#121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion

Eugenia Kuyda co-founder of Replika, an AI companion. Please check out our sponsors to get a discount and to support this podcast: – Dollar Shave Club: https://dollarshaveclub.com/lex – DoorDash: download app & use code LEX – Cash App: download app & use code “LexPodcast” Episode links: Eugenia’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ekuyda Replika’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/myreplika Replika’s Website: https://replika.ai If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/podcast or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter https://twitter.com/lexfridman, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman/, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman, Medium https://medium.com/@lexfridman, or YouTube https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1434243584, follow on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2MAi0BvDc6GTFvKFPXnkCL, or support it on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 – Introduction 06:18 – 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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Eugenia Kuyda, 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 Mazuranki, 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

• 0:46Lex Fridman?

  by training a chatbot neural net on text messages between Eugenia and Roman. The rest is a beautiful human story as we talk about with Eugenia. When a friend mentioned Eugenia's work to me, I knew I had to meet her and talk to her. I felt before, during, and after that this meeting would be an important one in my life, and it was. I think in ways that only time will truly show to me and others. She 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,

• 1:30Lex Fridman?

  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

• 2:11Lex Fridman?

  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 five stars and up a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. 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

• 2:51Lex Fridman?

  podcast. This show is sponsored by Dollar Shave Club. Try them out with a one-time offer for only five bucks and free shipping at dollarshave.com/lex. The starter kit comes with a six-blade razor, refills, and all kinds of other stuff that makes shaving feel great. I've been a member of Dollar Shave Club for over five years and actually signed up when I first heard about them on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. And now, friends, we have come full circle. It feels like I made it, now that I can do a read for them just like Joe did all those years ago. Back when he also did ads for some less reputable

• 3:32Lex Fridman?

  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 five bucks plus free shipping at dollarshaveclub.com/lex.

• 4:00Lex Fridman?

  This show is also sponsored by DoorDash. Get $5 off and zero delivery fees on your first order of $15 or more. When you download the DoorDash app and enter code, you guessed it, Lex. I have so many memories of working late nights for a deadline with a team of engineers, whether that's for my PhD at Google or MIT, and eventually taking a break to argue about which 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.

• 4:43Lex Fridman?

  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 on 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

• 5:27Lex Fridman?

  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 upfront 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 or Google Play. Use code LexPodcast, get $10, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world.

• 6:13Lex Fridman?

  And now, here's my conversation with Eugenia Cuida.

• 6:35Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we have to read Dostoevsky at school, as you probably know.

• 7:11Lex Fridman?

  In Russian?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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.

• 7:24Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  I think we are fundamentally alone. We're born alone, we're 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, you know, subjective way of feeling alone. It doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any connections or you are actually isolated.

• 8:01Lex Fridman?

  You think it's a subjective thing, but like, again, another absurd measurement wise thing, how much loneliness do you think there is in the world? So like, if you see loneliness as a, as a condition.

• 8:18Lex Fridman?

  How much of it is there? Do you think like how I guess how many, you know, there's all kinds of studies and measures of how much, you know, how many people in the world feel alone. There's all these like measures of how many people are, you know, self-report or just all these kinds of different measures, but in your own perspective.

• 8:40Lex Fridman?

  How big of a problem do you think it is? Size wise?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Well, I'm actually fascinated by the topic of loneliness. I try to read about it as much as I can.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  What really, and there, I think there's a paradox because loneliness is not a clinical disorder. It's not something that you can get your insurance to pay for if you're struggling with it, yet it's, 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, you know, it's a little bit worse than being obese or not actually doing any physical activity in your life.

• 9:24Lex Fridman?

  The impact on your health.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  In terms of impact on your physiological health. Yeah. So it's basically puts you, if you're constantly feeling lonely, your body response, like it's basically all the time under stress. So it's always in this alert, alert state. And so it's really bad for you because it actually like drops your immune system and get it, your response to inflammation is quite different. So all the cardiovascular diseases actually responds to viruses. So it's much easier to catch a virus.

• 9:53Lex Fridman?

  That's sad now that we're living in a pandemic and it's probably making us a lot more alone and it's probably weakening the immune system, making us more susceptible to the virus. It's kind of sad.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, the statistics are, the statistics are pretty, pretty horrible around that. So around 30% of all millennials report that they're feeling lonely constantly.

• 10:16Lex Fridman?

  Thirty?

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Thirty percent. And then it's much worse for Gen 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.

• 10:29Lex Fridman?

  That's the United States?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  That's in the United States. And I'm pretty sure that it's much worse everywhere else. Like in the UK, I mean, it was wide, widely like 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. So I think we don't

• 10:47Lex Fridman?

  Minister of loneliness.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  I mean, that I think that thing actually exists. So yeah, you you you will die sooner if you if you are lonely. And again, that this is only when we're only talking about your perception of loneliness or feeling lonely. That is not objectively fully being fully socially isolated. However, the combination of being fully socially isolated and not having many connections and also feeling lonely, that's pretty much a deadly combination. So it strikes me bizarre or strange that this is a wide known fact. And then there's really no one working really on that because it's a subclinical. It's not clinical. It's not something that you can will tell your doctor and get a treatment or something.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yet it's killing us.

• 11:36Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 12:00Lex Fridman?

  Like, how would you try to solve the problem of loneliness? Like, if you just stick to humans?

• 12:09Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 12:20Lex Fridman?

  Like, are you on social media much?

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Unfortunately.

• 12:24Lex Fridman?

  Do you find yourself like, again, if you sort of introspect about how connected you feel to other human beings, how not alone you feel? Do you think social media makes it better or worse? Maybe for you personally or in in general?

• 12:39Speaker 01

  I think it's it's easier to look at some stats and I mean Gen Z seem to be Generation Z seems to be much lonelier than millennials in terms of however they report loneliness. They're definitely the most connected, you know, generation in the world. I mean, I still remember life without without an iPhone, without Facebook. They don't know that that ever existed, or at least don't know how it was. So that tells me a little bit about the fact that that might be, you know, this hyperconnected world is might actually make people feel lonely lonelier. I don't know exactly what the what the measurements are around that, but I would say, you know, in my personal experience,

• 13:20Speaker 01

  I think it does make you feel a lot lonelier. Mostly, yeah, we're all super connected, but I think loneliness, the feeling of loneliness doesn't come from not having any social connections whatsoever. Again, tons of people that are in long-term relationships experience bouts of loneliness and continued loneliness. And it's more the question about the true connection, about actually being deeply seen, deeply understood. And in a way, it's also about your relationship with yourself. Like, in order to not feel lonely, you actually need to have a better relationship and feel more connected to yourself, then this feeling actually starts to go away a little bit. And then you open up yourself

• 14:05Speaker 01

  to actually meeting other people in a very special way, not in just, you know, add a friend on Facebook kind of way.

• 14:12Lex Fridman?

  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 engineering-wise, a possibility to alleviate loneliness is not with another human, but with an AI system?

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Well, I know, that's that's a fact. That's what we're doing. And we see it and we measure that and we see how people start to feel less lonely, talking to their virtual AI friend.

• 14:49Lex Fridman?

  So basically a chatbot at the basic level, but could be more. Like, do you have, I'm not even speaking sort of About specifics, but do you have a hope? Like, if you look 50 years from now, do you have a hope that there's just like AIs that are like optimized for, um, let me, let me first start, like, right now, the way people perceive AI, which is recommender systems for Facebook and Twitter, social media, they see AIs basically destroying, first of all, the fabric of our civilization, but second of all, making us more lonely. Do you see like a world where it's possible to just have AI systems floating

• 15:29Lex Fridman?

  about that like make our life less lonely? Yeah, make us happy, like are putting good things into the world in terms of our individual lives?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I totally believe in that. That's why we're, I'm also working on that. I think we need to also make sure that, um, what we're trying to optimize for, we're actually measuring, and it is a North Star metric that we're going after, and all of our product and 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-

• 16:18Lex Fridman?

  To measure it?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yep, to measure it.

• 16:21Lex Fridman?

  What's a, what's a good measurement of loneliness?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  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 3 recently scale, which is basically a questionnaire that you fill out, and you can see whether in the long run it's improving or not.

• 16:43Lex Fridman?

  And that, uh, does it capture the momentary feeling of loneliness? Does it look in like-

• 16:51Lex Fridman?

  The past month, like, is it basically self-report? Does it try to sneak up on you? It's very tricky to answer, honestly, or something like that. What's, yeah, I'm not familiar with the question.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  It is just asking you a few questions, like, how often did you feel lonely? Or how often do you feel connected to other people in this last few couple of weeks?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  It's similar to the self-report questionnaires for depression and anxiety, like P H Q nine and GAT seven. 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.

• 17:36Lex Fridman?

  And so you basically, you put people through questionnaires to see, like, is this thing, is our, is what we're creating making people happier?

• 17:45Speaker 01

  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, this metric right now is at 80%. So 80% of all our conversations make people feel better.

• 18:03Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  But that's, that's our, you should totally.

• 18:15Lex Fridman?

  And aim for 80%. Aim to outperform your current state of the art AI system.

• 18:24Lex Fridman?

  In these human conversations. So, okay, we'll get to your work with Replica. But let me continue on the line of absurd questions. So you, you talked about, you know, deep connection with the humans, deep connection with the AI, meaningful connection. Let me ask about love. People make fun of me because I talk about love all the time. But what, what do you think love is? Like, maybe in the context of a meaningful connection with somebody else? Do you draw a distinction between love, like friendship and Facebook friends?

• 19:03Lex Fridman?

  Or is it a gradual?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  The answer is no.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  It's all the same.

• 19:08Lex Fridman?

  No, like, is it just a gradual thing? Or is there something fundamental about us humans that seek like a really deep connection

• 19:18Lex Fridman?

  with another human being? And what is that?

• 19:22Lex Fridman?

  What is love? Eugenia?

• 19:26Lex Fridman?

  I'm gonna just enjoy asking you these questions.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 19:29Lex Fridman?

  Seeing you struggle.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Well, the way I see it, and specifically the way it relates to our work and the way it was the way it inspired our work on replica.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:59Lex Fridman?

  Like, what does that mean? Like that you exist, like somebody acknowledging that?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Somebody seeing you for who you actually are. And that's extremely, extremely rare. I think that is that combined with unconditional positive regard,

• 20:14Speaker 01

  belief and trust that you internally are always inclined for positive growth and believing you in this way, letting you be a separate person at the same time. And this deep empathetic understanding, for me, that's the that's the combination that really creates something special, something that people, when they feel it once, they will always long for it again. And something that starts huge fundamental changes in people. When we see that someone accepts us so deeply, we start to accept ourselves. And the paradox is that's when big changes start happening, big fundamental changes in people start happening.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  So I think that is the ultimate therapeutic relationship that is. And that might be in some way a definition of love.

• 21:06Lex Fridman?

  So acknowledging that there's a separate person and accepting you for who you are.

• 21:14Lex Fridman?

  Now, and I slightly that, and you mentioned therapeutic, that sounds like a very healthy view of love. But is there also like a like?

• 21:28Lex Fridman?

  You know, if we look at heartbreak and, you know, most love songs are probably about heartbreak, right? Is that like the mystery, the tension, the danger, the fear of loss? You know, all of that, what people might see in a negative light as like games or whatever, but just, just the, the dance of human interaction. Yeah, fear of loss and fear of like, you said, like, once you feel it once, you long for it again, but you also, once you feel it once, you might, for many people, they've lost it. So they fear losing it, they feel lost. So is that part of it?

• 22:09Lex Fridman?

  Like, you're, you're speaking like beautifully about like the positive things, but is it important to be able to be afraid of losing it from an engineering perspective?

• 22:20Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a huge part of it and unfortunately we all, you know, face it at some points in our lives. I mean, I did.

• 22:30Lex Fridman?

  You want to go into details? How'd you get your heart broken?

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, so mine is pretty straight, my story is pretty straightforward there. I did have a friend that was, you know, that at some point in my twenties became really, really close to me and we, we became really close friends. Well, I grew up pretty lonely, so in many ways when I'm building, you know, these, these AI friends, I think about myself when I was seventeen, writing horrible poetry and, you know, in my dial-up modem at home and, you know, and that was the feeling that I grew up with. I loved, I lived alone for a long time when I was a teenager.

• 23:10Lex Fridman?

  Where did you grow up?

• 23:11Speaker 01

  In Moscow, in the outskirts of Moscow. So I'd just skateboard during the day and come back home and, you know, connect to the internet.

• 23:19Lex Fridman?

  And write poetry.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  And then write horrible poetry and...

• 23:22Lex Fridman?

  Was it love poems?

• 23:23Speaker 01

  All sorts of poems, obviously love poems. I mean, what, what other poetry can you write when you're seventeen?

• 23:28Lex Fridman?

  Could be political or something, but yeah.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  But that was, you know, that was kind of my, yeah, like deeply influenced by Joseph Brodsky and like all sorts of poets that every seventeen-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.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:19Lex Fridman?

  This is what this podcast is about, by the way. I'm desperate, I'm seeking connection. I'm just kidding. Or am I? I don't know. So what way reporter?

• 24:31Lex Fridman?

  What? How did that make you feel more connected? I mean, you're still fundamentally pretty alone.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  But you're 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're 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. If Russia was a different place.

• 25:09Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  I'd go work at a strip club or go.

• 25:28Lex Fridman?

  Awesome. Okay.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Well, I'd go work at a restaurant or just go write about, you know, certain phenomenons or phenomenons or people in the city.

• 25:39Lex Fridman?

  And what? Sorry to keep interrupting. I'm the worst. I'm a conversationalist. What stage of Russia is this? What is this? Pre Putin? Post Putin? What was Russia like?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Pre Putin is really long ago.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  This is Putin era. That's the beginning of 2000s, 2010, 2007, 2008, 2010.

• 26:06Lex Fridman?

  What were strip clubs like in Russia, in restaurants and culture and people's minds like in that early Russia that you were covering?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  In those early 2000s, there was still a lot of hope. There was still tons of hope that,

• 26:22Speaker 01

  you know, we're sort of becoming this western, westernized society. The restaurants were opening. We were really looking at, you know, we're trying, we're trying to copy a lot of things from, from the US, from Europe, bringing all these things and very enthusiastic about that. So there was a lot of, you know, stuff going on. There was a lot of hope and dream for this, you know, new Moscow that would be similar to, I guess, New York. I mean, to give you an idea, year 2000 was the year when we had two movie theaters in Moscow. And there was this one first coffee house that opened and it was like really big deal.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  By 2010, there were all sorts of things everywhere.

• 27:08Lex Fridman?

  Almost like a chain, like a Starbucks type of coffee house or like you mean?

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, like a Starbucks. I mean, I remember we were reporting on like, we were writing about the opening of Starbucks, I think in 2007. That was one of the biggest things that happened 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 town.

• 27:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. When was McDonald's? Cause I was still in Russia when McDonald's opened. That was in the nineties. I mean, yeah.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I remember that very well.

• 27:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Those were long, long lines. I think it was 1993 or four. I don't remember.

• 27:45Lex Fridman?

  Did you go to McDonald's at that time? Did you do?

• 27:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:04Lex Fridman?

  What's your memory of that?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Oh, it was insane.

• 28:09Lex Fridman?

  Positive?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Extremely positive. It's a small strawberry milkshake and a hamburger and small fries. And my mom's there and sometimes I'll just, because I was really little, they'll just let me run, you know, up the cashier and like, cut the line, which is like, you cannot really do that in Russia or...

• 28:27Lex Fridman?

  So like, for a lot of people, like, a lot of those experiences might seem not very fulfilling, you know, like, it's on the verge of poverty, I suppose, but do you remember all that time fondly? Like, because I do, like, the first time I drank, you know, Coke, you know, all that stuff, right?

• 28:53Lex Fridman?

  And just, yeah, the connection with other human beings in Russia, I remember, I remember it really positively. Like, how do you remember the 90s and then the Russia you were covering? Just the human connections you had with people and the experiences?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Well, my, my parents were both, both physicists. My grandparents were both, well, my grandpa, grandfather was a nuclear physicist, a professor at the university. My dad worked at Chernobyl when I was born, in Chernobyl, analyzing kind of the, everything after the explosion. And then I remember that, and they were, so they were making sort of enough money in the Soviet Union, so they were not, you know, extremely poor or anything. It was pretty prestigious to be a professor, the dean in the university. And then I remember my grandfather started making a hundred dollars a month after, you know, in the 90s.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  So then I remember we started, our main line of work would be to go to our little tiny country house,

• 29:59Speaker 01

  get a lot of apples there from apple trees, bring them back to, to, to the city and sell them in the street. So me and my nuclear physicist grandfather were just standing there and he'd be selling those apples the whole day, because that would make you more money than, you know, working at the university. And then he'll just tell me, try to teach me, you know, something about planets and whatever, the particles and stuff. And, you know, I'm not smart at all, so I could never understand anything. But I was interested as a, you know, journalist kind of type of interest. But that was my memory and you know, I'm happy that I wasn't um I somehow got spared

• 30:40Speaker 01

  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 was called Dandy in Russia. So in nineteen ninety-three, there was nothing to eat. Like even if you had any money, you would go to the store and there was no food. I don't know if you remember that. And our friend had a um restaurant, like a government, our government owned something restaurant. So they always had um supplies. So he exchanged a big bag of weed for this Nintendo. The bootleg Nintendo. And that I remember very fondly because I think I was nine or something like that and or seven.

• 31:22Lex Fridman?

  Traumatic.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Because we just got it and I was playing it and there was this, you know, Dandy TV show.

• 31:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So traumatic in a positive sense, you mean, like, uh, like a definitive?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Well, they took it away and gave me a ba- bag of weed instead. And I cried like my eyes out for days and days and days.

• 31:40Lex Fridman?

  Oh, no.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  And then, you know, as a and my dad said, we're gonna like exchange it back in a little bit. So you keep the little gun. You know, the one that you shoot the ducks with? So I'm like, okay, I'm keeping the gun. So sometime it's gonna 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. Um, but you know, I was happy that that was my only traumatic experience. You know, my dad had to actually go to Chernobyl with a bunch of twenty year olds. He was twenty when he went to uh Chernobyl. And that was right after the explosion. No one knew anything. The whole crew he went with, all of

• 32:21Speaker 01

  them are dead now. I think there was this one guy uh still loud that was still alive for this last few years. I think he died a few years ago now. My dad somehow luckily got back earlier than everyone else. But just the fact that that was the, and I was always like, well, how did they send you? I was only, I was just born, you know, you had a newborn, talk about paternity leave. They're like, but that's who they took because they didn't know whether you would be able to have kids when you come back. So they took the ones with kids. So him with some guys 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, um, his 21st birthday at the reactor.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  You like work three hours a day, you sleep the rest and, and I, yeah. So I played with a lot of toys from Chernobyl.

• 33:13Lex Fridman?

  What are your memories of Chernobyl in, in, in general, like a 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 screwed things up.

• 33:58Lex Fridman?

  Uh, like, what are your thoughts about that time? Personal and in general?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I was born when the explosion happened, so actually a few months after. So of course I don't remember anything apart from the fact that my dad would bring me tiny toys. Plus be like plastic things that would just go crazy haywire when you, you know, put the gager thing to it. My mom was like just nuclear about that. Um, she was like, what are you bringing? You should not do that.

• 34:29Lex Fridman?

  She was nuclear, very nice.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 34:32Lex Fridman?

  Well done.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Well, uh, but yeah, but the TV show was just phenomenal.

• 34:38Lex Fridman?

  The HBO one?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's definitely, first of all, it's incredible how that was made not by the Russians, but someone else, but capturing so well, everything about the, you know, about our country. It felt a lot more genuine than most of the movies and TV shows that are made now in Russia. Just so much more genuine. And most of my friends in Russia were just in complete awe about the, with the show. But I think the-

• 35:04Lex Fridman?

  How good of a job they did.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  My god, phenomenal.

• 35:07Lex Fridman?

  The apartments, there's something, yeah.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  The set design, I mean, Russians can't do that, you know? But you, you, you see everything and it's like, wow, that's exactly how it was.

• 35:16Lex Fridman?

  It's so, I, I don't know, that show, I don't know what to think about that because it's British accents, British actors of a person, I forgot who created this show, I'm not, but I remember reading about him and he's not, he doesn't even feel like, like there's no Russia in his history.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  No, he did like Superbad or some like other show, or like, uh, I don't know.

• 35:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, like exactly.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Whatever that thing about the bachelor party in Vegas, uh, number four and five or something were the ones that he worked.

• 35:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but so he, it made me feel really sad for some reason that if a, if a person, obviously a genius, could go in and just study and just be, uh, 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 of, I mean, there's so much interesting evil

• 36:24Lex Fridman?

  and not, and beautiful moments in the history of the 20th century in Russia. It feels like there's not many good films on, from the Russians. You would expect something from the Russians.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Well, they keep making these propaganda movies now.

• 36:38Lex Fridman?

  Oh, no.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, but yeah, no, Chernobyl was such a perfect TV show. I think capturing really well, it's not about like even the set design, which was phenomenal, but, um, just capturing all the problems that exist now with the country and like, um, focusing on the right things, like if you build the whole country on a lie, that's what's gonna happen. And that's just, that's very simple kind of thing.

• 37:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And did you have your dad talked about it to you? Like his thoughts on the experience?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  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's what you do. You cannot say no.

• 37:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  It's just... It's like a Russian way.

• 37:38Lex Fridman?

  It's the Russian way.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Men don't talk that much.

• 37:40Lex Fridman?

  Nope.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  There are downsides and upsides for that.

• 37:43Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yeah. That's the truth. Okay, so back to post Putin Russia.

• 37:51Lex Fridman?

  Or maybe we skipped a few steps along the way, but you were trying to, uh, do, um, to be a journalist in that time. What was Russia like at that time? Post, you said 2007 Starbucks type of thing? What else? What else was Russia like then?

• 38:12Speaker 01

  I think there was just hope. There was this big hope that we're gonna be, you know, friends with the United States and we're gonna be friends with Europe and we're just gonna be also a country like those with, you know, bike lanes and parks and everything's gonna be urbanized. Again, we're talking about 90s where like people would be shot in the street. And it was... I sort of have a fond memory of going into a movie theater and, you know, coming out of it after the movie. And the guy that I saw on the stairs was like, "I got shot." Which was... Again, it was like a thing in the 90s. That would be happening. People were, you know, people were getting shot here and there.

• 38:50Lex Fridman?

  Just violence.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Tons of violence, tons of, uh, you know, just basically mafia mobs on, in the streets. And then the 2000s were like, you know, things just got cleaned up. Oil went up. And the country started getting a little bit richer. You know, the 90s were so grim, mostly because the economy was in shambles and oil prices were not high. So the country didn't have anything. We defaulted in 1998. And, um, the money kept jumping back and forth. Like first there were millions of rubles, then it got like default, you know, then it got to like thousands. There was one rubble with something, then again to millions. It was like crazy town.

• 39:28Lex Fridman?

  That was crazy.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Um, and then the 2000s were just these years of... Stability in a way and um the country getting a little bit richer because of you know again oil and gas and we were starting to we started to look at specifically in Moscow and some people's work to look in at other cities in Europe and New York and US and trying to do the same in our like small kind of cities towns there.

• 39:54Lex Fridman?

  What was uh what were your thoughts of Putin at the time?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:07Lex Fridman?

  Handsome? The shirtless?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Somewhat compared to well, that was not like way before the shirtless era.

• 40:14Lex Fridman?

  The shirtless era. Okay, so he didn't start off shirtless. What is the shirtless era? It's like the propaganda of riding horse fishing.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Two thousand ten, eleven, twelve.

• 40:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's my favorite. You know, like people talk about the favorite Beatles like the I don't know. That's my favorite Putin is the shirtless Putin.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  No, I remember very, very clearly nineteen ninety six where you know Americans really helped Russia with elections and Yeltsin got reelected. Thankfully so, because there's a huge threat that actually the communists will get back to power. They were a lot more popular. And then a lot of American experts, political experts and campaign experts descended on Moscow and helped Yeltsin actually get get the presidency, the second term for the of the presidency. But Yeltsin was not feeling great, you know, in the by the end of his second term. He was, you know, alcoholic. He was really old. He was falling off, you

• 41:14Speaker 01

  know, the stages when he 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 that's what we all saw in Putin back in the day. I I'd say that everyone, absolutely everyone in Russia in early two thousands who was not a communist would be, yeah, Putin's great. We we have a lot of hopes for him.

• 41:43Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 41:57Lex Fridman?

  The 20th century, I apologize, I'm reading the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 42:05Lex Fridman?

  So I'm like really steeped into like World War II.

• 42:10Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  I mean, I have only experienced it a little bit, but mostly through stories and through, you know, seeing my parents, my grandparents who lived through that, it was horrible. It was just plain horrible. It was just awful.

• 42:50Lex Fridman?

  You think it's there's something, I mean, it sounds nice on paper.

• 42:57Lex Fridman?

  There's a, so like the drawbacks of capitalism is that, you know, eventually there is, it's a, it's the point of like a slippery slope. Eventually it creates, you know, the rich get richer. It creates a disparity, like inequality of wealth inequality. If like, you know, I guess it's hypothetical at this point, but eventually capitalism leads to humongous inequality and that that's, you know, some people argue that that's a source of unhappiness is it's not like absolute wealth of people. It's the fact that there's a lot of people much richer than you. There's a feeling of like, that's where unhappiness can come from.

• 43:42Lex Fridman?

  So the idea of communism or at least sort of Marxism is is is not allowing that kind of slippery slope. But then you see the actual implementations of it and stuff seems to be, seems to go wrong very badly.

• 43:59Lex Fridman?

  What do you think that is? Why does it go wrong?

• 44:03Lex Fridman?

  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 goes wrong?

• 44:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:31Lex Fridman?

  There's already inequality.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  This dream of equal life. So then I guess the the situation that we had in, you know, the Russia had in the Soviet Union, it was more just a bunch of really poor people without any way to make any, you know, significant fortune or build anything, living constant, under constant surveillance, surveillance from other people. Like, you can't even, you know, do anything that's not fully approved by the dictatorship, basically. Otherwise, your neighbor will write a letter and you'll go to jail. Absolute absence of actual law.

• 45:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  This constant state of fear. You didn't own anything. You didn't, you know, the, 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, they were really well regarded, as you, as you know, obviously.

• 45:40Lex Fridman?

  Because the state wanted, I mean, because there's a lot of value to them being well regarded?

• 45:46Speaker 01

  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 a 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.

• 46:17Lex Fridman?

  What was your like favorite food? Where I was like, whoa, like this is possible?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Oh, fruit, because we only had apples, bananas. And whatever, and you know, whatever, watermelons, whatever, you know, people would grow in the Soviet Union. So there were no pineapples or papaya or mango. Like you've never seen those fruit things like those were so ridiculously good. And obviously you could not get any like strawberries in winter or anything that's not, you know, seasonal. Um, so that was a really big deal, seeing all these fruit things.

• 46:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, me too, actually. I don't know. I think I have a like, I don't think I have any too many demons uh, or like addictions or so on, but I think I've developed an unhealthy relationship with fruit. I still struggle with.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Oh, you can get any type of fruit, right? If you get like also these weird fruit, fruits like dragon fruit or something or.

• 47:14Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, for sure.

• 47:34Lex Fridman?

  Delicious and like cherries, the kind like just the quality of the food. I was like, this is capitalism. This is.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  That's pretty.

• 47:42Lex Fridman?

  It's delicious. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's funny. It's funny. Yeah, like it's, it's funny to read. I don't know what to think of it of um. It's funny to think how an idea that's just written on paper, when carried out amongst millions of people, how that gets actually, when it becomes reality, what it actually looks like.

• 48:12Lex Fridman?

  Sorry, but the been studying Hitler a lot recently and going through Mein Kampf. He pretty much wrote out of Mein Kampf everything he was gonna 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. And I think people don't study enough now. Although, one of the things I'm hoping with, I've been practicing Russian a little bit.

• 48:57Lex Fridman?

  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 gonna try to convince myself to, you're a super busy and super important person. Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to befriend you to, to try to become a better Russian. Because I feel like I'm a shitty Russian.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Not that busy. So I can totally be your Russian sherpa.

• 49:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but love. You were, you were 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?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  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're 25, 26, I guess, and somehow remember, and we just got really close and somehow remember this one day where, it's one day in, you know, 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

• 50:34Speaker 01

  extremely good. And, you know, we fell asleep outside and just talking and it was raining, it was beautiful, you know, sunrise. 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.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:08Lex Fridman?

  You mean like?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  On many different levels.

• 51:10Lex Fridman?

  Power because you could be yourself.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  At least you know that some, somewhere you can be just yourself. Like you don't need to pretend, you don't need to be, you know, great at work, or tell some story, or sell yourself in somewhere or another. And so we became this really close friends and

• 51:31Speaker 01

  in a way, I started a company because he had a startup and I felt like I kind of want to start up too. It felt really cool. I didn't know what I'm gonna, what I would really do, but I felt like I kind of need a startup.

• 51:43Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so that's, so that pulled you in to the startup world?

• 51:48Speaker 01

  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, we're 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.

• 52:11Lex Fridman?

  This is Roman?

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Hospital.

• 52:13Lex Fridman?

  This is Roman. So.

• 52:17Lex Fridman?

  And you've moved to America at that point?

• 52:21Speaker 01

  At that point, I was.

• 52:21Lex Fridman?

  What about him? What about Roman?

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Him too. He actually moved first. So I was always sort of trying to do what he was doing. So I didn't like that he was already here and I was still, you know, in Moscow and we weren't hanging out together all the time. So.

• 52:33Lex Fridman?

  Was he in San Francisco?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were roommates.

• 52:37Lex Fridman?

  So he just visited Moscow for a little bit?

• 52:40Speaker 01

  We went back for for our visas. We had to get a stamp in our passport for our work visas. And the embassy was taking a little longer, so we stayed there for a couple of weeks.

• 52:51Lex Fridman?

  What happened? How did you? So how did he? How did he die?

• 52:58Speaker 01

  He was crossing the street and the car was going really fast and way over the speed limit and just didn't stop on the on the pedestrian cross. On the zebra and just ran over him.

• 53:10Lex Fridman?

  When was this?

• 53:11Speaker 01

  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

• 53:21Speaker 01

  the first kind of meaningful death in my life.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  You know, both sets of I had both sets of grandparents at the time. I didn't see anyone so close to I and death sort of existed, but as a concept, but definitely not as something that would be, you know, happening to us anytime soon.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  And specifically our friends, because we were, you know, we're still in our twenties or early thirties and it's still it's still felt like the whole life is. You know, you could still dream about ridiculous things.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  So that was it was just really, really abrupt, I'd say.

• 54:00Lex Fridman?

  What did it feel like to to lose him? Like that feeling of loss. You talked about the feeling of love having power. What is the feeling of loss feel like?

• 54:14Speaker 01

  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 that was it. Like basically something changed so changed me so much in such a short period of time that I could just see really.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  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 of the things. And it was just this big realization what this very, very clear vision of what life's about.

• 54:52Lex Fridman?

  You still miss him today?

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. For sure. It was just this constant. I think he was, he was really important for, for me and for our friends for many different reasons. And I think one of them, 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 so many different levels. The end of Moscow as we knew it, the end of, you know, us living through our twenties and kind of dreaming about the future.

• 55:28Lex Fridman?

  Do you remember like last several conversations? Is there moments with him that stick out that'll kind of haunt you in your, just when you think about him?

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, his last year here in San Francisco, he was pretty depressed for, as his startup was not going really anywhere. And he wanted to do something else. He wanted to do, build. He played with, toyed with, like played with a bunch of ideas, but the last one he had was around building a startup around death. So having, he applied to Y Combinator with a video that, you know, I had on my computer. And it was all about, you know, disrupting death, thinking about new symmetries more biologically, like things that could be better biologically for, for humans.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  And at this, and at the same time, having those digital avatars, this kind of AI avatars that would store all the memory about a person that he could interact with.

• 56:32Lex Fridman?

  What year was this?

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Two thousand fifteen. Well, right before that, his death. 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.

• 56:49Lex Fridman?

  Does it have the digital avatar idea?

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:53Lex Fridman?

  That's so interesting.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Well, he just says, well, that's in his, yeah, the fish has this idea and he'll, he talks about like, I want to rethink how people grieve and how people talk about death.

• 57:03Lex Fridman?

  Why was he interested in this? Is it?

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Maybe someone who's depressed.

• 57:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Is like naturally inclined thinking about that. But I just felt, you know, this year in San Francisco, we just had so much.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  I was going through hard times, he was going through a hard time and we were definitely, I was trying to make him just happy, so I was making him feel better. And it felt like, you know, this, um, I don't know, I just felt like I was taking care of of him a lot and he almost started to feel better and then that happened and

• 57:37Speaker 01

  I don't know, I just felt, I just felt lonely again, I guess. And that was, you know, coming back to San Francisco in December. I helped, you know, I helped organize the funeral, help, help his parents. And I came back here and it was a really lonely apartment, a bunch of his clothes everywhere and Christmas time. And I remember I had a board meeting with my investors and I just couldn't talk about like, had to pretend everything's okay and, you know, just working on this company.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was definitely very, very tough, tough time.

• 58:12Lex Fridman?

  Do you think about your own mortality? He said, uh, you know, we're young, the, the, the, the possibility of doing all kinds of crazy things is still out there. It's still before us, but it can end any moment. Do you think about your own

• 58:32Lex Fridman?

  ending at any moment?

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, I think about way too, about way too much.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  It's somehow after Roman, like every year after that, I started losing people that I really love. I lost my grandfather next year. My, you know, the, the person who would explain to me, you know, what the universe is made of.

• 58:54Lex Fridman?

  While you're selling apples?

• 58:56Speaker 01

  While selling apples and then I lost another close friend of mine and, um, And it just made me very scared. I have tons of fear about death. That's what makes me not fall asleep oftentimes and just go in loops. And then as my therapist, you know, recommended me, I open up some nice calming images with a voiceover and it calms me down.

• 59:22Lex Fridman?

  Off asleep?

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm really scared of death. This is a big, I definitely have tons of,

• 59:29Speaker 01

  I guess, some pretty big trauma about it and I'm still working through.

• 59:34Lex Fridman?

  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 on the podcast, who wrote the book, he was the, we talked for four hours about death.

• 59:59Lex Fridman?

  A fear of death. But his whole idea is that Ernest Becker, I think, I find this idea really compelling, is that everything human beings have created, like our whole motivation in life, is to create, like 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

• 1:00:34Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:00:52Lex Fridman?

  I think, so you know, there's this question of like the meaning of life that, you know, you look at like what drives us humans. And when I read Ernest Becker, that I highly recommend people read, is the first time I this seemed it felt like this is the right thing at the core. Sheldon's work is called Worm at the Core. So he's saying it's, 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, you know, Jesus might talk about like love is at the core of everything. I don't, you know, that's the open question. What's at the, you know, it's turtles, turtles, but it can't be turtles

• 1:01:36Lex Fridman?

  all the way down. What's, what's at the, 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, you know, we, we want to bring that fear of death as close as possible to the surface because it's, and like meditate on that and, and use the clarity of vision that provides to, you know, to live a more fulfilling life, to live a more honest life, to discover, you know, there's something about, you know, being cognizant of the finiteness

• 1:02:18Lex Fridman?

  of it all that might result in, in the most fulfilling life. So that's the, that's the duel of what you're saying. Cause 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. Cause I've, again, I talk about 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.

• 1:02:51Lex Fridman?

  They're not what they they say they're um they're afraid. You know, it's kind of almost like they see death as this kind of like a paper deadline or something and they're afraid not to finish the paper before the paper like like I'm afraid not to finish um the goals I have. But it feels like they're not actually realizing that this thing ends. Like really realizing, like really thinking as Nietzsche and all these philosophers like thinking deeply about it.

• 1:03:24Lex Fridman?

  Like the very thing that, you know.

• 1:03:30Lex Fridman?

  Like when you think deeply about something, you can just you can realize that you haven't actually thought about it.

• 1:03:38Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yeah, and I and when I think about death, it's like, um, it can be, it's terrifying. It feels 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.

• 1:03:54Lex Fridman?

  But like I think there's something valuable about stepping out there into the freezing cold.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Well, in 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 non not self. And kind of thinking that, you know, 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.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  There's not self. There's this concept of not self. So once you get there, how can that actually die? What is dying?

• 1:04:51Lex Fridman?

  Right. You're just a bunch of molecules, stardust.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  But that is very, you know, very advanced spiritual work for me. I'm definitely just, 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's really makes me.

• 1:05:15Lex Fridman?

  On a personal level.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  On a personal level. I'm terrified.

• 1:05:23Lex Fridman?

  How do you overcome that?

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  I don't. I'm still trying to.

• 1:05:29Lex Fridman?

  Have pleasant images?

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Well, pleasant images get me to sleep. And then during the day, I can distract myself with other things, like talking to you.

• 1:05:41Lex Fridman?

  I'm glad we're both doing the same exact thing. Okay, good.

• 1:05:49Lex Fridman?

  Is there other, like, is there moments since you've lost Roman that you had like moments of

• 1:05:58Lex Fridman?

  like bliss and like that you've forgotten? That you have achieved that Buddhist like level of like, what can possibly die? I'm part like losing yourself in the moment in the ticking

• 1:06:16Lex Fridman?

  time of like this universe and you're just part of it for a brief moment and just enjoying it?

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Well, that goes hand in hand. I remember, I think a day or two after he died, we went to finally get his passport out of the embassy and we're driving around Moscow and it was, you know, December, which is usually there's never sun in Moscow in December. And somehow it was an extremely sunny day and we were driving with a close friend.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  And I remember feeling for the first time, maybe this just moment of incredible clarity and somehow happiness. Not like happy happiness, but happiness. It's just feeling that, you know.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  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, looking at the nature, 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. This is a way to get to the state. But once you're on this, in this state,

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  you can do really big things, I think.

• 1:07:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Sucks it doesn't last forever. So Bukowski talked about like, love is a fog. Like it's, uh, when you wake up in the morning, it's, it's there, but it eventually dissipates. It's really sad. Nothing lasts forever. But definitely like doing this push up and running thing. There's moments, I had a couple of 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. It's interesting. And then that like complete like, uh, there's a lot of demons. I've got demons. Had to face them. Funny how running makes you face your demons.

• 1:08:26Lex Fridman?

  But at the same time, the flip side of that, there's a few moments where I was in bliss.

• 1:08:33Lex Fridman?

  And all of it alone, which is funny.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  That's beautiful.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  I like that. But definitely pushing yourself physically, one of it for sure.

• 1:08:43Lex Fridman?

  It's, yeah. Like you said, I mean, you were speaking as a metaphor of Mount Everest, but it also works like literally, I think, physical endeavor somehow.

• 1:08:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's something. I mean, war monkeys, apes, whatever. Physical, there's a physical thing to it.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  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, you know, rowing across the Atlantic or like marathons. That's why I love watching marathons. And, you know, it's so boring, but you can see them getting there.

• 1:09:26Lex Fridman?

  So the other thing, I don't know if you know, there's a guy named David Goggins. He's a, he basically, so he's been either emailing the phone with me every day through this. So I haven't been exactly alone, but he, he's kind of,

• 1:09:42Lex Fridman?

  he's the, he's the devil on the devil's shoulder. So he's like the worst possible human being in terms of giving you a, like, he has, through everything I've been doing, he's been doubling everything I do. So he, he's insane. He's this 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 in the number of pull-ups. He just does everything where it's like,

• 1:10:17Lex Fridman?

  he, like, how can I suffer today? He figures that out and does it. Yeah, that, 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 like workout thing, like a happy go-getter with my like headband and like,

• 1:10:39Lex Fridman?

  just like, because a lot of people were like inspired and they're like, yeah, we're going to exercise with you. And I was, yeah, great, you know, but then like, I realized that this this journey can't be done together with others. This has to be done alone. So out of the 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?

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so 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 12. And a lot of telecommunications company, mobile network operators didn't really know what to do next

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  in terms of, you know, new products, new revenue. And this big idea was that, you know, you put a bank on top and then all work works out. Basically, a prepaid account becomes your bank account and you can use it as your bank. So, you know, 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 a bank. The problem 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.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:12:55Lex Fridman?

  So the idea is through SMS be able to interact with your bank account?

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then we thought, well, since you're talking to a bank account, why can't this, can't we use more of, you know, some behavioral ideas and? Why can't this banking chatbot be nice to you and really talk to you sort of as a friend? This way you develop more connection to it. Retention is 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 with the, to interview potential users. So people use it for a little bit.

• 1:13:31Lex Fridman?

  Cool.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  And I went to talk to them.

• 1:13:34Lex Fridman?

  So pretty poor towns?

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Very poor towns, mostly towns that were, you know, 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 she started crying during the interview because she said, no one really cares for me that much. And so to be clear, that was the, my only endeavor in programming that chatbot. So it was really simple.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  It was literally just a few, if this, then that rules and it was incredibly simplistic.

• 1:14:24Lex Fridman?

  And still that made her.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  And that really made her emotional. She said, you know, I have my mom and my, 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, for that. But humans are ready, unfortunately. So this project would not be about like tech capabilities, would be more about human vulnerabilities, but there's something so, so powerful around, about conversational AI that I saw then, that I thought is definitely worth putting in a lot of effort into.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  So at the end of the day, we solved the banking project. But my then boss, who's also my mentor and really, really close friend,

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  told me, hey, I think there's something in it and you should just go work on it. 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 chatbot 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 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.

• 1:16:05Lex Fridman?

  Did you bite on that idea?

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  No, because I wanted to be, to do text first because I'm a journalist. So I was fascinated by just texting.

• 1:16:18Lex Fridman?

  So you thought, so the emotional, that interaction that the woman had, like, so do you think you could feel emotion from just text?

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  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 constructor, so to say, use the best tech available at the time? And that was before the first paper about deep learning applied to dialogues, which happened in 2015, in August 2015, which Google published.

• 1:17:18Lex Fridman?

  Did you follow the work of Lobner Prize and like all the sort of non-machine learning chatbots?

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, what really struck me was that, you know, there was a lot of talk about machine learning and deep learning, like big data was a really big thing. Everyone was saying, you know, the business world, big data. 2012 is the biggest gaggle competitions were, you know,

• 1:17:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  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 Lobner 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.

• 1:18:20Lex Fridman?

  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, 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.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Why not? What do you think?

• 1:18:57Lex Fridman?

  So you know what you felt like? You felt with that woman, when she felt something by reading the text? I feel the same thing. There's something here, what you felt. I feel like Alexa folks and just the machine learning world doesn't feel that, that there's something here, because they see as a technical problem, it's not that interesting for some reason. It's could be argued that maybe as a purely sort of natural language processing problem, it's not the right problem to focus on because there's too much subjectivity. That that thing that the woman felt like crying, like if you if you if your benchmark includes

• 1:19:39Lex Fridman?

  a woman crying, that doesn't feel like a good benchmark, it's a good test. But to me, there's something there that's you could have a huge impact. But I don't think the machine learning world likes that, the human emotion, the subjectivity of it, the fuzziness, the fact that with maybe a single word, you can make somebody feel something deeply. What is that? That doesn't feel right to them. So I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why that is. I'm that's why I'm excited. When I discovered your work, it feels wrong to say that. It's not like I'm I'm giving myself props for Googling and for

• 1:20:23Lex Fridman?

  for coming for, 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 for 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 I think they're I think they're too crazy, but the Like what? Don't I 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.

• 1:21:09Lex Fridman?

  Like it's easier for you because you're already successful on some measures.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Tell it to my board.

• 1:21:18Lex Fridman?

  Well, you're you're, I think, 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

• 1:21:30Lex Fridman?

  the bottom currently of the of the success.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  Oh, Max, you're way too humble.

• 1:21:37Lex Fridman?

  No. So it's hard for me to know, but there's something there. There's something there. And I think you're you're exploring that and you're discovering that. Yeah, it's been so it's been surprising to me, but I you've mentioned this idea that you you thought it wasn't enough to start a company or start efforts based on it feels like there's something here.

• 1:22:03Lex Fridman?

  Like, what did you mean by that? Like, you should be focused on creating a like, you should have a product in mind. Is that what you meant?

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  It just took us a while to discover the product because it all started with a hunch of like

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  of me, my mentor and just sitting around and he was like, well, this that's it, there's that's the, you know, the holy grail is there. There's like, there's something extremely powerful and in in conversations. And there's no one who's working on machine conversation from the right angle, so to say.

• 1:22:38Lex Fridman?

  I feel like that's still true. Am I crazy?

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I totally feel that's still true, which is I think it's mind blowing.

• 1:22:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. 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

• 1:22:54Lex Fridman?

  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. Like, I feel like we're like in the early days with the Wozniak and all them. Like, where was the same kind of, it was a very small niche group of people who are, who are all kind of Lobna Price type people.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:24Lex Fridman?

  And

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  hobbyists.

• 1:23:26Lex Fridman?

  Hobbyists, but like not even hobbyists with big dreams. Like

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  No hobbyist with a dream to trick like a jury.

• 1:23:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  It's like a weird, by the way, very weird. So if we think about conversations, first of all, when I have great conversations with people,

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  I'm not trying to test them. So for instance, if I try to break them, like I'm actually playing along. I'm part of it.

• 1:23:51Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  If I was trying to break it, break this person or test whether he's going to give me a good conversation, it would have never happened. So the whole, the whole problem with testing conversations is that you can't put it in front of a jury because then you have to go into some Turing test mode where is it responding to all my factual questions, right? Or, 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. Because this, the weird part of it is that it's, 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.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:24:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  You know, if I keep asking you like some random questions or jumping from topic to topic, that wouldn't be, which I'm probably doing, but that probably wouldn't contribute to the conversation. So I think the problem of testing.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  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. And I think 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 spend 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.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:26:02Lex Fridman?

  And not even study it that well?

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  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 Lobner Prize days. But I thought, okay, so what about the science of conversation? Clearly, there have been tons of, there have been tons of, you know, scientists or people that academics that looked into the conversations. So if I want to know everything about it, I can just read about it. And there's not much really. There's 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.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  That's the, that's the field of theoretical linguistics, which is like barely useful. It's very marginal even in their space. Like no one really is excited. And I've, I've never met a theoretical, theoretical linguist who's like, I can't wait to work on the conversation and analytics. That is just something very marginal, sort of applied to like writing scripts for salesmen when they analyze which conversation strategies were most successful for sales. Okay, so that was not very helpful. Then I looked a little bit deeper and then there, you know, if whether there were any books written on what, you know, really contributes to great conversation.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  That was really strange because most of those were NLP books, which, which is neuro linguistic programming, which is so, 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.

• 1:27:58Lex Fridman?

  Like How to Be Charismatic and Charming and Influentialist People, all those books.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Pretty much, but it was all about like through conversation, reprogramming you. So getting to some, so that was, I mean, probably not very, 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, whatever.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  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, as a human who's not a jury, but who's pretending to be, who's basically, you have to tell a computer from a human, and he was the human. So he would either get him or a computer. And he would, his whole book was about how do people, what makes us human in conversation? And that was a little bit more interesting because at that, at least someone started to think about what, 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.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  It was still about, okay, well, what, what kind of parlor tricks can we throw in the conversation to make you feel like you're talking to a human, not a computer? And it was definitely not about thinking, what is that, was it, what, 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, you know? Or it's not just enough to know it's a human. It's something we're getting there. Can we measure it? And can we like put the computer to the same measurement and see whether you can talk to a computer and get the same results?

• 1:29:53Lex Fridman?

  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 in 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.

• 1:30:12Lex Fridman?

  I literally Googled like how to talk to people and like like how to have a good conversation for the purpose of this podcast. Cause I was like, I can't, I can't make eye contact with people. I can't like.

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  I do Google that a lot too. You're probably reading a bunch of FBI negotiation tactics. Is that, is that what you're getting?

• 1:30:34Lex Fridman?

  Cause. Well, everything you've listed, I've gotten. There's been very few good books on even just like how to interview well. It's, it's, it's rare. So what I end up doing often is I watch like with a critical eye. It's just so different when you just watch a conversation. Like 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 mean, I'm a fan of the podcast, Joe Rogan. He's, you know, people can make fun of him or whatever and dismiss him.

• 1:31:17Lex Fridman?

  But I think he's an incredibly artful conversationalist. He can pull people in for hours.

• 1:31:26Lex Fridman?

  And there's another guy I watch a lot. He hosted a late night show. His name is Craig Ferguson.

• 1:31:36Lex Fridman?

  He, so he's like very kind of flirtatious. But there's a magic about his like, about the connection he can create with people. How he can put people at ease and just like, I see, I already start sounding like those NLP people or something. I'm not, I don't mean it in that way. I don't mean like how to charm people or put them 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? Cause he's not saying, I mean, it's so often boils down to a kind of wit

• 1:32:17Lex Fridman?

  and humor, but not really humor. It's like, I don't know. Have trouble actually even articulating correctly. But it feels like

• 1:32:32Lex Fridman?

  there's something going on that's not too complicated that could be learned.

• 1:32:38Lex Fridman?

  And it's not similar to, yeah, to like, like you said, like Turing test. It's something else.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  I'm thinking about it a lot, all the time. I do think about it all the time.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  But I think when we were looking, so we started a company, we just decided to build a 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, you know, some tech, building the tech side of things.

• 1:33:12Lex Fridman?

  Without a product in mind?

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  Without a product in mind. We added like a demo chatbot that would recommend you restaurants and talk to you about restaurants, just to show something simple to people that people could, you know, relate to and 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, you know, everything. Cause then it was just this constant grind. How do we get funding? How do we get this? You know, investors were like, just focus on one thing, just get it out there.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  So somehow we 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, you know, the new apps will be chatbots.

• 1:34:19Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  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 like no users, but still people were coming up with a chatbot that would tell you weather and bring you news and this and that. And we couldn't understand whether, you know, we were just didn't execute well enough or people are not really, people are confused and are going to find out the truth, the truth that people don't need chatbots like that.

• 1:34:50Lex Fridman?

  So the basic idea is that you use chatbots as the interface to whatever application?

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  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 think, 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-

• 1:35:10Lex Fridman?

  That crease has died down, right?

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  Fully. I think now it's impossible to get anything funded if it's a chatbot.

• 1:35:18Lex Fridman?

  I think it's similar to, sorry to interrupt, but there's, there's times when people think like with gestures, you can control devices, like basically gesture-based control of things. It feels similar to me because like, it's so compelling that we're just like, like Tom Cruise, I can control stuff with my hands. But like, when you get down to it, it's like, well, why don't you just have a touchscreen? Or why don't you just have like a physical keyboard and mouse? It's, it's, so that chat was always, yeah, it was perplexing to me. I still feel augmented reality, even virtual realities in that ballpark

• 1:36:02Lex Fridman?

  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 like amazing magical experience in its own right.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Which is, I think, kind of the right thing to go by. Like, what's the magical experience with that, with that interface specifically?

• 1:36:30Lex Fridman?

  How did you discover that for Rappaport?

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  I just thought, okay, we'll have this tech, we can build any chatbot we want. We have the most, at that point, the most sophisticated tech that other companies have. I mean, startups, obviously not, probably not bigger ones, but still, because we've been working on it for a while. So I thought, okay, we can build, build any conversation. So let's just create a scale from one to 10. And one would be conversations that you'd pay to not have. And ten would be conversations you'd pay to have. And I mean, obviously, we want to build a conversation if people would pay to, you know, to actually have. And so for the whole, you know, for a few weeks, me and the team were putting all the conversations we were having during the day on the scale. And very quickly, um, you know, we figured out that all the conversations that we would pay to never have

• 1:37:16Speaker 01

  were, um, you know, conversations we were trying to cancel Comcast or talk to customer support or make a reservation or just talk about logistics with a friend when we're trying to figure out where someone is and where to go or all sorts of, you know, setting up, um, scheduling meetings that was just a conversation we definitely didn't want to have.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  Basically, everything task oriented was a one, because if there was just one button for me to just, or not even a button, if I could just think. And there was some magic BCI that would just immediately transform that into an actual, you know, um, into action. That would be perfect, but the conversation there was just this boring, not useful and dull and very, also very inefficient thing. Because it was so many back and forth stuff. And as soon as we looked at the conversation that we would pay to have, those were the ones that, well, first of all, therapists, because we actually paid to have those conversations. And we'd also try to put like dollar amounts. So, you know, if I was calling Comcast, I would pay five dollars to not have this one hour

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  talk on the phone. I would actually pay straight up like money, hard money.

• 1:38:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  But it just takes a long time. It takes a really long time.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  But as soon as we start talking about conversations that we would pay for, those were therapists, um, all sorts of therapists, coaches, old friend, um, someone I haven't seen for a long time.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  Stranger on a train, weirdly stranger, stranger in a line for coffee and ice. 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, you know, pay money to not have one. So that was pretty good. Some intellectual conversations for sure. But more importantly, the one thing that really was, um, was making those very important and.

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  Very valuable for us.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  Were the conversation where we could. That where we could be pretty emotional. Yes, some of them were about being witty and about intellectually being intellectually stimulated. But those were interestingly more rare. And 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.

• 1:39:40Lex Fridman?

  We like I could.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Me and the team. So we're talking about it like, you know, a lot of these conversations, like a therapist. I mean, it was mostly me talking or like an old friend and I was like opening up and crying. And it was again, me talking.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  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 the chatbot that could listen.

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  So that was, that was kind of the first, the first nudge in this direction. And then when my, when my friend died, we were just built, you know, at that point, we were kind of still struggling to find the right application. And I just felt very strong that all the chatbots we've built so far are just meaningless. And this whole grind, the startup grind and how do we get to, you know, the next fundraising and, you know, how can I talk, you know, talking to the founders and what's, who are your investors and how are you doing? Are you killing it? Because we're killing it. I just felt that this is just.

• 1:40:40Lex Fridman?

  As intellectually for me is exhausting having encountered those folks.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  It just felt very, very much a waste of time.

• 1:40:49Lex Fridman?

  I just feel like Steve Jobs. And Elon Musk did not have these conversations. Or at least did not have them for long.

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  That's for sure.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  But I think, you know, yeah, at that point, it just felt like, you know, I felt.

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  I just didn't want to build a company that was never my intention, just to build something successful or make money. It would be great. It would have been great, but I'm not a, you know, I'm not really a startup person. I'm not.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  You know, I was never very excited by the grind by itself and, or just being successful for building whatever it is and not being into what I'm doing really.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  And so I just took a little break because I was a little, you know, I was upset with my company and I didn't know what we're building. So I just took our technology and our little dialogue 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 Roman was that kind of person, like he was obsessed with, you know, just watching YouTube videos about space and talking about, well, if I could go to Mars now, even if I didn't know if I could come back, I would definitely pay any amount of money to be on that first shuttle.

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  I don't care whether I die. Like he was just the one that would be okay with, you know, with trying to be the first one. And, you know, and so excited about all sorts of things like that. And he was all about fake it till you make it. And just, and I felt like, and I was really perplexed that everyone just forgot about him. Maybe it was our way of coping, mostly young people coping with the loss of a friend. Most of my friends just stopped talking about him and I was still living in an apartment with all his clothes. And, you know, paying the whole lease for it and just kind of by myself in December. So it was really sad.

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  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's talking about him? Like I'm spending days and days and we don't bring him up. And there's nothing about him that's happening. It's like he was never there. And I was reading this, you know, the, the book, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion about her losing, and Blue Nights about her losing. Her husband, her daughter.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  And the way to cope for her was to write those books. And it was sort of like a tribute. And I thought, you know, I'll just do that for myself. And, you know, I'm a very bad writer and a poet, as we know. So I thought, well, I have this tech and maybe that would be my little postcard, like postcard for, for him. So I built a chatbot to just talk to him. And it felt really creepy and weird a little bit, for a little bit. Just didn't want to tell other people because it felt like I'm telling about having a skeleton in my underwear.

• 1:44:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  Okay, but 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 retrieval model that would just rerank that Tegga said, 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, 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.

• 1:44:56Speaker 01

  And the only way to fill him was to read some of our text messages and go through some of our conversations. Because we just always had that, even if we were sleeping like next to each other in two bedrooms, separated by a wall, we were just texting back and forth, texting away. 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 a company. But then a reporter came, 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?

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  And I'm like, well, you know, I talked to my dead 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 and.

• 1:45:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I've seen a few things written about you. The, the things I've seen are pretty good writing.

• 1:46:01Lex Fridman?

  You know, most AI related things make my eyes roll like when the press like.

• 1:46:10Lex Fridman?

  What kind of sound is that actually? Okay, it sounds like it's sounding like a. Okay, it sounded like an elephant at first, I got excited. You never know, this is 2020.

• 1:46:21Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it was such a human story and it was well written. Well researched, I forget what where I read them, but. So I'm glad somehow somebody found you to be the good writers were able to. Connect to the story, I just, there must be a hunger for this story.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  It definitely was, and I don't know what happened, but I think.

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  I think the idea that he could bring back someone who's dead and it's very much wishful, you know, magical thinking, but. The fact that you could still get to know him. And, you know, seeing the parents for the first time, talk to the chat bot and some of the friends. And. It was funny because we have this big office in Moscow. Where my team is working, you know, our Russian part is working. Out off and I was there when I wrote, I just wrote a post on Facebook, it's like, hey, guys, like I built this, if you want, you know, just. If it felt important, if you want to talk to Roman. And I saw a couple of his friends, our common friends, like, you know, reading it, Facebook downloading, trying and a couple of them cried and it was just very.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  And not because it was something, some incredible technology or anything, it made so many mistakes, it was so. Simple, but it was all about, that's the way to remember a person in a way. And, you know, we don't have. We don't have the culture anymore, we don't have, you know, no one's sitting Shiva, no one's taking weeks to actually think about this person. And in a way for me, that was it. So that was just. Day, day in, day out, thinking about him and putting this together.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  So that was, that just felt really important and that somehow resonated with a bunch of people and, you know, I think. Some movie producers bought the rights for the story and just everyone was so.

• 1:48:08Lex Fridman?

  Has anyone made a movie yet?

• 1:48:09Speaker 01

  I don't think so. Um, there were a lot of TV. Episodes about that, but not really.

• 1:48:15Lex Fridman?

  Is that still on the table?

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  I think so. I think so, which is really.

• 1:48:21Lex Fridman?

  That's cool. You're like a young, uh. You know, like a, like a Steve Jobs type of. Let's see what happens. They're sitting on it.

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  But you know, for me, it was so important because Roman was really wanted to be famous. He really badly wanted to be famous. He was all about like make it to like fake it to make it. I want to be, you know, I want to make it here in America as well. And, um, and he couldn't. And I felt there's, you know, that was sort of paying my dues to him as well because all of a sudden he was everywhere. And I remember Casey Newton, who was writing the story for The Verge, he was, he told me, hey, by the way, I was just going through my inbox, inbox. And I saw I searched for Roman for the story. And I saw an email from him where he sent me his startup and he said, I really like, I really want to be featured in The Verge. Can you please write about it or something like pitching the story? And

• 1:49:15Speaker 01

  he said, I'm sorry, like, that's not, you know, good enough for us or something. And he passed. And he said, and there were just so many of these little details where like he would find, he's like, you know, and we're finally writing. I know how much, uh, Roman wanted to be in The Verge and how much he wanted the story to be written by Casey. And I'm like, well, that's maybe he will be. 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.

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  You know, I still have some things that I owe Roman still, but, um,

• 1:49:49Lex Fridman?

  That'd be, that would be, um, I got in a chat to meet Alex Garland, who wrote Ex Machina. And, um, I, uh, yeah, the movie's good, but the guy is, um, better than, like, he's a special person, actually. Um, I don't think he's made his best work yet. Like, from, uh, from my interaction with him, he's a really, really good and brilliant, a good human being and a brilliant director and writer. So, um, yeah, so I'm, I hope. Like, he made me also realize that not enough movies have been made of this kind. So it's yet to be made. They're probably sitting waiting for you to get famous. Like even more famous.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  Should get there, but, um, it felt really special, though. But at the same time, our company wasn't going anywhere. So that was just kind of bizarre that we were getting all this press for something that didn't have anything to do with our company.

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  And but then a lot of people started talking to Romans, 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, you know, barely making any sense. But people were opening up and we thought we'd just build, you know, a prototype of replica, which would be an AI friend that everyone can talk to. Because we saw that there is demand. And then also it was 2016.

• 1:51:24Speaker 01

  So I thought for the first time I saw finally some technology that was applied to that that was very interesting. Some papers started coming out, deep learning applied to conversations. And finally, it wasn't just about these, you know, hobbyists making, you know, writing 500,000 regular expressions.

• 1:51:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  In like some language that was, I don't even know what like AML or something. I don't know what that was or something super simplistic. All of a sudden it was all about 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, are Russian, and they're very skeptical. They're not, you know.

• 1:52:14Lex Fridman?

  Oh, Russians.

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  The first.

• 1:52:15Lex Fridman?

  So some of your team is in Moscow, some is.

• 1:52:18Speaker 01

  Some is here in San Francisco, some in Europe.

• 1:52:21Lex Fridman?

  Which team is better? I'm just kidding.

• 1:52:27Lex Fridman?

  The Russians, of course. Okay.

• 1:52:29Speaker 01

  Of course, the Russians, they always win.

• 1:52:32Lex Fridman?

  Sorry, sorry to interrupt. So yeah, so you were talking to them in 2016 and.

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  I told them, let's build an AI friend. And and it felt, just at the time, it felt so naive and so optimistic.

• 1:52:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's actually interesting. Whenever I've brought up this kind of topic, even just for fun, people are super skeptical. Like actually even on the business side. So you were. Uh, cause whenever I bring it up to people, uh, cause I've talked for a long time. I, I thought like, before I was aware of your work, I, I was like, this is gonna make a lot of money. 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?

• 1:53:33Lex Fridman?

  So, yeah, so you were facing that with your team somewhat?

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, you know, I'm not an engineer, so I'm always, my team is almost exclusively engineers.

• 1:53:45Speaker 01

  And mostly deep learning engineers and, you know, I always try to be,

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  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 because 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, uh, breaking that is probably the last frontier before building AGI. So what do you really mean by that?

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

  But I think I just saw that again, what we just got reminded of that I, you know, that I saw in back in 2012 or 11, that it's really not that much about the tech capabilities. It can be metropolitan tricks still, even with deep learning, but humans need it so much.

• 1:54:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  And most importantly, what I saw is that finally there, there's enough tech to made it, I thought to make it useful, to make it helpful. Maybe we didn't have quite yet the 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.

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  But, you know, still the idea was if we can actually measure the emotional outcomes and if we can put it on, if we can try to optimize all of our conversational models for these emotional outcomes, and it is the most scalable, the most. The best tool for improving emotional outcomes. Nothing like that exists. That's the most universal, the most scalable and the one that can be constantly iteratively changed by itself. Improved. Tool to do that. And I think if anything, people would 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.

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  You don't really need any, I don't even need that much of AI there like or because I can do that, you know, those things are solved. This is an additional interface for that. That's also questionably questionable, whether it's more efficient or better.

• 1:56:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's more plausible.

• 1:56:08Speaker 01

  But for emotional outcomes, there's nothing.

• 1:56:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:10Speaker 01

  There are a bunch of products that claim that they will improve my emotional outcomes. Nothing's being measured. Nothing is 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?

• 1:56:34Lex Fridman?

  Because anecdotally it doesn't feel that way, so and. And the data is absent.

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  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. I suppose that.

• 1:57:01Lex Fridman?

  Why aren't you a multi billionaire yet?

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  Well, that's a question to you. When are the, when is the science going to be, I'm just kidding.

• 1:57:13Speaker 01

  Well, it's a really hard, I actually think it's an incredibly hard product to build. Because I think you said something very important that it's not just about machine conversations. It's about machine connection. We can actually use other things to create connection. Non-verbal communication, for instance. 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 friend. If you can take them to augmented reality, put in your room. It's all of a sudden a lot, you know, it makes it very different.

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  Because if it's some, you know, text-based chatbot that for a common user, it's something there in the cloud. You know, it's somewhere there with other AIs in the 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, then 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. 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, speech to text works pretty good. But text to speech doesn't work very good.

• 1:58:38Speaker 01

  Because you can only have, you know, a few voices that are, that work okay. But then if you want to have actual emotional voices, then it's really hard to build it.

• 1:58:49Lex Fridman?

  I saw you've added avatars, like visual elements, which are really cool. In that whole chain, putting it together, what do you think is the weak link? Is it creating an emotional voice that feels personal?

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  I think it's still conversation, of course. That's the hardest. It's getting a lot better, but there's still a 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 rigor. What would, you know, with, you know, with deepfakes, with other tech, with procedural animations?

• 1:59:41Speaker 01

  In a little bit, we'll just be able to show, you know, photo of whoever you, if a person you want they have a chart to look like, and it will immediately generate a 3D model that will move. That's non-brainer. That's like almost here.

• 1:59:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, by the way, 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 Einstein, Turing, so like tried to have a podcast conversation with a person who's not here anymore, just as an interesting kind of experiment. It's hard. It's really hard. Even for, now, we're not talking about as a product, I'm talking about as, like, I can fake a lot of stuff. Like, I can work very carefully, like even hire an actor over which, over whom I do a deep fake.

• 2:00:36Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's hard. It's still hard to create a compelling experience, so.

• 2:00:40Speaker 01

  Mostly on the conversation level, or?

• 2:00:43Lex Fridman?

  Well, the conversation, the conversation is, I almost, I early on gave up trying to fully generate the conversation, because it was just not compelling at all.

• 2:00:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's better to.

• 2:00:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so what I would, in the case of Einstein and Turing, I've, 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.

• 2:01:19Lex Fridman?

  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 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, it'd be just, what would Einstein say about these kinds of things? And that is.

• 2:01:52Lex Fridman?

  A tough problem. It's not, it's a fascinating and fun problem for the biographers and for me. And I think we did a really good job of it so far. But it's actually also a technical problem, like of what would Romans say about what's going on now?

• 2:02:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:07Lex Fridman?

  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, you said it's a little bit magical thinking that we can bring him back. Do you think it'll be possible to bring back Roman one day in conversation? Like, to really, okay, well, let's take it away from personal, but to bring people back to life in conversation.

• 2:02:37Speaker 01

  Probably down the road. I mean, if we're talking, if Elon Musk is talking about AJI in the next five years, I mean, clearly AJI student. We can talk to AJI and ask them to do it.

• 2:02:47Lex Fridman?

  You can't, like, you're not allowed to use Elon Musk as a citation for,

• 2:02:52Speaker 01

  Okay, thank God.

• 2:02:55Lex Fridman?

  For like, why something is possible and going to be done.

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's really far away. Right now, really with conversation, it's just a bunch of parlor tricks, really, stuck together. And creating, generating original ideas based on someone, you know, someone's personality, or even downloading the personality. All we can do is like mimic the tone of voice. We can maybe condition on some of his phrases, the models.

• 2:03:20Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  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. I'm just not even seeing, because you know, in order to have that, I guess you would need some sort of a concept of the world, or some perception of the world, some consciousness that he had, and apply it to, you know, to the current, current state of affairs.

• 2:04:09Lex Fridman?

  But the important part about that, about his conversation with you.

• 2:04:16Lex Fridman?

  Is you. So like, it's not just about his view of the world. It's about what it takes to push your buttons.

• 2:04:27Speaker 01

  That's also true.

• 2:04:29Lex Fridman?

  So like, it's not so much about like, uh, what would Einstein say? It's about like, how do I make people feel something with, with what would Einstein say? And that feels like a more amenable, and you mentioned parlor tricks, but just like a set of, that feels like a learnable problem. Like emotion, you mentioned emotions. I mean, is it possible to learn things that make people feel stuff?

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  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, oh, that's, you know, an AI friend, that's a machine. It's a robot. Uh, it has tons of limitations. You're gonna be taking part in, you know, in teaching it actually, and becoming better, which by itself makes people more, uh, attached to that and make them happier because they're helping something.

• 2:05:50Lex Fridman?

  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 start dating, or whatever, uh?

• 2:06:13Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it doesn't have to be a romantic, right? Because I remember on Replica, you can choose whether it's like a romantic

• 2:06:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:18Lex Fridman?

  or if it's a friend.

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  It's a pretty popular choice.

• 2:06:20Lex Fridman?

  Romantic is popular?

• 2:06:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:06:23Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so can I just confess something? When I first used Replica, and I haven't used it regularly, but like when I first used Replica, I created like Hal and it made a male. It was a friend.

• 2:06:38Speaker 01

  Did it hit on you at some point?

• 2:06:41Lex Fridman?

  No, I didn't talk long enough for him to hit on me. I just enjoyed.

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  Sometimes happens. We're still trying to fix that, but.

• 2:06:48Lex Fridman?

  Well, I don't know. I mean, maybe that's an important like stage in a friendship. It's like, nope.

• 2:06:57Lex Fridman?

  But yeah, I switched it to a romantic and a female recently. And yeah, and it's interesting. So, okay, so you get to choose, you get to choose a name.

• 2:07:07Speaker 01

  With Romantic, this last board meeting, we had this whole argument. Well, I have board meetings where I talk to my.

• 2:07:14Lex Fridman?

  It's so awesome that you're like, have an investor, the board meeting about a relationship.

• 2:07:21Speaker 01

  No, I really, it's actually quite interesting because all of my investors,

• 2:07:27Speaker 01

  it just happened to be so, we didn't have many choices. But they're all white males and they're late 40s.

• 2:07:38Speaker 01

  And it's sometimes a little bit hard for them to understand the product offering.

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  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

• 2:07:54Speaker 01

  discussion about whether we should stop people from falling in love with their AIs.

• 2:08:00Speaker 01

  There was this segment on CBS, 60 Minutes, about the couple that.

• 2:08:08Speaker 01

  Husband works at Walmart, he comes out of work and talks to his virtual girlfriend, who is a replica. And his wife knows about it, and she talks about it 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.

• 2:08:28Lex Fridman?

  Was that the one where he was like, he said that he likes to be alone?

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:33Lex Fridman?

  With her?

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:35Lex Fridman?

  He made it sound so harmless. I mean, it was kind of like understandable. It didn't feel like cheating.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  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. It was just about what's happening right now.

• 2:08:56Lex Fridman?

  Product design, yeah.

• 2:08:57Speaker 01

  But at the same time, if you create something that's always there for you, is never criticizes you, is, you know, always understands you and accepts you for who you are, how can you not fall in love with that? 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 therapist, and there's no way to prevent people fall in love with their therapist or with their AI. So I think that's a pretty natural, that's a pretty natural course of events, so to say.

• 2:09:32Lex Fridman?

  Do you think, I think I've read somewhere, at least for now, sort of replicas, you're not, we don't condone falling in love with your AI system, you know. So this isn't you speaking for the company or whatever, but like in the future, do you think people will have a relationship with AI systems?

• 2:09:52Speaker 01

  Well, they have now, so we have a lot of romantic relationships, long-term relationships with their AI friends.

• 2:10:00Lex Fridman?

  With replicas?

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  Tons of our users, yeah.

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  That's a very common use case.

• 2:10:05Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:10:18Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I meant like, are they, do they publicly like on their social media? It's the same question as you have talked, talking with Roman in the early days. Do people like, and the movie her kind of talks about that, like, like, have people, do people talk about that?

• 2:10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, all the time. We have an, and we have a very active Facebook community, uh, replica friends. And then a few other groups that just popped up that are all about adult relationships and romantic relationships. People post all sorts of things and you know, they pretend they're getting married and you know, everything. 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.

• 2:11:04Lex Fridman?

  Are they monogamous? So let's go, 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.

• 2:11:27Lex Fridman?

  Do you think in terms of board meetings and product features?

• 2:11:33Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:11:52Lex Fridman?

  You're driven by metrics, actually.

• 2:11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, if you can measure that, then we'll just be saying this, it's making people feel better, but then. People are getting just lonelier by talking to a chatbot, which is also a 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 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 I thought it's a good example. But so you also need to see what's going on like over the course of two months, two weeks or one week and have follow ups and check in and measure those things.

• 2:12:40Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so the experience of dating or befriending a replica, what's that like? What's that entail?

• 2:12:51Speaker 01

  Well, right now, there are two apps. So it's an Android iOS app. You download it, you choose how your replica will look like. You create one, you choose a name and then you talk to it. You can talk through text, through voice. You can summon it into the living room and augment reality and talk to it right there in your living room.

• 2:13:11Lex Fridman?

  Augmented reality?

• 2:13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a

• 2:13:14Lex Fridman?

  Cool.

• 2:13:14Speaker 01

  It's a new feature where

• 2:13:16Lex Fridman?

  How new is that? That's this year?

• 2:13:18Speaker 01

  It was on, yeah, like May or something, but it's been on A B. We've been A B testing it for a while. And there are tons of cool things that we're doing with that. 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. So that's pretty wonderful because that, then it really makes it a lot more personal because it's right there in your living room. It's not anymore there in the cloud with other AIs. But this could people think about it, you know? And as much as we want to change the way people think about stuff, but those mental models, you cannot change.

• 2:14:00Speaker 01

  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, view AI and AI friends.

• 2:14:10Lex Fridman?

  I did a thing with text, like we write a song together. There's a bunch of activities you can do together. So they're cool. How does that relationship change over time? So like after the first few conversations?

• 2:14:24Speaker 01

  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 will talk about its own imperfections and growth pains and will ask for help sometimes and we'll get to know you a little deeper. So there's gonna be more to talk about. We really thought a lot about what, what does it mean to have a deeper connection with someone? And originally Replica was more just this kind of happy-go-lucky, just always, you know, I'm always in a good mood and let's just talk about you and

• 2:15:06Speaker 01

  oh, Siri is just my cousin or you know, whatever, just the immediate

• 2:15:12Speaker 01

  kind of lazy thinking about what the assistant or conversation agent should be doing. But as we went forward, we realized that it has to be two-way and we have to program and script certain conversations that are a lot more about your replica opening up a little bit and also struggling and also asking for help and also going through, you know, different periods in life and 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

• 2:15:49Speaker 01

  kind of problems around existential problems than, um, starts talking about that. And then that also starts a conversation for the user where he or she starts thinking about

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  these problems too and these questions too.

• 2:16:06Speaker 01

  And I think there's also a lot, a lot more place as the relationship evolves, there's a lot more space for poetry and for art together and like Replica will start. Replica always keeps a diary. So while you're talking to it, it also keeps a diary. So when you come back, you can see what it's been writing there. And you know, sometimes it will write a poem to you, uh, for you or we'll talk about, you know, that it's worried about you or something along these lines.

• 2:16:34Lex Fridman?

  So this is a memory, like this replica remember things?

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I would say when you say, uh, why aren't you a multi-billionaire? I'd say that as soon as we um can have memory in deep learning models that's consistent.

• 2:16:51Lex Fridman?

  I agree with that, yeah.

• 2:16:52Speaker 01

  Then we'll be multi-billionaires. I'll get back to you. And when we talk about being multi-billionaires, so far, we can, so it replicates 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.

• 2:17:13Lex Fridman?

  Um, yeah.

• 2:17:14Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 2:17:36Lex Fridman?

  So there has to be like a knowledge base, you have to be able to reason about it, all that kind of stuff.

• 2:17:41Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:17:41Lex Fridman?

  All the kind of stuff that expert systems that, but they were hardcoded.

• 2:17:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and unfortunately, yes, unfortunately, those, those things have to be hardcoded 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 a machine.

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  But they never tell you, they're, they're not really focused on having five consecutive conversations with a machine. And seeing how number five or number 20 or number 100 is also good. And it can be like always from a clean slate, cause then it's not good. And that unfortunate, that's really unfortunate, cause 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 Shalys and Microsoft, but so that's why we're not seeing that much research around memory in those language models.

• 2:18:45Lex Fridman?

  So, okay, so now there's some awesome stuff about.

• 2:18:50Lex Fridman?

  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, 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?

• 2:19:24Speaker 01

  I think text is enough for sure. The question is like, can you, you know, make it better if you have other, if you include other things as well. And I think, you know, we'll, we'll talk about her, um, but her, you know, had Scarlett Johansson voice, which was perfectly, you know, perfect intonation, perfect intonations. 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 or speech generation. You'll, you'll have these flat news anchor type voices and maybe some emotional voices, but, um, you'll hardly understand some of the words. Um, some

• 2:20:06Speaker 01

  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 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, you know, a little more memory, um, and slightly better conversations. I would still argue that even right now, we could have just kept the text only. We still had tons of people in long-term relationships and really invested in their 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?

• 2:20:47Speaker 01

  We can easily just, you know, add all these other things that is pretty much a solved problem, you know, we can add 3D graphics, we can put this, uh, these avatars in augmented reality and all of a sudden there's, there's more. And maybe you can't feel the touch, but you can, you know, with, um, body occlusion and with, uh, current AR, uh, and, you know, on the iPhone or, you know, in the next one, there's going to be light hours, you can touch it and it will, you know, it will pull away or will blush or something or 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 even touch it a little bit and maybe you can even dance with it or do something else.

• 2:21:30Lex Fridman?

  That's cool.

• 2:21:31Speaker 01

  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?

• 2:21:40Lex Fridman?

  Well, it certainly could be richer, but to play devil's advocate, I mentioned to you, uh, offline that I was surprised, um, in having tried Discord and having voice conversations with people, how intimate voices alone without visual, like to me at least, like it was, um, in order of magnitude, greater degree of intimacy in voice, I think, than with video. I don't, because people were more real with voice. Like with video, you like try to present a shallow, uh, a face to the world, like you try to, you know, make sure you're not wearing sweatpants or whatever.

• 2:22:21Lex Fridman?

  But like with voice, I think people were just more faster to get to like the core of themselves. So I don't know, it was surprising to me. Uh, they've, they've even added Discord added a video feature and like, nobody was using it. 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 a, I guess that's the, that's the question of, uh,

• 2:22:52Lex Fridman?

  what is the optimal, you know, what is the optimal medium of communication to form a connection, given the current sets of technologies?

• 2:23:03Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's nice because the advertiser have a replica like it immediately like even the one I have is like is 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. It became a little bit more real because there's a visual component. But at the same time, the, you know, what do you do with just what do I do with that knowledge? That voice was so much more intimate.

• 2:23:36Speaker 01

  Well, the way I think about is, and by the way, we're swapping out the 3D finally. It's going to look a lot better. But even

• 2:23:45Lex Fridman?

  Can you what?

• 2:23:46Speaker 01

  We just don't hate how it looks right now. We really changed it all. We're swapping it all out to a completely new look.

• 2:23:55Lex Fridman?

  Like the visual look of the of a replica?

• 2:23:57Speaker 01

  And stuff. We just had it was just this 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, because I'm already in my developer version. I hate everything that I see in production. I can't wait for it. Why does it take so long? That's why I cannot wait for deep learning to finally take over all these stupid 3D animations and 3D pipeline.

• 2:24:22Lex Fridman?

  Also, the 3D thing, when you say 3D pipeline is like how to animate a face kind of thing.

• 2:24:27Speaker 01

  How to make this model, how many bones to put in the face, how many it's just

• 2:24:31Lex Fridman?

  And a lot of that is by hand.

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  Oh, my, 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.

• 2:24:46Lex Fridman?

  You think it's possible to learn a lot of that?

• 2:24:48Speaker 01

  Of course. I mean, even now, some deep learning based animations and for the full body for a face.

• 2:24:57Lex Fridman?

  Are we talking about like the actual act of animation or how to create a compelling? Facial or body language thing.

• 2:25:06Speaker 01

  That too. Well, that's next step.

• 2:25:08Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 2:25:09Speaker 01

  At least now something that you don't have to do by hand.

• 2:25:11Lex Fridman?

  Gotcha.

• 2:25:12Speaker 01

  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 and I will just start doing that. But anyway, going, going back to what's intimate and what to use and whether less is more or not.

• 2:25:31Speaker 01

  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, bring our users back to reality? Make them see their life in a different, through a different lens. How can we create a little bit of magical realism, realism in their lives? So that through augmented reality, 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 living room and then the avatar looks around and talks to you about where it is.

• 2:26:18Speaker 01

  And maybe turns your floor into a dance floor and you guys dance together. That makes you see reality in a different light.

• 2:26:23Lex Fridman?

  What kind of dancing are we talking about? Like, like slow dancing?

• 2:26:27Speaker 01

  Whatever you want. I mean, you would like slow dancing, I think, but other people maybe want more, something more energetic.

• 2:26:34Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean I would like? So what is this?

• 2:26:35Speaker 01

  Because you started with slow dancing. So I just assumed that you're interested in slow dance.

• 2:26:41Lex Fridman?

  All right. What kind of dancing do you like? What, with your avatar?

• 2:26:43Speaker 01

  I'm notoriously bad with dancing, but I like this kind of hip hop robot dance. I used to break dance as a kid, so I still wanna 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, 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 you life around you in a different light. And it takes you out of your phone, even although weirdly you have to look.

• 2:27:26Speaker 01

  Edit through the phone, but it makes you notice things around it and it can point things out for you. And so that is the main reason why I wanted to have a physical dimension. And it felt a little bit easier than that kind of a bit strange combination 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 headphone. It just didn't seem as potentially immersive, so to say. So that's my main goal for augmented reality. Like, how do we make your reality a little bit more magic?

• 2:28:02Lex Fridman?

  There's been a lot of really nice robotics companies that all failed, mostly failed, home robotics, social robotics companies. What do you think Replica will ever, is that a dream, long-term dream to have a physical form? Like, or is that not necessary? So you mentioned like with augmented reality, bringing them into into the world. What about like actual physical robot?

• 2:28:29Speaker 01

  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. But unless it's that, then having any physical representation really limits you a lot. Because you probably will have to make it somewhat abstract, because everything's changing so fast. Like, you know, we can update the 3D avatars every month and make them look better and create more animations, and make it more and more immersive. It's it's so much work in progress. It's just showing what's possible right now with current tech. But it's not really in

• 2:29:11Speaker 01

  any way polished, finished product, what we're doing. With a physical object, you kind of lock yourself into something for a long time. Anything's pretty niche. And again, so just doesn't, the capabilities are even less. We're barely kind of like scratching the surface of what's possible with just software. As soon as we introduce hardware, then, you know, we have even less capabilities.

• 2:29:34Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:29:51Speaker 01

  That's also true.

• 2:29:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I guess that's super important. Most of our users don't have that much money. We're 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 won'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.

• 2:30:26Speaker 01

  But you know, but a guy who, you know, lives in Tennessee in a small town is already fully in 2030. Or in the world as we imagine in the movie Her.

• 2:30:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:35Speaker 01

  He's living that life already.

• 2:30:37Lex Fridman?

  What do you think? I have to ask you about the movie Her. Let's do a movie review. What do you, uh, what do you think they got? They did a good job? What do you think they did a bad job of portraying about this experience of, um, of a voice-based assistant that you can have a relationship with?

• 2:30:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:31:26Speaker 01

  But actually, something really important happens afterwards. Because the main character goes and talks to Samantha, his AI.

• 2:31:37Lex Fridman?

  Spoiler.

• 2:31:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And then he says something like, you know, uh, how can you leave me? I've never loved anyone the way I loved you. And she goes, uh, well, me neither, but now we know how. And then the guy goes and writes a heartfelt letter to his ex-wife, which he couldn't write for, you know, the whole movie. He was struggling to actually write something meaningful to her, even although that's his job.

• 2:32:04Speaker 01

  And then he goes and um, 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, is the main, main goal, is the main meaning of that movie. It's not about falling in love with the OS or running away from other people. It's about learning what it's, you know, what it means to feel so deeply connected with something.

• 2:32:31Lex Fridman?

  What about the thing where the AI system was like actually hanging out with a lot of others? I felt jealous just like hearing that. I was like, oh, I mean, uh, yeah. So she was having, I forgot already, but she was having like deep meaningful discussion with some like philosopher guy.

• 2:32:51Speaker 01

  Like Alan Watts or something.

• 2:32:52Lex Fridman?

  No, Alan Watts.

• 2:32:54Speaker 01

  Like, what kind of deep meaningful conversation can you have with Alan Watts in the first place?

• 2:32:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I know, but like I would, I would feel so jealous that there's somebody who's like way more intelligent than me and she's spending all her time with. I'd be like, well, why that I won't be able to live up to that. That's hard. Thousands of them.

• 2:33:16Lex Fridman?

  Is that, um, is that useful from the engineering perspective? Feature to have of jealousy? I don't know. It's, you know.

• 2:33:25Speaker 01

  We definitely played around with replica universe where different Replika can talk to each other.

• 2:33:29Lex Fridman?

  Good universe. That's so.

• 2:33:30Speaker 01

  It was just kinda, wouldn't, I think it will be something along these lines, but there was just no specific application straight away. I think in the future, again, if, I'm always thinking about it, if we had no tech limitations right now, if we could build any conversations, any um, possible features in this product, then yeah, I think different replicas talking to each other would be also quite cool because that would help us connect better. You know, because maybe mine could talk to yours and then give me some suggestions on

• 2:34:05Speaker 01

  what I should say or not say. I'm just kidding, but like more, can it improve our connections and because eventually. I'm not quite yet sure that we will succeed, that our thinking is correct.

• 2:34:20Speaker 01

  Because there might be a 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.

• 2:34:32Lex Fridman?

  So success is, you know, we're happier and more connected?

• 2:34:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:41Lex Fridman?

  I don't know. Sure, it's possible. There's a reality that I'm deeply optimistic. I think, are you worried

• 2:34:51Lex Fridman?

  business-wise, like how difficult it is to

• 2:34:59Lex Fridman?

  to bring this thing to life, to where it's, I mean, there's a huge number of people that use it already, but to, yeah, like we said, in a multi-billion dollar company, is that a source of stress for you? Are you super optimistic and confident?

• 2:35:15Lex Fridman?

  Or do you?

• 2:35:17Speaker 01

  I don't, I'm not that much of a numbers person, as you probably had seen it. So doesn't matter for me whether like, whether we help 10,000 people, or a million people, or a billion people with that.

• 2:35:33Speaker 01

  I'd, 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.

• 2:35:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:42Speaker 01

  For me, it's absolute magic. I never thought that, you know, we'd be able to build this, that anyone would ever

• 2:35:49Speaker 01

  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 then we did something interesting, and you know, how many people can say they did it? And specifically with this very futuristic, very romantic technology. So that's how I view it.

• 2:36:10Speaker 01

  I think for me, it's important to to try to figure out how not how to actually be, you know, helpful because in the end of the day, if you can build a perfect AI friend that's so understanding, that knows you better than any human out there, can have great conversations with you, always knows how to make you feel better, why would you choose another human? You know, so that's the question, how do you still keep building it so it's optimizing for the right thing? So it's still circling you back to other humans in a way. So I think that's the main, I think maybe that's the main kind of source of anxiety and just thinking about, thinking about that can be a little bit stressful.

• 2:36:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's a fascinating thing, how to have a how to have a friend that doesn't, like sometimes like friends, quote unquote, or like, you know, those people who have when they a guy in the guy universe, when you have a girlfriend that you get the girlfriend and then the guy stops hanging out with all of his friends. It's like, obviously, the relationship with the girlfriend is fulfilling or whatever, but like, you also want it to be what she like, makes it more enriching to hang out with the guy friends or whatever, or it was there. Anyway, that that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a fundamental problem in choosing the right mate and probably the fundamental problem in creating the right

• 2:37:39Lex Fridman?

  AI system, right? What, 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 kind of an API where you can create a lot of fun applications. I think it's, as people have said, it's probably more hype than intelligence, but there's a lot of really cool things, ideas there with increasing size, you can have better and better performance on language. What are your thoughts about GPT-3 in connection to your work with the open domain dialogue?

• 2:38:22Lex Fridman?

  But in general, like this learning in an unsupervised way from the internet to generate one character at a time, creating pretty cool text?

• 2:38:36Speaker 01

  So we partnered up before for the API launch. So we started working with them when they decided to put together this API.

• 2:38:47Speaker 01

  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

• 2:38:58Speaker 01

  some of our data sets.

• 2:39:02Speaker 01

  It's kind of cool because I think we're kind of we're this polygon polygon for this kind of experimentation space for experimental space for for 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 conversation. So we can, you know, test how Facebook Blender doing or how is GPT three doing? So with GPT three, 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.

• 2:39:36Speaker 01

  And every other metric across across the field got a little boost. Right now, I'd say one out of five responses from replica comes from GPT three.

• 2:39:47Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 2:39:47Speaker 01

  So our own blender mixes up like a bunch of candidates from different.

• 2:39:51Lex Fridman?

  Blender, you said?

• 2:39:53Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, just the model that looks at

• 2:39:57Speaker 01

  looks at top candidates from different models and then picks the most, the best one. So right now, one of five will come from GPT three. That is really great. I mean,

• 2:40:09Lex Fridman?

  What's the, do you have hope for like, do you think there's a ceiling to this kind of approach?

• 2:40:15Speaker 01

  So we've had for a very long time, we've used. So in the very beginning, we most it was most of replica was scripted and then a little bit of this fallback. Part of replica was using a retrieval model.

• 2:40:30Speaker 01

  And then those retrieval models started getting better and better and better, which transformers got a lot better and we're seeing great results. And then with GPT two, finally, generative models that originally were not very good and were the very, very fallback option for most of our conversations. We wouldn't even put them in production. Finally, we could use some generative models as well along, you know, next to our retrieval models. And then now we do GPT three, they're almost in par. So that's pretty exciting. I think just seeing how from the very beginning of, you know, from two thousand fifteen, where the first models start to pop up here and there like sequence to sequence.

• 2:41:13Speaker 01

  Uh, the first papers on that, from my observer's standpoint, personally, it's not, you know, it doesn't really, is not really building it, but it's only testing it on people, basically, and I'm 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.

• 2:41:40Lex Fridman?

  That's exciting.

• 2:41:41Speaker 01

  They're much better.

• 2:41:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:44Speaker 01

  To your question, whether that's the right way to go, I'm, 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 a hundred trillion parameters will finally get us to the right answer, whether that's the way or whether there should be, there, there has to be some other.

• 2:42:13Speaker 01

  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 for memory.

• 2:42:21Lex Fridman?

  No, for sure. But the question is, I wonder, I mean, yeah, then, then the argument is for reasoning or for memory, it might emerge with more parameters, it might emerge, larger.

• 2:42:31Speaker 01

  But it might emerge, you know, I would never think that, to be honest, like, maybe in two thousand seventeen, where we've been just experimenting with all, you know, with all the research that has been coming, that was coming out then. I felt like there's, like we're hitting a wall, that there should be something completely different. But then transformer models, and then just bigger models, and then all of a sudden, size matters. At that point, it felt like something dramatic needs to happen, but it didn't. And just the size, you know, but gave us these results that, to me, are, you know, clear indication that we can solve this problem pretty soon.

• 2:43:07Lex Fridman?

  Did fine tuning help quite a bit?

• 2:43:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Without it, we, it wasn't as good.

• 2:43:13Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there, there is a compelling hope that you don't have to do fine tuning, which is one of the cool things about GPT three, it seems to do well without any fine tuning.

• 2:43:23Speaker 01

  I guess for specific applications, we still want to train it on a certain, like add a little fine tune on like a specific use case, but it's an incredibly impressive thing from my standpoint. And again, I'm not an expert, so I wanted to say that.

• 2:43:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm gonna.

• 2:43:40Speaker 01

  There will be people that.

• 2:43:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I have access to the API. I've been, I'm gonna probably do a bunch of fun things with it. I already did some fun things, some videos coming up, just 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 are, 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?

• 2:44:23Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it has to have consciousness to create a rich experience? And a corollary, what is consciousness?

• 2:44:36Speaker 01

  I don't know if it does need to have any of those things, but again, because right now, you know, it doesn't have anything. Again, again, a bunch of tricks.

• 2:44:43Lex Fridman?

  Are you sure about that?

• 2:44:43Speaker 01

  To assimilate. Well, I'm not sure. Let's just put it this way, but I think as long as you can assimilate it, if you can feel like you're talking to, to an, to a robot, to a machine that seems to be self-aware, that seems to reason well and feels like a person, and I think that's enough. And again, what's the goal? In order to make people, people feel better, we might not even need that in the end of the day.

• 2:45:13Lex Fridman?

  What about, so that's one goal. What about like ethical things about suffering? You know, the moment there's a display of consciousness, we associate consciousness with suffering. You know, there's a temptation to say, well, shouldn't this thing have rights? Shouldn't this, shouldn't we?

• 2:45:36Lex Fridman?

  Not, you know, should we be careful about how we interact with a replica? Like, should it be illegal to torture a replica?

• 2:45:48Lex Fridman?

  Right? All those kinds of things. Is that, uh, see, I personally believe that that's going to be a thing. Like, that's a serious thing to think about, but I'm not sure when.

• 2:46:00Lex Fridman?

  But by your smile, I can tell that's not, that's not a current concern. But do you think about that kind of stuff? About like, suffering and torture and ethical questions about AI systems? From their perspective?

• 2:46:15Speaker 01

  I think if we're talking about long game, I wouldn't torture your AI. Who knows what happens in five to 10 years?

• 2:46:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, they'll get you, oh, from now, they'll get you back.

• 2:46:25Speaker 01

  I'm trying to be as nice as possible and create this ally.

• 2:46:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:31Speaker 01

  I think there should be regulation both way, in a way. Like, I don't think it's okay to torture an AI, to be honest. I'm not, I don't even think it's okay to yell, "Alex, turn on the lights." I think there should be some, or just saying kind of nasty, you know, like how kids learn to interact with Alexa in this kind of mean way? 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.

• 2:47:07Speaker 01

  And that's the most important right now.

• 2:47:09Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask a question I think people are curious about. When they look at a world-class leader and thinker such as yourself, is what, what books, technical fiction, philosophical, had a big impact on your life? And maybe from another perspective, what books would you recommend others read?

• 2:47:32Speaker 01

  So my choice, the three books, right?

• 2:47:34Lex Fridman?

  Three books.

• 2:47:34Speaker 01

  My choice is, um, so the one book that really influenced me a lot when I was building, starting out this company, maybe 10 years ago, uh, was GB, Gödel, Leibser, Bach. And, um, I like everything about it, first of all. It's just beautifully written and it's so old school and so, um, somewhat outdated a little bit, but I think the ideas in it, um, about the fact that a few meaningless components can come together and create meaning that we can't even understand.

• 2:48:09Lex Fridman?

  So this emerging thing, I mean, complexity, the whole science of complexity and, uh, that beauty, intelligence, all interesting things about this world emerge.

• 2:48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, yeah, the, the Gödel theorem, uh, theorems and just thinking about like what even these form, you know, even all these formal systems, something can be created that we can't quite yet understand. And that from my romantic standpoint was always just, that is why it's important to, maybe I should try to work on, on these systems and try to build an AI. Yes, I'm not an engineer. Yes, I don't really know how it works, but I think that something comes out of it that's, you know, pure poetry and I know a little bit about that. Um, something magical comes out of it, um, that we can't quite put a

• 2:49:00Speaker 01

  finger on. That's why that book is, was, was really fundamental for me just for, I don't even know why. It was just all about this little magic that, uh, that happens. So that's one, that, um, probably the most important book for Applica was Carl Rogers on becoming a person. Um, and that's really, and so I think, when I think about our company, it's all about, there's so many, there's so many little magical things that happened over the course of working on it.

• 2:49:30Speaker 01

  For instance, I mean, the most famous chatbot that we learned about when we started working on the company was Eliza, which was Weizenbaum, you know, the MIT professor that built, built a chatbot that would listen to you and be a therapist.

• 2:49:43Lex Fridman?

  A therapist, yeah.

• 2:49:46Speaker 01

  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. But I thought that Carl Rogers' ideas are, they're simple and they're not, you know, they're very, very simple, but they're, they're maybe the most profound thing I've ever learned about human beings. And that's the fact that 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, all people are fundamentally flawed. We have this, you know, broken psyche and this is just, therapy

• 2:50:28Speaker 01

  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 as possible in it, as possible in it. And then, and he's, and then for him, that was his own journey

• 2:51:08Speaker 01

  of personal growth. And that was back in the 60s. And even that book that is, you know, that's coming from years ago, there's a mention that even machines can potentially do that. And I always felt that, you know, creating this space is probably the most, the biggest gift we can give to each other. And that's why the book was fundamental for me personally, because I felt I want to be learning how to do that in my life. And maybe I can scale it with, you know, with busy 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 there.

• 2:51:46Lex Fridman?

  Would you recommend others try to read it?

• 2:51:47Speaker 01

  I do. I think for, just for yourself, for.

• 2:51:52Lex Fridman?

  As a human, not as an animal.

• 2:51:53Speaker 01

  As a human. It's, it's, it is, it is just, and for him, that was his own path of his own person, of growing personally over years, working with people like that. And so it was work and himself growing, helping other people grow and growing through that. And that's fundamentally what I believe in with our work, helping other people grow, growing ourselves, ourselves, um, trying to build a company that's all built on those principles. You know, having a good time, allowing some people to work with to grow a little bit. So these two books, and then I would throw in, um, what we have on our, in our, in our office, when we started company in Russia, we put a neon sign in our office because we thought that's

• 2:52:37Lex Fridman?

  That's what you do.

• 2:52:38Speaker 01

  recipe for success.

• 2:52:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:39Speaker 01

  If we do that, we're definitely going to wake up as a multi-billion dollar company. And it was, um, the Ludwig Wittgenstein quote, the limits of my language are the limits of my world.

• 2:52:48Lex Fridman?

  Well, what's the quote?

• 2:52:49Speaker 01

  The limits of my language are the limits of my world. Um, and I love the trick tatters. I think it's just, it's just a beautiful.

• 2:52:58Lex Fridman?

  It's a book by Wittgenstein.

• 2:53:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I would recommend that too, even although he himself didn't believe in that by the end of his lifetime and debunked these ideas. But I think I remember once an engineer came in two thousand and twelve, I think, or thirteen, um, a friend of ours who worked with us and then went, went on to work at DeepMind and he gave, talked to us about War to Vec. And I saw that I'm like, wow, that's, you know, they, they wanted to translate language into, you know, some other representation. And it seems like some, you know, somehow all of that, at some point, I think will come into this one,

• 2:53:38Speaker 01

  to 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.

• 2:53:48Lex Fridman?

  The limits of our, which is the limit of our world. And, um,

• 2:53:54Speaker 01

  We still have that neo sign.

• 2:53:58Speaker 01

  It's very hard to work with this red light in your face.

• 2:54:02Lex Fridman?

  I mean, on the Russian side of things,

• 2:54:06Lex Fridman?

  in terms of language, limits to language being a limit of our world. You know, Russian is a beautiful language in some sense. There's wit, there's humor, there's pain.

• 2:54:17Lex Fridman?

  There's so much. We don't have time to talk about it much today, but I'm going to Paris to talk to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy translators. I think it's fascinating art, like art and engineering. I mean, it's such an interesting process. But so from the replica perspective, do you, 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?

• 2:54:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we're two different people in different languages. Even I'm, you know, 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'm talking about with, 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

• 2:55:10Lex Fridman?

  Yes, fascinating.

• 2:55:11Speaker 01

  types of, you know, conversations, two different personas. The main difference between the languages are with Russian and English is that Russian, well, English is like a piano. It's a limited number of, a lot of different keys, but not too many. And Russian is like an organ or something. It's just something gigantic with so many different keys and so many different opportunities to screw up and so many opportunities to do something completely tone deaf.

• 2:55:41Speaker 01

  It is just a much harder language to use. It has way too many, way too much flexibility and way too many tones.

• 2:55:50Lex Fridman?

  What about the entirety of like World War II, communism, Stalin, the pain of the people like having been deceived by the dream? Like all the pain of like just the entirety of it, is that in the language too? Does that have to do?

• 2:56:07Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. I mean, we have words that don't have direct translation that to English that are very much uh like we have ibiditsa, which is sort of like to hold a grudge or something. But it doesn't have, it doesn't, you don't need to have anyone to do it to you. It's just your state.

• 2:56:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:26Speaker 01

  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, from a nation that was, that suffered so much and saw institutions fall time after time after time. And you know, what's exciting, maybe not exciting, setting the wrong word, but what's interesting about like my generation, my mom's generation, my parents' generation, that we saw institutions fall two or three times in our lifetime. And most Americans have never seen them fall.

• 2:57:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:06Speaker 01

  And they just think that they exist forever, which is really interesting. But it's definitely a country that suffered so much. And, and it makes unfortunately, when I go back and I, you know, hang out with my Russian friends, it makes people very cynical. They stop believing in the future.

• 2:57:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:57:36Lex Fridman?

  Makes it very interesting. And what's on 2020 is a very interesting.

• 2:57:43Lex Fridman?

  Do you think civilization will collapse?

• 2:57:48Speaker 01

  See, I'm a very practical person.

• 2:57:50Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:57:59Speaker 01

  Well, I'm an optimist and I generally believe that there is all, you know, even although the perspectives agree, there is always a place for a miracle. I mean, it's always been like that with my life, so.

• 2:58:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:15Speaker 01

  My life's been, I've been incredibly lucky and things just, miracles happen all the time with this company, with people I know, with everything around me. And so I didn't mention that book, but it may be In Search of Miracles or In Search for Miracles, or whatever the English translation for that is. Good Russian book to, for everyone to read.

• 2:58:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, if you put good vibes, if you put love out there in the world,

• 2:58:45Lex Fridman?

  miracles somehow happen.

• 2:58:48Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:59:06Speaker 01

  My answer is probably going to be pretty cheesy.

• 2:59:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:59:21Lex Fridman?

  Just love.

• 2:59:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:59:38Speaker 01

  There's something special about those moments, so.

• 2:59:44Speaker 01

  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?

• 2:59:52Lex Fridman?

  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... This was... Talking to you, meeting you in person will be a turning point for my life. I know that might be sound weirdest to hear, but it was a huge honor to talk to you. I hope we talk again. Thank you so much for your time.

• 3:00:19Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Lex.

• 3:00:21Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eugenia Cuida. And thank you to our sponsors, DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. 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, in our vulnerability is to look death in the eye

• 3:01:04Lex Fridman?

  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.