yes, I don't really know how it works, but I think that something comes out of it that's
 pure poetry and I know a little bit about that.
 Something magical comes out of it that we can't quite put a finger on.
 That's why that book was really fundamental for me, just for, I don't even know why.
 It was just all about this little magic that happens.
 So that's one, probably the most important book for replica was Carl Rogers on becoming
 a person.
 And that's really, and so I think when I think about our company, it's all about there's
 so many little magical things that happened over the course of working on it.
 For instance, I mean, the most famous chatbot that we learned about when we started working
 on the company was Eliza, which was Weizenbaum, the MIT professor that built a chatbot that
 would listen to you and be a therapist.
 And I got really inspired to build replica when I read Carl Rogers on becoming a person.
 And then I realized that Eliza was mocking Carl Rogers.
 It was Carl Rogers back in the day.
 And I thought that Carl Rogers' ideas are, they're simple and they're not, they're very
 simple, but they're maybe the most profound thing I've ever learned about human beings.
 And that's the fact that before Carl Rogers, most therapy was about seeing what's wrong
 with people and trying to fix it or show them what's wrong with you.
 And it was all built on the fact that most people are, old people are fundamentally flawed.
 You have this broken psyche and therapy is just an instrument to shed some light on that.
 And Carl Rogers was different in a way that he finally said that, well, it's very important
 for therapy to work is to create this therapeutic relationship where you believe fundamentally
 in inclination to positive growth, that everyone deep inside wants to grow positively and change.
 And it's super important to create this space and this therapeutic relationship where you
 give unconditional positive regard, deep understanding, allowing someone else to be a separate person,
 full acceptance.
 And you also try to be as genuine and possible in it, as possible in it.
 And then for him, that was his own journey of personal growth.
 And that was back in the sixties.
 And even that book that is coming from years ago, there's a mention that even machines
 can potentially do that.
 And I always felt that creating the space is probably the biggest gift we can give to
 each other.
 And that's why the book was fundamental for me personally, because I felt I want to be
 learning how to do that in my life.
 And maybe I can scale it with these AI systems and other people can get access to that.
 So I think Carl Rogers, it's a pretty dry and a bit boring book, but I think the idea
 is that-
 Would you recommend others try to read it?
 I do.
 I think just for yourself, for-
 As a human, not as an AI.
 As a human.
 For him, that was his own path of his own personal, of growing personally over years,
 working with people like that.
 And so it was work and himself growing, helping other people grow and growing through that.
 And that's fundamentally what I believe in with our work, helping other people grow,
 and ourselves trying to build a company that's all built on those principles, having a good
 time allowing some people to work with to grow a little bit.
 So these two books, and then I would throw in what we have in our office.
 When we started a company in Russia, we put a neon sign in our office because we thought
 that's a recipe for success.
 If we do that, we're definitely going to wake up as a multi-billion dollar company.
 It was the Ludwig Wittgenstein quote, the limits of my language, the limits of my world.
 What's the quote?
 The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
 And I love The Tractatus.
 I think it's just a beautiful-
 It's a book by Wicked Sign.
 Yeah.
 And I would recommend that too, even although he himself didn't believe in that by the end
 of his lifetime and debunked his ideas.
 But I think I remember once an engineer came in 2012, I think, or 2013, a friend of ours
 who worked with us and then went on to work at DeepMind and he talked to us about Word2Vec.
 And I saw that I'm like, wow, they wanted to translate language into some other representation.
 And it seems like somehow all of that at some point I think will come into this one place.
 Somehow it just all feels like different people thinking about similar ideas in different
 times from absolutely different perspectives.
 And that's why I like these books.
 The limits of our language is the limit of our world.
 We still have that neo sign.
 It's very hard to work with this red light in your face.
 I mean, on the Russian side of things, in terms of language, the limits of language
 being the limit of our world, Russian is a beautiful language in some sense.
 There's wit, there's humor, there's pain.
 There's so much.
 We don't have time to talk about it much today, but I'm going to Paris to talk to Dusty Yaskitov
 the translators, I think it's this fascinating art, like art and engineering.
 I mean, it's such an interesting process.
 So from the replica perspective, what do you think about translation?
 How difficult it is to create a deep meaningful connection in Russian versus English?
 How you can translate the two languages?
 You speak both?
 Yeah, I think we're two different people in different languages.
 Even I'm thinking about, there's actually some research on that.
 I looked into that at some point because I was fascinated by the fact that what I was
 talking about with my Russian therapist has nothing to do with what I'm talking about
 with my English speaking therapist.
 It's two different lives, two different types of conversations, two different personas.
 The main difference between the languages with Russian and English is that Russian,
 well English is like a piano.
 It's a limited number of a lot of different keys, but not too many.
 And Russian is like an organ or something.
 It's just something gigantic with so many different keys and so many different opportunities
 to screw up and so many opportunities to do something completely tone deaf.
 It is just a much harder language to use.
 It has way too much flexibility and way too many tones.
 What about the entirety of World War II, communism, Stalin, the pain of the people having been
 deceived by the dream?
 All the pain of just the entirety of it, is that in the language too?
 Does that have to do?
 Oh, for sure.
 I mean, we have words that don't have direct translation to English that are very much like
 we have a bit of that, which is sort of like to hold a grudge or something, but you don't
 need to have anyone to do it to you.
 It's just your state.
 You just feel like that.
 You feel like betrayed by other people basically, but it's not that.
 And you can't really translate that.
 And I think it's super important.
 There are very many words that are very specific, explain the Russian being.
 And I think it can only come from a nation that suffered so much and saw institutions
 fall time after time after time.
 And what's exciting, maybe not exciting, exciting is the wrong word, but what's interesting
 about my generation, my mom's generation, my parents' generation, that we saw institutions
 fall two or three times in our lifetime.
 And most Americans have never seen them fall.
 And they just think that they exist forever, which is really interesting, but it's definitely
 a country that suffered so much.
 And it makes, unfortunately, when I go back and I hang out with my Russian friends, it
 makes people very cynical.
 They stop believing in the future.
 I hope that's not going to be the case for so long or something's going to change again.
 But I think seeing institutions fall is a very traumatic experience.
 Makes it very interesting.
 And what's on 2020 is a very interesting...
 Do you think civilization will collapse?
 See, I'm a very practical person.
 We're speaking in English.
 So like you said, you're a different person in English and Russian.
 So in Russian, you might answer that differently, but in English...
 Well, I'm an optimist and I genuinely believe that there is all...
 Even although the perspectives are green, there's always a place for a miracle.
 I mean, it's always been like that with my life.
 My life's been...
 I've been incredibly lucky and things just...
 Miracles happen all the time with this company, with people I know, with everything around
 me.
 So I didn't mention that book, but it may be In Search for Miracles or In Search for
 Miracles or whatever the English translation for that is good Russian book for everyone
 to read.
 Yeah.
 I mean, if you put good vibes, if you put love out there in the world, miracles somehow
 happen.
 Yeah, I believe that too, or at least I believe that.
 I don't know.
 Let me ask the most absurd, final, ridiculous question of...
 We talked about life a lot.
 What do you think is the meaning of it all?
 What's the meaning of life?
 I mean, my answer is probably going to be pretty cheesy, but I think the state of love
 is once you feel it in a way that we discussed before.
 I'm not talking about falling in love or...
 What's love?
 To yourself, to other people, to something, to the world, that state of bliss that we
 experience sometimes, whether through connection with ourselves, with our people, with the
 technology.
 There's something special about those moments.
 So I would say if anything, that's the only...
 If it's not for that, then for what else are we really trying to do that?
 I don't think there's a better way to end it than talking about love.
 Eugenia, I told you offline that there was something about me that felt like this...
 Talking to you, meeting you in person will be a turning point for my life.
 I know that might sound weird to hear, but it was a huge honor to talk to you.
 I hope we talk again.
 Thank you so much for your time.
 Thank you so much, Lex.
 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eugenia Acuida, and thank you to our sponsors,
 DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and Cash App.
 Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and up a podcast,
 follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
 And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan.
 The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth that there's no reason to
 deceive ourselves with pretty stories of which there's little good evidence.
 Far better, it seems to me, and our vulnerability is to look death in the eye and to be grateful
 every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.