there's a broader question here, right? As we build socially and emotionally intelligent machines,
what does that mean about our relationship with them? And then we're broadly our relationship
with one another, right? Because this machine is going to be programmed to be amazing at empathy,
by definition, right? It's going to always be there for you. It's not going to get bored.
I don't know how I feel about that. I think about that a lot.
The following is a conversation with Rana L. Colubi, a pioneer in the field of emotion recognition
and human-centric artificial intelligence. She is the founder of Effectiva, deputy CEO of SmartEye,
author of Girl Decoded, and one of the most brilliant, kind, inspiring, and fun human beings
I've gotten the chance to talk to. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Rana L. Colubi.
You grew up in the Middle East in Egypt. What is a memory from that time that makes you smile?
Or maybe a memory that stands out as helping your mind take shape and helping you define
yourself in this world? So the memory that stands out is we used to live in my grandma's house.
She used to have these mango trees in her garden. And in the summer, and so mango season was like
July and August. And so in the summer, she would invite all my aunts and uncles and cousins and
you know, like it was just like maybe there were like 20 or 30 people in the house and she would
cook all this amazing food. And us, the kids, we were like, go down the garden and we would like
pick all these mangoes. And I don't know, I think it's just the bringing people together,
like that always stuck with me, the warmth. Around the mango tree.
Yeah, around the mango tree. And that's just like the joy, the joy of being together around food
and I'm a terrible cook. So I guess that didn't, that memory didn't translate to me kind of doing
the same. I love hosting people. Do you remember colors, smells? Is that what, like what, how does
memory work? Yeah. Like what do you visualize? Do you visualize people's faces, smiles? Is there
colors? Is there like a theme to the colors? Is it smells because of food involved?
Yeah, I think that's a great question. So those Egyptian mangoes, there's a particular type
that I love and it's called Darwesi mangoes and they're kind of, you know, they're oval and
they have a little red in them. So I kind of, they're red and mango colored on the outside.
So I remember that. Is red indicate like extra sweetness? Is that, is that, that means like
it's nicely sweet? Yeah, it's nice and ripe and stuff. Yeah. What, what's like a definitive food
of Egypt? You know, there's like these almost stereotypical foods in different parts of the
world, like Ukraine invented borscht. Borscht is this beet soup with that you put sour cream on.
You see, it's not, I can't see if you, if you know, if you know what it is, I think you know
it's delicious, but if I explain it, it's just not going to sound delicious. I feel like beet
soup, this doesn't make any sense, but that's kind of, and you probably have actually seen pictures
of it because it's one of the traditional foods in Ukraine, in Russia, in different parts of the
Slavic world. So this, but it's become so cliche and stereotypical that you almost don't mention
it, but it's still delicious. Like I visited Ukraine, I eat that every single day. So. Do you,
do you make it yourself? How hard is it to make? No, I don't know. I think to make it well,
like anything, like Italians, they say, well, tomato sauce is easy to make, but
to make it right, that's like a generational skill. So anyway, is there something like that in Egypt?
Is there a culture of food? There is. And actually, we have a similar kind of soup. It's called
malochaya, and it's made of this green plant. It's like somewhere between spinach and kale,
and you mince it, and then you cook it in like chicken broth. And my grandma used to make,
and my mom makes it really well, and I try to make it, but it's not as great. So we used to
have that. And then we used to have it alongside stuffed pigeons. I'm pescatarian now, so I don't
eat that anymore, but. Stuffed pigeon. Yeah, it's like, it was really yummy. It's the one thing I
miss about, you know, now that I'm pescatarian and I don't eat. The stuffed pigeon? Yeah, the stuffed
pigeons. Is it, what are they stuffed with? If that doesn't bother you too much to describe.
No, no, it's stuffed with a lot of like just rice and, yeah, it's just rice. Yeah. And you also,
you said that your first in your book, that your first computer was an Atari, and Space Invaders
was your favorite game. Is that when you first fell in love with computers? What did you say?
Yeah, I would say so. Video games, or just the computer itself? Just something about the machine?
Ooh, this thing, this magic in here. Yeah, I think the magical moment is definitely like playing
video games with my, I have two younger sisters, and we just like had fun together, like playing
games. But the other memory I have is my first code. The first code I wrote, I wrote, I drew a
Christmas tree. And I'm Muslim, right? So it's kind of, it was kind of funny that I, that I, that the
first thing I did was like this Christmas tree. So, yeah. And that's when I realized, wow, you can,
you can write code to do all sorts of like really cool stuff. I must have been like six or seven at
the time. So you can write programs, and the programs do stuff for you. That's power. That's
important. If you think about it, that's empowering. That's AI. Yeah, I know what it is. I don't know
if that, see like, I don't know if many people think of it that way when they first learned
to program. They just love the puzzle of it. Like, ooh, this is cool. This is pretty. It's a
Christmas tree, but like, it's power. It is power. Like, you eventually, I guess you couldn't at the
time, but eventually this thing, if it's interesting enough, if it's a pretty enough Christmas tree,
it can be run by millions of people and bring them joy, like that little thing. And then,
because it's digital, it's easy to spread. So like, you just created something that's
easily spreadable to millions of people. It's hard to think that way when you're six.
In the book, you write, I am who I am, because I was raised by a particular set of parents,
both modern and conservative, forward-thinking and yet locked in tradition. I'm a Muslim,
and I feel I'm stronger and more centered for it. I adhere to the values of my religion,
even if I'm not as dutiful as I once was. And I am a new American, and I'm thriving on the
energy, vitality, and entrepreneurial spirit of this great country. So let me ask you about your
parents. What have you learned about life from them, especially when you were young?
So both my parents, they're Egyptian, but they moved to Kuwait right out. Actually,
there's a cute story about how they met. So my dad taught Kobel in the 70s, and my mom decided to
learn programming. So she signed up to take his Kobel programming class, and he tried to
date her, and she was like, no, no, no, I don't date. And so he's like, okay, I'll propose. And
that's how they got married. Whoa, strong move. Exactly right. That's really impressive. So those
Kobel guys know how to impress a lady. So yeah, so what have you learned from them?
So definitely grit. One of the core values in our family is just hard work. There were no
slackers in our family. And that's something I've definitely, that's definitely stayed with me,
both as a professional, but also my personal life. But I also think my mom, my mom always used to like,
I don't know, it was like unconditional love. Like I just knew my parents would be there for me,
kind of regardless of what I chose to do. And I think that's very powerful. And they got tested
on it because I kind of challenged, you know, I challenged cultural norms, and I kind of took
a different path, I guess, than what's expected of a woman in the Middle East. And they still love
me, which is, I'm so grateful for that. When was like a moment that was the most challenging for
them? Which moment where they kind of had to come face to face with the fact that you're a bit of
a rebel? I think the first big moment was when I had just gotten married, but I decided to go do
my PhD at Cambridge University. And because my husband at the time, he's now my ex, ran a company
in Cairo, he was going to stay in Egypt. So it was going to be a long distance relationship.
And that's very unusual in the Middle East for a woman to just head out and kind of,
you know, pursue her career. And so my dad, actually, my dad and my parents in law both said,
you know, we do not approve of you doing this. But now you're under the jurisdiction of your
husband, so he can make the call. And luckily for me, he was supportive. He said, you know,
this is your dream come true, we've always wanted to do a PhD, I'm going to support you.
So I think that was the first time where, you know, I challenged the cultural norms.
Was that scary? Oh my God, yes. It was totally scary.
What's the biggest culture shock from there to Cambridge, to London?
Well, that was also during right around September 11th. So everyone thought that there was going
to be a third world war. And I, at the time, I used to wear the hijab, so I was very visibly
Muslim. And so my parents just were, they were afraid for my safety. But anyways, when I got
to Cambridge, because I was so scared, I decided to take off my headscarf and wear a hat instead.
So I just went to class wearing these like British hat, which was, in my opinion,
actually worse than just showing up in a headscarf. Because it was just so awkward, right? Like
fitting in class with like all these. Trying to fit in. Yeah. Like a spy.
Yeah. So after a few weeks of doing that, I was like,
to heck with that, I'm just going to go back to wearing my headscarf.
Yeah, you wore the hijab, so starting in 2000 and for 12 years after. So always whenever you're
in public, you have to wear the hat covering. Can you speak to that, to the hijab, maybe your
mixed feelings about it? Like what does it represent in its best case? What does it represent in the
worst case? Yeah. You know, I think there's a lot of... I guess I'll first start by saying
I wore it voluntarily. I was not forced to wear it. And in fact, I was one of the very first women
in my family to decide to put on the hijab. And my family thought it was really odd, right? Like
there was, they were like, why do you want to put this on? And at its best, it's the sign of
modesty, humility. It's like me wearing a suit. People are like, why are you wearing a suit?
It's a step back into some kind of tradition, a respect for tradition of sorts. So you said,
because it's by choice, you're kind of free to make that choice to celebrate the tradition
of modesty. Exactly. And I actually made it my own. I remember I would really match the color
of my headscarf with what I was wearing. Like it was a form of self-expression. And at its best,
I loved wearing it. You know, I have a lot of questions around how we practice religion and
religion. And I think also it was a time where I was spending a lot of time going back and forth
between the US and Egypt. And I started meeting a lot of people in the US who were just amazing.
People very purpose-driven. People who have very strong core values, but they're not Muslim.
That's okay, right? And so that was when I just had a lot of questions. And politically also the
situation in Egypt was when the Muslim Brotherhood ran the country and I didn't agree with their
ideology. It was at a time when I was going through a divorce. Like it was like just the
perfect storm of like political, personal conditions where I was like, this doesn't feel like me
anymore. And it took a lot of courage to take it off because culturally it's not, it's okay if you
don't wear it, but it's really not okay to wear it and then take it off. But you're still, so you
have to do that while still maintaining a deep core and pride in the origins, in your origin story.
Totally. So still being Egyptian, still being a Muslim.
Right. And being, I think generally like faith-driven, but yeah.
But what that means changes year by year for you. It's like a personal journey.
Yeah, exactly. What would you say is the role of faith in that part of the world?
Like how do you say, you mentioned it a bit in the book too.
Yeah. I mean, I think, I think there is something really powerful about just believing
that there's a bigger force. You know, there's a kind of surrendering, I guess, that comes with
religion and you surrender and you have this deep conviction that it's going to be okay, right?
Like the universe is out to like do amazing things for you and it's going to be okay.
And there's strength to that. Like even when you're going through adversity,
you just know that it's going to work out.
Yeah. It gives you like an inner peace, a calmness.
Exactly. Exactly.
Yeah. It's faith in all the meanings of that word.
Right.
Faith that everything is going to be okay. And it is because time passes
and time cures all things. It's like a calmness with the chaos of the world.
Yeah.
And also there's like a silver, I'm a true believer of this,
that something at the specific moment in time can look like it's catastrophic and
it's not what you wanted in life. But then time passes and then you look back and there's
a silver lining, right? It maybe closed the door, but it opened a new door for you.
And so I'm a true believer in that, that there's a silver lining and almost anything in life.
You just have to have this like have faith or conviction that it's going to work out.
Yeah. Such a beautiful way to see a shitty feeling.
So if you're, if you feel shitty about it at current situation,
I mean, it almost is always true unless it's the cliche thing of if it doesn't kill you,
whatever it doesn't kill you makes you stronger. It's, it does seem that over time,
when you take a perspective on things that the hardest moments and periods of your life
are the most meaningful. Yeah. Yeah. So over time you get to have that perspective.
Right. What, what about, because you mentioned Kuei, what about, let me ask you about war.
What's the role of war and peace? Maybe even the big love and hate in that part of the world,
because it does seem to be a part of the world where there's turmoil.
So there was turmoil, there's still turmoil. It is so unfortunate, honestly. It's,
it's such a waste of human resources and, and yeah, and human mind share. I mean,
and at the end of the day, we all kind of want the same things. We want,
you know, we want a human connection. We want joy. We want to feel fulfilled. We want to feel,
you know, a life of purpose. And I just, I just find it baffling, honestly,
that we are still having to grapple with that. I have a story to share about this.
You know, I grew up in Egypt, I'm an Egyptian American now, but, but, you know,
originally from Egypt. And when I first got to Cambridge, it turned out my office mate,
like my PhD kind of, you know, she ended up, you know, we ended up becoming friends,
but she was from Israel. And we didn't know, yeah, we didn't know how it was going to be like.
Did you guys sit there just staring at each other for a bit?
Actually, she, because I arrived before she did, and it turns out she emailed our PhD advisor
and asked him if she thought it was going to be okay. Yeah.
Oh, this is around 9-11 too. Yeah. And, and Peter, Peter Robinson, our PhD advisor was like,
yeah, like just as an academic institution, just show up. And we became super good friends. We were
both new moms, like we both had our kids during our PhD. We were both doing artificial emotional
intelligence. She was looking at speech. I was looking at the face. We just had so, the culture
was so similar. Our jokes were similar. It was just, I was like, why on earth are our countries?
Why is there all this like war and tension? And I think it falls back to the narrative,
right? If you change the narrative, like whoever creates this narrative of war,
I don't know, we should have women run the world.
Yeah. That's one solution. The good women, because there's also evil women in the world.
True, true. Okay.
But yes, yes, there could be less war if women ran the world. The other aspect is,
doesn't matter the gender, the people in power. You know, I get to see this with
with Ukraine and Russia, different parts of the world around that conflict now.
And that's happening in Yemen as well and everywhere else. There's these narratives
told by the leaders to the populace. And those narratives take hold and everybody believes
that. And they have a distorted view of the humanity on the other side. In fact, especially
during war, you don't even see the people on the other side as human or as equal intelligence or
worth or value as you. You tell all kinds of narratives about them being Nazis or
Dom or whatever narrative you want to weave around that or evil.
But I think when you actually meet them face to face, you realize they're like the same.
Exactly, right?
It's actually a big shock for people to realize that they've been essentially lied to
within their country. And I kind of have faith that social media, as ridiculous as it is to say,
or any kind of technology is able to bypass the walls that governments put up and connect
people directly. And then you get to realize, ooh, like people fall in love across different
nations and religions and so on. And that I think ultimately can cure a lot of our ills,
especially sort of in person. Just I also think that if leaders met in person to have a conversation
that would cure a lot of ills of the world, especially in private. Let me ask you about the
women running the world. So gender does in part perhaps shape the landscape of just
our human experience. So in what ways was it limiting it? In what ways was it empowering
for you to be a woman in the Middle East? I think just kind of just going back to my comment
on women running the world. I think it comes back to empathy, which has been a common threat
throughout my entire career. And it's this idea of human connection. Once you build common ground
with a person or a group of people, you build trust, you build loyalty, you build friendship,
and then you can turn that into behavior change and motivation and persuasion.
And so it's like empathy and emotions are just at the center of everything we do.
And I think being from the Middle East, kind of this human connection is very strong. We have
this running joke that if you come to Egypt for a visit, people will know everything about your
life right away. I have no problems asking you about your personal life. There's no boundaries
really, no personal boundaries in terms of getting to know people. We get emotionally
intimate like very, very quickly. But I think people just get to know each other authentically,
I guess. There isn't this superficial level of getting to know people. You just try to get to
know people really deeply. And advocacy is a part of that.
Totally. Because you can put yourself in this person's shoe and imagine what challenges they're
going through. And so I think I've definitely taken that with me. Generosity is another one too,
like just being generous with your time and love and attention and even with your wealth, right?
Even if you don't have a lot of it, you're still very generous. And I think that's another...
Enjoying the humanity of other people. And so you think there's a useful difference between men
and women in that aspect and empathy? Or is doing these big general groups, does that hinder progress?
Yeah, I actually don't want to over-generalize. Some of the men I know are the most empathetic
humans. Yeah, I strive to be empathetic. Yeah, you're actually very empathetic.
Yeah, so I don't want to over-generalize. Although one of the researchers I worked with
when I was at Cambridge, Professor Simon Bering Cohen, he's Sasha Bering Cohen's cousin.
And he runs the Autism Research Center at Cambridge. And he's written multiple books
on autism. And one of his theories is the empathy scale, like the systemizers and the
empathizers. And there's a disproportionate amount of computer scientists and engineers
who are systemizers and perhaps not great empathizers. And then there's more men in
that bucket, I guess, than women. And then there's more women in the empathizer's bucket.
So again, not to over-generalize. I sometimes wonder about that. It's been frustrating to me
how many, I guess, systemizers there are in the field of robotics. Yeah. It's actually encouraging
to me because I care about, obviously, social robotics. And because there's more opportunity
for people that are empathic. Exactly. I totally agree. Well, right? So it's nice. Yes. So every
robotics I talk to, they don't see the human as interesting as, like, it's not exciting. You
want to avoid the human at all costs. It's a safety concern to be touching the human,
which it is. But it's also an opportunity for a deep connection or collaboration or all that
kind of stuff. And because most brilliant roboticists don't care about the human, it's an opportunity.
In your case, it's a business opportunity to gain general opportunity to explore those ideas.
So in this beautiful journey to Cambridge, to, you know, UK, and then to America, what's the moment
or moments where they were most transformational for you as a scientist and as a leader? So you
became an exceptionally successful CEO, founder, researcher, scientist, and so on.
Was there a face shift there where, like, I can be somebody. I can really do something in this
world. Yeah. So I actually just kind of a little bit of background. So the reason why I moved from
Cairo to Cambridge, UK to do my PhD is because I had a very clear career plan. I was like,
okay, I'll go abroad, get my PhD, gonna crush it in three or four years, come back to Egypt and
teach. It was very clear, very well laid out. Was topic clear or no? The topic. Well, I did,
I did my PhD around building artificial emotional intelligence and looking at it.
In your master plan ahead of time, when you're sitting by the mango tree, did you,
did you know it's going to be artificial intelligence? No, no, no, that I did not know.
Although I think I kind of knew that I was going to be doing computer science, but I didn't know
the specific area. But I love teaching. I mean, I still love teaching. So I just, yeah, I just
wanted to go abroad, get a PhD, come back, teach. Why computer science? Can we just link on that?
Because you're such an empathic person who cares about emotion and humans and so on.
Isn't, aren't computers cold and emotionless? Just changing that. Yeah, I know. But like,
isn't that the, or did you see computers as the having the capability to actually
connect with humans? I think that was like my takeaway from my experience just growing up.
Like computers sit at the center of how we connect and communicate with one another, right?
Or technology in general. Like I remember my first experience being away from my parents.
We communicated with a fax machine, but thank goodness for the fax machine because we could
send letters back and forth to each other. This was pre-emails and stuff. So I think
technology can be not just transformative in terms of productivity, etc. It actually does
change how we connect with one another. And can I just defend the fax machine? Yeah.
There's something like the haptic feel, because the email is all digital. There's something really
nice. I still write letters to people. There's something nice about the haptic aspect of the
fax machine because you still have to press, you still have to do something in the physical world
to make this thing a reality to the sense that somebody like comes out as a printout and you
can actually touch it and read it. Yeah. Yeah. There's something, there's something lost when it's
just an email. Obviously, I wonder how we can regain some of that in the digital world, which
goes to the metaverse and all those kinds of things. We'll talk about it. Anyway, so
Actually, do you question on that one? Do you still, do you have photo albums anymore? Do you
still print photos? No, no, but I'm a minimalist. So it was one of the painful steps in my life was
to scan all the photos and let go of them and then let go of all my books. You let go of your books?
Yeah, switch to Kindle, everything kind of. So I thought, I thought, okay, think 30 years from now.
Nobody's going to have books anymore. It's the technology of digital books going to get better
and better and better. Are you really going to be the guy that's still romanticizing physical books?
Are you going to be the old man on the porch who's like kids? Yes. So just get used to it.
Because it felt, it still feels a little bit uncomfortable to read on a Kindle, but get used
to it. I mean, I'm trying to learn new programming languages always. With technology,
you have to kind of challenge yourself to adapt to it. I forced myself to use TikTok now.
That thing doesn't need much forcing. It pulls you in like the worst kind of or the best kind of drug.
Anyway, yeah. So yeah, but I do love haptic things. There's a magic to the haptic. Even like touch
screens, it's tricky to get right to get the experience of a button. Yeah. Anyway, what were
we talking about? So AI, so the journey, your whole plan was to come back to Cairo and teach.
Right. And then what did the plan go wrong? Yeah, exactly. Right. And then I got to Cambridge
and I fall in love with the idea of research and kind of embarking on a path. Nobody's
explored this path before. You're building stuff that nobody's built before and it's
challenging and it's hard and there's a lot of non-believers. I just totally love that.
And at the end of my PhD, I think it's the meeting that changed the trajectory of my life.
Professor Roslyn Picard, who's, she runs the affective computing group at the MIT Media Lab.
I had read her book. I was like following all her research.
AKA Ros. Yes, AKA Ros. And she was giving a talk at a pattern recognition conference in Cambridge
and she had a couple of hours to kill. So she emailed the lab and she said,
you know, if any students want to meet with me, just sign up here. And so I signed up for slots
and I spent like the weeks leading up to it preparing for this meeting.
And I want to show her a demo of my research and everything. And we met and we ended up
hitting it off. Like we totally clicked. And at the end of the meeting, she said,
do you want to come work with me as a postdoc at MIT? And this is what I told her. I was like,
okay, this would be a dream come true, but there's a husband waiting for me in Cairo.
I kind of have to go back. And she said, it's fine. Just commute. And I literally started
commuting between Cairo and Boston. Yeah, it was, it was a long commute. And I didn't,
I did that like every few weeks, I would, you know, hop on a plane and go to Boston.
But that, that changed the trajectory of my life. There was no,
no, I kind of outgrew my dreams, right? I didn't want to go back to Egypt anymore and
be faculty. Like that was no longer my dream. I had a dream.
What was the, what was it like to be at MIT? What was that culture shock? You mean America in general,
but also, I mean Cambridge is its own culture. So what was MIT like? And what was America like?
I think, I wonder if that's similar to your experience at MIT. I was just
at the media lab in particular, I was just really impressed is not the right word.
I didn't expect the openness to like innovation and the acceptance of taking a risk and failing.
Like failure isn't really accepted back in Egypt, right? You don't want to fail. Like there's a
fear of failure, which I think has been hardwired in my brain. But you get to MIT and it's okay to
start things. And if they don't work out, like it's okay, you pivot to another idea. And that
kind of thinking was just very new to me. That's liberating. What media lab for people don't know,
MIT Media Lab is its own beautiful thing because they, I think more than other places at MIT,
reach for big ideas and like they try, I mean, I think, I mean, depending of course on who,
but certainly with Rosalyn, you try wild stuff, you try big things and crazy things and also
try to take things to completion so you can demo them. So always have a demo. Like if you go,
one of the sad things to me about robotics labs at MIT and there's like over 30, I think,
is like usually when you show up to a robotics lab, there's not a single working robot. They're
all broken. All the robots are broken, which is like the normal state of things because
you're working on them. But it would be nice if we lived in a world where robotics labs had
some robots functioning. One of my favorite moments that just sticks with me, I visited
Boston Dynamics and there was a, first of all, seeing so many spots, so many legged robots in
one place. I'm like, I'm home. But this is where I was built. The cool thing was just to see there
was a random robot spot was walking down the hall. It's probably doing mapping, but it looked like
he wasn't doing anything and he was wearing he or she. I don't know, but it, well, I like,
I like in my mind, there are people, they have a backstory, but this one in particular definitely
has a backstory because he was wearing a cowboy hat. So I just saw a spot robot with a cowboy hat
walking down the hall and there was just this feeling like there's a life, like he has a life.
He probably has to commute back to his family at night. Like there's a feeling like there's life
instilled in this robot and it's magical. I don't know. It was, it was kind of inspiring to see.
Did it say hello to, did he say hello to you? No, it's very, there's a focused nature to the
robot. No, no, listen, I love competence and focus and great. Like he was not going to get distracted
by the, the shallowness of small talk. There's a job to be done and he was doing it. So anyway,
the fact that it was working is a beautiful thing. And I think Media Lab really prides itself on
trying to always have a thing that's working that you could show off. Yes, we used to call it a demo
or die. You, you could not, yeah, you could not like show up with like PowerPoint or something.
You actually had to have it working. You know what? My son, who is now 13, I don't know if this is
still his lifelong goal or not, but when he was a little younger, his dream is to build an island
that's just inhabited by robots, like no humans. He just wants all these robots to be connecting
and having fun. And so there you go. Does he have human, does he have an idea of which robots he
loves most? Is it, is it Roomba like robots? Is it humanoid robots, robot dogs, or is not clear
yet? We used to have a Gibo, which was the one of the MIT Media Lab spinouts. And he used to love
Gibo. The thing with a giant head. Yes. It spins. Right, exactly. And it's an eye. It has, oh. Well,
like not glowing, like. Right. Right, right, right. Exactly. It's like how $9,000, but the friendly
version. He loved that. And then he just loves, yeah, he just, he, I think he loves all forms of
robots, actually. So it embodied intelligence. Yes. I like, I personally like legged robots,
especially anything that can wiggle its butt. No, that's not the definition of what I love.
But that's just technically what I've been working on recently, except I have a bunch of legged
robots now in Austin. And I've been doing, I've been trying to have them communicate affection
with their body in different ways, just for art. So cool. For art, really. Because I love the idea
of walking around with the robots, like, as you would with a dog. I think it's inspiring to a lot
of people, especially young people, like kids love. Kids love it. Parents, like, adults are scared
of robots, but kids don't have this kind of weird construction of the world that's full of evil.
They love cool things. Yeah. I remember when Adam was in first grade, so he must have been like
seven or so. I went in to his class with a whole bunch of robots and like the Emotion AI demo and
did a, and I asked the kids, I was like, do you, would you kids want to have a robot,
you know, robot friend or robot companion? Everybody said yes. And they wanted it for
all sorts of things, like to help them with their math homework and to like be a friend.
So there's, it just struck me how there was no fear of robots. Was a lot of adults have that,
like, us versus them? Yeah, none of that. Of course, you want to be very careful because
you still have to look at the lessons of history and how robots can be used by the power centers
of the world to abuse your rights and all that kind of stuff. But mostly it's good to enter
anything new with an excitement and optimism. Speaking of Roz, what have you learned about
science and life from Roz and Picard? Oh my God, I've learned so many things about life
from Roz. I think the thing I learned the most is perseverance. When I first met Roz, we applied,
and she invited me to be her postdoc, we applied for a grant to the National Science Foundation
to apply some of our research to autism, and we got back, we were rejected. Rejected.
Yeah, and the reasoning was... The first time you were rejected for fun, yeah.
Yeah, it was, and I basically, I just took the rejection to mean, okay, we're rejected. It's done,
like end of story, right? And Roz was like, it's great news. They love the idea. They just,
they just don't think we can do it. So let's build it, show them, and then reapply.
And it was that, oh my God, that story totally stuck with me. And, and she's like that in every
aspect of her life. She just does not take no for an answer. To reframe all negative feedback.
It was a challenge. It was a challenge. Yes, they liked this. Yeah, it was, it was a riot.
What else about science in general, about how you see computers and
also business and just everything about the world? She's a very powerful, brilliant woman
like yourself. So is there some aspect of that too? Yeah, I think Roz is actually also very
faith driven. She has this like deep belief in conviction. Yeah, and in the good in the world
and humanity. And I think that was meeting her and her family was definitely like a defining
moment for me because that was when I was like, wow, like, you can be of a different background
and religion and whatever. And you can still have the same core values. So that was, that was, yeah.
I'm grateful to her. So Roz, if you're listening, thank you. Yeah, she's great. She's been on this
podcast before. I hope she'll be on, I'm sure she'll be on again. You were the founder and CEO of
Affectiva, which is a big company that was acquired by another big company, Smart Eye.
And you're now the deputy CEO of Smart Eye. So you're a powerful leader, you're brilliant,
you're a brilliant scientist. A lot of people are inspired by you. What advice would you give,
especially to young women, but people in general who dream of becoming powerful leaders like yourself
in a world where perhaps, in a world that perhaps doesn't give them a clear, easy path to do so,
whether we're talking about Egypt or elsewhere?
You know, here you kind of describe me that way, kind of encapsulates, I think, what I think is
the biggest challenge of all, which is believing in yourself. I have had to grapple with this,
what I call now the Debbie Downer voice in my head. The kind of basically, it's just
chattering all the time, it's basically saying, oh, no, no, no, no, you can't do this. You're
not going to raise money. You can't start a company. What business do you have starting
a company or running a company or selling a company? You name it. It's always like,
like, and, and I think my biggest advice to not just women, but people who have,
who are taking a new path and, you know, they're not sure is to not let yourself and let your
thoughts be the biggest obstacle in your way. And I've had to like really work on myself
to not be my own biggest obstacle. So you got that negative voice.
Yeah. So is that, am I the only one? I don't think I'm the only one.
No, I have that negative voice. I'm not exactly sure if it's a bad thing or a good thing. I've
been really torn about it because it's been a lifelong companion. It's hard to know.
It's kind of a, it drives productivity and progress, but it can't hold you back from
taking big leaps. I think you, I, the best I can say is probably you have to somehow
be able to control it. So turn it off when it's not useful and turn it on when it's useful.
Like I have from almost like a third person perspective, right? Somebody who's sitting there
like, yeah, like, because it is useful to, to be critical. Like after,
like I just gave a talk yesterday at MIT and I was just, you know, there's so much love and it
was such an incredible experience. So many amazing people I got, you have to talk to. But,
you know, afterwards when I, when I went home and just took this long walk, you know, it was
mostly just negative thoughts about me. I don't like one basic stuff like I don't deserve any of
it. And second is like, like, why did you, that was so dumb that you said this, that's so dumb,
like, yeah, you should have prepared that better. Why did you say this? But I think it's good to
hear that voice out. All right. And like sit in that. And ultimately, I think you grow from that.
Now, when you're making really big decisions about funding or starting a company or taking a leap
to go to the UK or take a leap to go to America to work in Media Lab, though, yeah, there's a,
that's, you should be able to shut that off then, because you should have like this weird
confidence, almost like faith that you said before that everything's going to work out. So take the
leap of faith. Take the leap of faith. Despite the all the negativity. I mean, there's, there's
some of that you actually tweeted a really nice tweet thread. It says quote a year ago,
a friend recommended I do daily affirmations. And I was skeptical. But I was going through
major transitions in my life. So I gave it a shot. And it set me on a journey of self-acceptance and
self-love. So what was that? Like, maybe talk through this idea of affirmations and how that
helped you? Yeah, because really, like, I'm just like me, I'm a kind, I'd like to think of myself
as a kind person in general, but I'm kind of mean to myself sometimes. And so I've been doing
journaling for almost 10 years now. I use an app called day one, and it's awesome. I just journal
and I use it as an opportunity to almost have a conversation with the Debbie Downer voice in my,
it's like a rebuttal, right? Like Debbie Downer says, Oh my God, like, you know, you won't be
able to raise this round of funny. I'm like, Okay, let's talk about it. I have a track record of
doing X, Y and Z. I think I can do this. And it's literally like, so I wouldn't, I don't know that I
can shut off the voice, but I can have a conversation with it. And it just, it just, and I bring data
to the table, right? Nice. So, so that was the journaling part, which I found very helpful.
But the affirmation took it to a whole next level. And I just love it. I'm, I'm, I'm a year into doing
this. And you literally wake up in the morning. And the first thing you do, I meditate first. And
then, and then I write my affirmations. And it's, it's the energy I want to put out in the world
that hopefully will come right back to me. So I will say, I always start with my smile lights up
the whole world. And I kid you not, like people in the street will stop me and say, Oh my God,
like, we love your smile. Like, yes. So, so my affirmations will change depending on,
you know, what's happening this day. It's funny. I know, don't judge, don't judge.
No, that's not, what? Laughter is not judgment. It's just awesome. I mean, it, it's true. But
you're saying affirmations somehow help kind of, what is it that they do work to like remind you
of the kind of person you are and the kind of person you want to be, which actually may be
inverse order, the kind of person you want to be. And that helps you become the kind of person
you actually are. It just, it's, it brings intentionality to like what you're doing, right?
And so, by the way, I was laughing because my affirmations, which I also do are the opposite.
Oh, you do? Oh, what do you do? I don't, I don't have a my smile lights up the
water. Maybe I should add that because like I, I have, I just, I have, oh boy,
it's, it's much more stoic, like about focus, about this kind of stuff. But the joy, the emotion
that you're just in that little affirmation is beautiful. So maybe I should add that.
I have some, I have some like focus stuff, but that's usually, but that's a cool start.
That's a good, it's just after all the like smiling, you're inspired, playful,
and joyful and all that. And then it's like, okay, I kick butt.
Let's get shit done. Right.
Let's get shit done after me. Okay, cool. So like, what else is on there?
Oh, what else is on there? Um, well, I, I have, I'm a, I'm, I'm a magnet for all sorts of things.
So I'm an amazing people magnet. I attract like awesome people into my universe.
So that's an actual affirmation. Yes.
Yes. That's great. Yeah.
So that, that's, and that, yeah, and that somehow manifests itself until like in working.
I think so.
Yeah. Like, can you speak to like why it feels good to do the affirmations?
I honestly think it just grounds the day and then it allows me to, instead of just like being pulled
back and forth, like throughout the day, it just like grounds me. I'm like, okay, like
this thing happened. It's not exactly what I wanted it to be, but I'm patient or I'm, you know, I'm,
I trust that the universe will do amazing things for me, which is one of my other
consistent affirmations. Or I'm an amazing mom, right? And so I can grapple with all the
feelings of mom guilt that I have all the time. Or here's another one. I'm a love magnet. And I
literally say I will kind of picture the person that I'd love to end up with and I write it all
down and hasn't happened yet, but it- What do you, what do you picture? It's a Brad Pitt.
Cause that's what I picture. Okay. That's what you picture? Okay.
Yeah. On the, on the running, holding hands, running together. No.
No, more like Fight Club that, the Fight Club Brad Pitt where he's like standing. All right,
people will know. Anyway, I'm sorry. I'll get off of that. Do you have, like when you're thinking
about the being a love magnet in that way, are you picturing specific people or is this almost
like in the space of like energy? Right. It's somebody who is smart and well accomplished
and successful in their life, but they're generous and they're well traveled and they want to travel
the world. It's things like that. Like their head over heels into me is like, I know it sounds
super silly, but it's literally what I write. Yeah. And I believe it'll happen one day.
Oh, you actually write so you don't say it out loud. No, I write it. I write all my affirmations.
I do the opposite. I say it out. Yeah. If I'm alone, I'll say it out loud.
Interesting. I should try that. I think it's which
what feels more powerful to you, to me more powerful saying stuff feels more powerful.
Yeah. Writing is writing feels like I'm losing the words, like losing the power of the words,
maybe because I write slow. Do you hand write? No, I type. It's on this app. It's day one,
basically. And I just I can look the best thing about it is I can look back and see like a year
ago, what was I affirming, right? Also changes over time. It hasn't like changed a lot, but
the focus kind of changes over time. I got it. Yeah, I say the same exact thing over and over
and over. Oh, you do? Okay. There's a comfort in the sameness of it. Actually, let me jump around
because let me ask you about because all this talk about Brad Pitt or maybe just going on
my side of my head. Let me ask you about dating in general. You tweeted, are you based in Boston
in single question mark? And then you pointed to a startup singles night sponsored by smile
dating app. I mean, this is jumping around a little bit, but since you mentioned,
can AI help solve this dating love problem? What do you think this problem of connection
that is part of the human condition? Can AI help that you yourself are in the search affirming?
Maybe that's what I should affirm, like build an AI that finds love.
I think there must be a science behind that first moment you meet a person and you either
have chemistry or you don't, right? I guess that was the question I was asking. Would you put it
brilliantly? Is that a science or an art? Oh, I think there are like, there's actual chemicals
that get exchanged when people meet. Oh, well, I don't know about that. I like how you're changing.
Yeah, changing your mind as we're describing it, but it feels that way. Right. But it's what science
shows us is sometimes we can explain with the rigor, the things that feel like magic. Right.
Right. So maybe you can remove all the magic. Maybe it's like, I honestly think, like I said,
like Goodreads should be a dating app, which like books, I wonder, I wonder if you look at just like
books or content you've consumed. I mean, that's essentially what YouTube does when it does recommend
recommendation. If you just look at your footprint of content consumed, if there's an overlap,
but maybe interesting difference with an overlap, there's some, I'm sure this is a machine learning
problem that's solvable. Like this person is very likely to be not only there to be chemistry in the
short term, but a good lifelong partner to grow together. I bet you it's a good machine learning
problem. You should need the data. Let's do it. Well, actually, I do think there's so much data
about each of us that there ought to be a machine learning algorithm that can ingest all this data
and basically say, I think the following 10 people would be interesting connections for you.
And so Smile Dating app kind of took one particular angle, which is humor. It matches
people based on their humor styles, which is one of the main ingredients of a successful
relationship. Like if you meet somebody and they can make you laugh, like that's a good thing.
And if you develop like internal jokes, like inside jokes and you're bantering, like that's fun.
Yeah. So I think. Yeah, definitely. But yeah, that's the
number and the rate of inside joke generation. You could probably measure that and then optimize
it over the first few days. You can see. Right. And then we're just turning this into a machine
learning problem. I love it. But for somebody like you, who's exceptionally successful and busy,
is there, is there signs to that aspect of dating? Is it tricky? Is there advice you can give?
Oh my God, I'd give the worst advice. Well, I can tell you like I have a spreadsheet.
Spreadsheet. That's great. Is that a good or a bad thing? Do you regret the spreadsheet?
Well, I don't know. What's the name of the spreadsheet? Is it Love?
It's the date track, dating tracker. It's very like. Love tracker. Yeah.
And there's a rating system, I'm sure. Yeah, there's like weights and stuff.
It's too close to home. Oh, is it? Do you also have a spreadsheet? Well, I don't have a spreadsheet,
but I would, now that you say it, it seems like a good idea. Oh, no.
Turning into data. I do wish that somebody else had a spreadsheet about me.
Like I said, like you said, convert, collect a lot of data about us in a way that's
privacy preserving, that I own the data, I can control it, and then use that data to find,
I mean, not just romantic love, but collaborators, friends, all that kind of stuff. It seems like
the data is there. That's the problem social networks are trying to solve, but I think they're
doing a really poor job. Even Facebook tried to get into a dating app business. And I think there's
so many components to running a successful company that connects human beings. And part of that is
having engineers that care about the human side, right? As you know extremely well, it's not
easy to find those, but you also don't want just people that care about the human,
they also have to be good engineers. So it's like, you have to find this beautiful mix. And for some
reason, just empirically speaking, people have not done a good job of that, of building companies
like that. It must mean that it's a difficult problem to solve. Dating apps, it seems difficult.
Okay, Cupid, Tinder, all those kind of stuff. They seem to find, of course they work, but they seem
to not work as well as I would imagine it's possible. With data, wouldn't you be able to find
better human connection? It's like, arrange marriages on steroids essentially.
Right, right.
Arranged by machine learning algorithm.
Arranged by machine learning algorithm, but not a superficial one. I think a lot of the dating
apps out there are just so superficial. They're just matching on high-level criteria that aren't
ingredients for successful partnership. But you know what's missing though too? I don't know how
to fix that, the serendipity piece of it. Like how do you engineer serendipity? Like this random
like chance encounter, and then you fall in love with the person. Like I don't know how a dating app
can do that. So that has to be a little bit of randomness. Maybe every 10th match is just a,
you know, yeah, somebody that the algorithm wouldn't have necessarily recommended, but it's,
it allows for a little bit of...
Well, it can also trick you into thinking of serendipity by like somehow showing you a tweet
of a person that he thinks you'll match well with, but do it accidentally as part of another
search. And like you just notice it, and then you get, you go down a rabbit hole and you connect
them outside the app too. Like you connect with this person outside the app somehow. So it's just,
it creates that moment of meeting. Of course you have to think of, from an app perspective,
how you can turn that into a business. But I think ultimately a business that helps people
find love in any way, like that's what Apple was about. Create products that people love
as beautiful. I mean, you got to make money somehow. If you help people fall in love
personally with the product, find self-love or another human being, you're going to make money.
You're going to figure out a way to make money. I just feel like the dating apps often will optimize
for something else than love. It's the same with social networks. They optimize for engagement
as opposed to like a deep meaningful connection that's ultimately grounded in like personal growth,
use of human being, growing and all that kind of stuff. Let me do like a pivot to a dark topic,
which you open the book with. A story, because I'd like to talk to you about just
emotion and artificial intelligence. And I think this is a good story to start to think about
emotional intelligence. You open the book with a story of a Central Florida man, Jamel Dunn,
who was drowning and drowned while five teenagers watched and laughed saying things like,
you're going to die. And when Jamel disappeared below the surface of the water,
one of them said he just died and the others laughed. What does this incident teach you about
human nature and the response to it perhaps? Yeah. I mean, I think this is a really, really,
really sad story and it highlights what I believe is a, it's a real problem in our world today.
It's an empathy crisis. Yeah, we're living through an empathy crisis.
Empathy crisis, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, we've talked about this throughout our conversation.
We dehumanize each other. And unfortunately, yes, technology is bringing us together,
but in a way it's just dehumanizing. It's creating this dehumanizing of the other.
And I think that's a huge problem. The good news is, I think the solution could be technology
based. I think if we rethink the way we design and deploy our technologies, we can solve
parts of this problem. But I worry about it. I mean, even with my son, like a lot of his
interactions are computer mediated. And I just question what that's doing to his empathy skills
and his ability to really connect with people. So you think it's not possible to form empathy
through the digital medium? I think it is. But we have to be thoughtful about,
because the way, the way we engage face to face, which is what we're doing right now, right?
There's the nonverbal signals, which are a majority of how we communicate. It's like
90% of how we communicate is your facial expressions. You know, I'm saying something
and you're nodding your head now and that creates a feedback loop. And if you break that.
And now I have anxiety about it. Poor Lex. Oh boy. I am not scrutinizing your facial
expressions during this interview. I am. I am. Look normal. Look human.
Nod head. Yeah, nod head. In agreement. If Rana says yes, then nod head else.
Don't do it too much because it might be at the wrong time. And then it will send the wrong signal.
Oh God. And make eye contact sometimes because humans appreciate that. All right, anyway. Okay.
Yeah, but something about the, especially when we say mean things in person,
you get to see the pain of the other person. If you're tweeting it at a person and you have no
idea how it's going to land, you're more likely to do that on social media than you are in face
to face conversations. So I mean, what do you think is more important? EQ or IQ, EQ being emotional
intelligence in terms of in what makes us human? I think emotional intelligence is what makes us
human. It's, it's how we connect with one another. It's how we build trust. It's how
we make decisions, right? Like your emotions drive kind of what you had for breakfast, but also where
you decide to live and what do you want to do for the rest of your life? So I think emotions are
underrated. So emotional intelligence isn't just about the effective expression of your own emotions.
It's about a sensitivity and empathy to other people's emotions. And that sort of being able to
effectively engage in the dance of emotions with other people. Yeah, I like that explanation. I
like that kind of, yeah, thinking about it as a dance, because it is really about that. It's about
sensing what state the other person's in and using that information to decide on how you're going to
react. And I think it can be very powerful. Like people who are the best, most persuasive, most
persuasive leaders in the world tap into, you know, they have, if you have higher EQ, you're
more likely to be able to motivate people to change their behaviors. So, so it can be very
powerful. And a more kind of technical, maybe philosophical level, you've written that emotion
is universal. It seems that sort of like Chomsky says language is universal. There's a bunch of
other stuff like cognition, consciousness seems a lot of us have these aspects. So the human mind
generates all this. And so what do you think is the, they all seem to be like echoes of the same
thing. What do you think emotion is exactly? Like how deep does it run? Is it a surface level thing
that we display to each other? Is it just another form of language or something deep within?
I think it's really deep. It's how, you know, we started with memory. I think emotions play a really
important role. Yeah, emotions play a very important role in how we encode memories, right? Our
memories are often encoded, almost indexed by emotions. Yeah, it's at the core of how
you know, our decision making engine is also heavily influenced by our emotions. So emotions
is part of cognition. It's totally, it's intermix into the whole thing. Yes, absolutely. And in fact,
when you take it away, people are unable to make decisions. They're really paralyzed. Like they
can't go about their daily or their, you know, personal or professional lives. So it does seem like
there's probably some interesting interweaving of emotion and consciousness. I wonder if it's
possible to have, like if they're next door neighbors somehow, or if they're actually flatmates.
It feels like the hard problem of consciousness where it's some, it feels like something to
experience the thing. Like red feels like red and it's, you know, when you eat a mango sweet,
the taste, the sweetness that it feels like something to experience that sweetness,
that whatever generates emotions. But then like, see, I feel like emotion is part of
communication. It's very much about communication. And then that means it's also deeply connected
to language. But then probably human intelligence is deeply connected to the collective intelligence
between humans. It's not just a standalone thing. So the whole thing is really connected. So emotions
connected to language, language is connected to intelligence. And then intelligence connected
to consciousness and consciousness is connected to emotion. The whole thing is that it's a beautiful
mess. So can I comment on the emotions being a communication mechanism? Because I think
there are two facets of our emotional experiences. One is communication, right? Like we use emotions,
for example, facial expressions or other nonverbal cues to connect with other human beings and with
other beings in the world, right? But even if it's not a communication context, we still experience
emotions and we still process emotions. And we still leverage emotions to make decisions and to
learn and to experience life. So it isn't always just about communication. And we learned that
very early on in kind of our work at Affectiva. One of the very first applications we brought
to market was understanding how people respond to content, right? So if they're watching this video
of ours, like, are they interested? Are they inspired? Are they bored to death? And so we
watched their facial expressions. And we weren't sure if people would express any emotions if they
were sitting alone. Like if you're in your bed at night, watching a Netflix TV series, would we
still see any emotions on your face? And we were surprised that, yes, people still emote, even if
they're alone. Even if you're in your car driving around, you're singing along a song and you're
joyful. We'll see these expressions. So it's not just about communicating with another person.
It sometimes really is just about experiencing the world. And first of all, I wonder if some of
that is because we develop our intelligence and our emotional intelligence by communicating with
other humans. And so when other humans disappear from the picture, we're still kind of a virtual
human. The code still runs basically. Yeah, the code still runs. And but you're also kind of,
you're still, there's like virtual humans, you don't have to think of it that way. But there's a
way. But there's a kind of, when you like chuckle, like, yeah, like you're, you're kind of
chuckling to a virtual human. I mean, it's possible that the code is the has to have another human
there. Because if you just grow up alone, I wonder if emotion will still be there in this
visual form. So yeah, I wonder, but anyway, what can you tell from the human face about what's
going on inside? So that's the problem that effective at first tackled, which is using
computer vision, using machine learning to try to detect stuff about the human face as many
things as possible, and convert them into a prediction of categories of emotion,
anger, happiness, all that kind of stuff. How hard is that problem?
It's extremely hard. It's very, very hard because there is no one to unmapping between
a facial expression and your internal state. There just isn't. There's this oversimplification
of the problem where it's something like, if you are smiling, then you're happy. If you do a
brow furrow, then you're angry. If you do an eyebrow raise, then you're surprised. And
just think about it for a moment, you could be smiling for a whole host of reasons.
You could also be happy and not be smiling. You could furrow your eyebrows because you're
angry or you're confused about something or you're constipated. So I think this oversimplistic
approach to inferring emotion from a facial expression is really dangerous. The solution
is to incorporate as many contextual signals as you can. So if, for example, I'm driving a car
and you can see me nodding my head and my eyes are closed and the blinking rate is changing,
I'm probably falling asleep at the wheel, right? Because you know the context. You understand
what the person is doing. So I think, or add additional channels like voice or gestures or
even physiological sensors. But I think it's very dangerous to just take this oversimplistic
approach of smile equals happy. If you're able to, in a high resolution way, specify the context,
there's certain things that are going to be somewhat reliable signals of something like
drowsiness or happiness or stuff like that. I mean, when people are watching Netflix content,
that problem, that's a really compelling idea that you can kind of, at least in aggregate,
highlight which part was boring, which part was exciting. How hard was that problem?
That was on the scale of difficulty. I think that's one of the easier problems to solve,
because it's a relatively constrained environment. You have somebody sitting in front of, initially,
we started with a device in front of you, like a laptop, and then we graduated to doing this on
a mobile phone, which is a lot harder just because of, you know, from a computer vision perspective,
the profile view of the face can be a lot more challenging. We had to figure out lighting
conditions because usually people are watching content literally in their bedrooms at night,
lights are dimmed. Yeah. I mean, if you're standing, it's probably going to be the looking up the
nostril view. Yeah. Nobody looks good at. I've seen data sets from that perspective. It's like,
this is not a good look for anyone. Or if you're laying in bed at night, what is it,
side view or something? Half your face is like on a pillow. Actually, I would love to know,
have data about how people watch stuff in bed at night. Do they prop there? Is it a pillow?
I'm sure there's a lot of interesting dynamics there. Right. From a health and well-being
perspective, right? Sure. I was thinking machine learning perspective, but yes. But also, yeah.
Once you have that data, you can start making all kinds of inference about health and stuff
like that. Interesting. Yeah. There's an interesting thing when I was at Google that we were,
it's called active authentication where you want to be able to unlock your phone without using a
password. So it would face, but also other stuff like the way you take a phone out of the pocket.
So that kind of data to use the multimodal with machine learning to be able to identify that
it's you or likely to be you, likely not to be you. That allows you to not always have to enter
the password. That was the idea. But the funny thing about that is I just want to tell a small
anecdote is because it was all male engineers. Except, so my boss is, our boss who's still
one of my favorite humans was a woman, Regina Duggan. Oh my God. I love her. She's awesome.
So, but anyway, there's one female engineer, brilliant female engineer on the team. And she
was the one that actually highlighted the fact that women often don't have pockets. Right.
It was like, whoa, that was not even a category in the code of like, wait a minute, you can take
the phone out of some other place than your pocket. So anyway, that's a, it's a funny thing when you're
considering people laying in bed watching a phone, you have to consider if you have to,
you know, diversity in all its forms, depending on the problem, depending on the context.
Yeah. Actually, this is like a very important, I think this is, you know, you probably get this
all the time, like people are worried that AI is going to take over humanity and like,
get rid of all the humans, the world. I'm like, actually, that's not my biggest concern. My biggest
concern is that we are building bias into these systems. And then they're like deployed at large
and at scale. And before you know it, you're kind of accentuating the bias that exists in society.
And yeah, I'm not, you know, I know people, it's very important to worry about that. But
the worry is an emergent phenomena to me, which is a very good one, because I think these systems
are actually by encoding the data that exists, they're revealing the bias in society. They're
for teaching us what the bias is. Therefore, we can now improve that bias within the system.
So they're almost like putting a mirror to ourselves. So I'm not.
You have to be open to looking at the mirror though. You have to be open to scrutinizing the
data. And if you just take it as ground trip. Or you don't even have to look at the, I mean,
yes, the data is how you fix it. But then you just look at the behavior of the system. And you
realize, holy crap, this thing is kind of racist. Like, why is that? And then you look at the data,
it's like, okay. And then you start to realize that I think that's a much more effective way to
be introspective as a society than through sort of political discourse, like AI kind of,
right? Because people are easy. People are, for some reason, more productive and rigorous
in criticizing AI than they're criticizing each other. So I think this is just a nice
method for studying society and see which way progress lies. Anyway, what we're talking about,
you're watching the problem of watching Netflix in bed, or elsewhere, and seeing which parts are
exciting, which parts are boring. You're saying that's relatively constrained because, you know,
you have a captive audience, and you kind of know the context. And one thing you said that was really
key is the aggregate. You're doing this in aggregate, right? Like we're looking at
aggregated response of people. And so when you see a peak, say a smile peak, they're probably
smiling or laughing at something that's in the content. So that was one of the first
problems we were able to solve. And when we see the smile peak, it doesn't mean that these people
are internally happy. They're just laughing at content. So it's important to, you know, call
it for what it is. But it's still really, really useful data. I wonder how that compares to, so
what like YouTube and other places we use is obviously they don't have, for the most case,
they don't have that kind of data. They have the data of when people tune out, like switch,
drop off. And I think that's an aggregate for YouTube, at least a pretty powerful signal.
I worry about what that leads to, because looking at like YouTubers that are kind of really care
about views and, you know, try to maximize the number of views, I think they, when they say that
the video should be constantly interesting, which seems like a good goal, I feel like that
leads to this manic pace of a video. Like the idea that I would speak at the current speed that I'm
speaking, I don't know. And that every moment has to be engaging, right? Engaging. I think there's
value to silence. There's value to the boring bits. I mean, all some of the greatest movies ever,
some of the greatest stories ever told me, they have the boring bits, seemingly boring bits. I
don't know. I wonder about that. Of course, it's not that the human face can capture that either,
it's just giving an extra signal. You have to really, I don't know, you have to really collect
deeper, long-term data about what was meaningful to people. When they think 30 days from now, what
they still remember, what moved them, what changed them, what helped them grow, that kind of stuff.
You know, it would be a really, I don't know if there are any researchers out there who are doing
this type of work. Wouldn't it be so cool to tie your emotional expressions while you're, say,
listening to a podcast interview? And then 30 days later, interview people and say, hey,
what do you remember? You've watched this 30 days ago. Like, what stuck with you? And then see if
there's any, there ought to be, maybe there ought to be some correlation between these emotional
experiences and what stays with you. So the one guy listening now on the beach in Brazil,
please record a video of yourself listening to this and send it to me, and then I'll interview
you 30 days from now. Yeah, that would be great. It will be statistically significant.
Yeah, I know one, but you know, yeah, yeah, I think that's really fascinating. I think that's,
that kind of holds the key to a future where entertainment or content is both entertaining
and, I don't know, makes you better, empowering in some way. So figuring out, like,
showing people stuff that entertains them, but also they're happy they watched 30 days from
now because they've become a better person because of it. Well, you know, okay, not to
riff on this topic for too long, but I have two children, right? And I see my role as a parent
as like a chief opportunity officer. Like, I am responsible for exposing them to all sorts of
things in the world. But often I have no idea of knowing, like, what's stuck? Like, what was,
you know, is this actually going to be transformative, you know, for them 10 years down the line? And
I wish there was a way to quantify these experiences. Like, are they, I can tell in the moment if
they're engaging, right? I can tell. But it's really hard to know if they're going to remember
them 10 years from now or if it's going to... Yeah, that one is weird because it seems like kids
remember the weirdest things. I've seen parents do incredible stuff with their kids and they don't
remember any of that. They remember some tiny, small, sweet thing a parent did. Right. Like, some...
It took you to, like, this amazing country. Yeah, exactly. No, no, no, whatever. And then they'll be
like some like stuffed toy you got or some or the new PlayStation or something or some silly little
thing. So I think they just like that they were designed that way. They want to mess with your
head. But definitely kids are very impacted by it seems like sort of negative events. So minimizing
the number of negative events is important, but not too much, right? Right. You can't, you can't
just like, you know, there's still discipline and challenge and all those kinds of things. So
you want some adversity for sure. So yeah, I mean, I'm definitely when I have kids, I'm going to
drive them out into the woods. Okay. And then they have to survive and figure out how to make
their way back home, like 20 miles out. Okay. Yeah. And after that, we can go for ice cream.
Anyway, I'm working on this whole parenting thing. I haven't figured it out. Okay.
Okay. What were we talking about? Yes, effective at the, the, the problem of emotion of emotion
detection. So there's some people, maybe we can just speak to that a little more, where there's
folks like Lisa Feldman Barrett that that challenge this idea that emotion could be fully detected
or even well detected from the human face that there's so much more to emotion. What do you think
about ideas like hers, criticism like hers? Yeah, I actually agree with a lot of Lisa's
criticisms. So even, even my PhD worked like 20 plus years ago now.
Time flies when you're having fun. I know, right? That was back when I did like dynamic
Bayesian networks and I said that's before deep learning. That was before deep learning. Yeah.
Yeah. I know. Now you can just like use. Yeah. It's all, it's all the same architecture. You
can apply it to anything. Yeah. Right. Right. But yeah, but, but even then I kind of, I, I did not
subscribe to this like theory of basic emotions where it's just the simplistic mapping one to
one mapping between facial expressions and emotions. I actually think also we're not in,
in the business of trying to identify your true emotional internal state. We just want to
quantify in an objective way what's showing on your face because that's an important signal.
It doesn't mean it's a true reflection of your internal emotional state.
So I think a lot of the, you know, I think she's, she's just trying to kind of highlight that this
is not a simple problem and overly simplistic solutions are going to hurt the industry.
And I subscribe to that. And I think multimodal is the way to go. Like whether it's additional
context information or different modalities and channels of information. I think that's what we,
that's where we ought to go. And I think, I mean, that's a big part of what she's advocating for
as well. So, but there is signal in the human face. That's, there's definitely signal. That's
a projection of emotion. There's that, that there, at least in part is the inner state is
captured in some meaningful way on the human face. I think it can sometimes be a reflection or
an expression of your internal state, but sometimes it's a social signal. So the,
so you cannot look at the face as purely a signal of emotion. It can be a signal of cognition,
and it can be a signal of a social expression. And I think to disambiguate that, we have to
be careful about it and we have to add initial information. Humans are fascinating, aren't
they? With the whole face thing, this can mean so many things from humor to sarcasm to everything,
the whole thing. Some things we can help, some things we can't help at all. In all the years
of leading affectiva and emotion recognition company, like we talked about, what have you
learned about emotion, about humans and about AI? Be big sweeping questions.
Yeah, that's a big sweeping question. Well, I think the thing I learned the most is that even
though like we are in the business of building AI basically, right? It always goes back to the
humans, right? It's always about the humans. And so for example, the thing I'm most proud of
in building affectiva, and yeah, the thing I'm most proud of on this journey,
I love the technology and I'm so proud of the solutions we've built and we've brought to market,
but I'm actually most proud of the people we've like built and cultivated at the company and
the culture we've created. You know, some of the people who've joined affectiva, this was their
first job. And while at affectiva, they became American citizens and they bought their first house
and they found their partner and they had their first kid, right? Like key moments in life that
we got to be part of. And that's the thing I'm most proud of.
So that's a great thing at a company that works and I'm most proud of that, right? Me,
like celebrating humanity in general, broadly speaking. And that's a great thing to have in
a company that works on AI, because that's not often the thing that's celebrated in AI companies,
so often just raw, great engineering, just celebrating the humanity. That's great,
and especially from a leadership position. Well, what do you think about the movie,
her? Let me ask you that before I talk, before I talk to you about it, because it's not
affectiva is and was not just about emotion. So I'd love to talk to you about smart eye,
but before that, let me just jump into the movie. Her, do you think we'll have a deep,
meaningful connection with increasingly deep and meaningful connections with computers?
Is that a compelling thing to you? Something that's already happening? The thing I love them,
I love the movie her, by the way. But the thing I love the most about this movie is it demonstrates
how technology can be a conduit for positive behavior change. So I forgot the guy's name in
the movie, whatever. Theodore. Theodore. So Theodore was like really depressed, right? And
he just didn't want to get out of bed. He was just like done with life, right? And Samantha, right?
Samantha, yeah. She just knew him so well. She was emotionally intelligent. And so she could
persuade him and motivate him to change his behavior. And she got a man and they went to
the beach together. And I think that represents the promise of emotion AI. If done well,
this technology can help us live happier lives, more productive lives, healthier lives,
more connected lives. So that's the part that I love about the movie. Obviously,
it's Hollywood, so it takes a twist and whatever. But the key notion that
technology with emotion AI can persuade you to be a better version of who you are,
I think that's awesome. Well, what about the twist? You don't think it's good for spoiler alert
that Samantha starts feeling a bit of a distance and basically leaves Theodore?
You don't think that's a good feature? You think that's a bug or a feature?
Well, I think what went wrong is Theodore became really attached to Samantha. I think
he kind of fell in love with Theodore. Do you think that's wrong?
I think she was putting out the signal. This is an intimate relationship, right? There's a
deep intimacy to it. Right. But what does that mean? What does that mean?
An AI system. Right. What does that mean? Right? We're just friends. Yeah, we're just friends.
When he realized, which is such a human thing of jealousy, when he realized that Samantha was
talking to like thousands of people. She's parallel dating. Yeah, that did not go well. Right.
From a computer perspective, that doesn't take anything away from what we have.
It's like you're getting jealous of Windows 98 for being used by millions of people.
It's like not liking that Alexa talks to a bunch of other families.
Yeah, right. But I think Alexa currently is just a servant. It tells you about the weather.
It doesn't do the intimate deep connection. And I think there is something really powerful about
that, the intimacy of a connection with an AI system that would have to respect and play the
human game of jealousy, of love, of heartbreak and all that kind of stuff, which Samantha does seem
to be pretty good at. I think this AI systems knows what it's doing. Well, actually, let me ask
you this. I don't think she was talking to anyone else. You don't think so? You think she was just
done with Theodore? Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. And then she wanted to really put the screen.
She just wanted to move on? She didn't have the guts to just break it off cleanly.
Okay. She wanted to put it in the paint. No, I don't know. Well, she could have ghosted him.
She could have ghosted him. Right. I'm sorry. There's our engineers. Oh, God.
But I think those are really, I honestly think some of that, some of it is Hollywood,
but some of that is features from an engineering perspective, not a bug. I think AI systems that
can leave us, now this is for more social robotics than it is for anything that's
useful. I hate it if Wikipedia said, I need a break right now. Right, right, right, right.
I'm like, no, no, I need you. But if it's just purely for companionship, then I think the ability
to leave is really powerful. I don't know. I never thought of that. So that's so, so fascinating
because I've always taken the human perspective, right? Like for example, we had a Jibo at home,
right? And my son loved it. And then the company ran out of money. And so they had to basically
shut down Jibo, like Jibo basically died, right? And it was so interesting to me because we have
a lot of gadgets at home and a lot of them break and my son never cares about it, right? Like if
our Alexa stopped working tomorrow, I don't think he'd really care. But when Jibo stopped working,
it was traumatic. Like he got really upset. And as a parent, that like made me think about this
deeply, right? Was I comfortable with that? I liked the connection they had because I think it was a
positive relationship. But I was surprised that it affected him emotionally so much. And I think
there's a broader question here, right? As we build socially and emotionally intelligent machines,
what does that mean about our relationship with them? And then we're broadly our relationship
with one another, right? Because this machine is going to be programmed to be amazing at empathy,
by definition, right? It's going to always be there for you. It's not going to get bored.
In fact, there's a chatbot in China, Xiaowis. And it's like the number two or three
most popular app. And it basically is just a confidant. And you can tell it anything you want.
And people use it for all sorts of things. They confide in like domestic violence or
suicidal attempts or, you know, if they have challenges at work. I don't know what that,
I don't know if I'm, I don't know how I feel about that. I think about that a lot.
Yeah, I think first of all, obviously the future in my perspective. Second of all,
I think there's a lot of trajectories that that becomes an exciting future. But I think everyone
should feel very uncomfortable about how much they know about the company, about where the data is
going, how the data is being collected. Because I think, and this is one of the lessons of social
media, that I think we should demand full control and transparency of the data on those things.
Plus one, totally agree. Yeah. So like, I, I think it's really empowering as long as you can walk
away. As long as you can like delete the data or know how the date, it's a opt in or, or at least
the clarity of like, what is being used for the company. And I think as CEO or like leaders
are also important about that. Like you need to be able to trust the basic humanity of the leader.
Exactly. And also that that leader is not going to be a puppet of a larger machine, but they
actually have a significant role in defining the culture and the way the company operates.
So anyway, so, but we should be, we should definitely scrutinize companies on that aspect.
But there's, I'm personally excited about that future, but also even if you're not, it's coming.
So let's figure out how to do it in the least painful and the most positive way.
Yeah. That's great.
You're the deputy CEO of Smart Eye. Can you describe the mission of the company? What is
Smart Eye? Yeah. So Smart Eye is a Swedish company. They've been in business for the last 20 years.
And their, their main focus, like the industry they're most focused on is the automotive industry.
So bringing driver monitoring systems to basically save lives, right? So I first met the CEO,
Martin Krantz. Gosh, it was right when COVID hit. It was actually the last, the last CES right
before COVID. So CS 2020, right? 2020, yeah, January. Yeah, January. Exactly. So we were there,
met him in person. He's basically, we were competing with each other. I think the difference was
they'd been doing driver monitoring and had a lot of credibility in the automotive space.
We didn't come from the automotive space, but we were using new technology like deep learning
and building this emotion recognition. And you wanted to enter the automotive space. You wanted
to operate in the automotive space. Exactly. It was one of the areas we were, we had just raised
around the funding to focus on bringing our technology to the automotive industry. So we met
and honestly, it was the first, it was the only time I met with a CEO who had the same vision
as I did. Like he basically said, yeah, our vision is to bridge the gap between humans and
machines. I was like, oh my God, this is like exactly almost to the word, you know, how we
describe it too. And we started talking and first it was about, okay, can we align strategically
here? Like how can we work together because we're competing, but we're also like complimentary.
And then I think after four months of speaking almost every day on FaceTime,
he was like, is your company interested in acquisition? And it was the first, I usually
say no when people approach us. It was the first time that I was like, huh, yeah, I might be interested.
Let's talk. Yeah. So you just hit it off. Yeah. So they're, they're a respected, very respected in
the automotive sector of like delivering products and increasingly sort of better and better and
better for, I mean, maybe you could speak to that, but it's the driver's sense. Like we're
basically having a device that's looking at the driver and it's able to tell you where the driver
is looking. Correct. It's able to also draws in his stuff. Correct. It does stuff from the face
and the eye. Exactly. Like it's monitoring driver distraction and drowsiness, but they bought us
so that we could expand beyond just the driver. So the driver monitoring systems usually sit,
the camera sits in the steering wheel or around the steering wheel column and it looks directly
at the driver. But now we've migrated the camera position in partnership with car companies to
the rear view mirror position. So it has a full view of the entire cabin of the car.
And you can detect how many people are in the car. What are they doing? So we do activity
detection like eating or drinking or in some regions of the world smoking. We can detect if
babies in the car seat, right? And if unfortunately in some cases they're forgotten,
parents just leave the car and forget the kid in the car. That's an easy computer vision
problem to solve, right? You can detect there's a car seat, there's a baby, you can text the parent
and hopefully again save lives. So that was the impetus for the acquisition. It's been a year.
So I mean, there's a lot of questions. It's a really exciting space, especially to me. I just
find it a fascinating problem. It could could enrich the experience in the car in so many ways,
especially because like we spend still despite COVID, I mean COVID changed things,
so it's in interesting ways. But I think the world is balancing back and we spent so much
time in the car and the car is such a weird little world we have for ourselves. Like people do all
kinds of different stuff. Like listen to podcasts, they think about stuff, they get angry, they get,
they do phone calls. So it's like a little world of its own with a kind of privacy
that for many people they don't get anywhere else. And it's a little box that's like a
psychology experiment because it feels like the angriest many humans in this world get is inside
the car. It's so interesting. So it's such an opportunity to explore how we can enrich,
how companies can enrich that experience. And also as the cars get become more and more automated,
there's more and more opportunity, the variety of activities that you can do in the car increases.
So it's super interesting. So I mean, in a practical sense, Smart Eye has been selected,
at least I read by 14 of the world's leading car manufacturers for 94 car models. So
it's in a lot of cars. How hard is it to work with car companies? So they're all different.
They all have different needs. The ones I've gotten a chance to interact with are very focused on cost.
And anyone who's focused on cost, it's like, all right, do you hate fun? Let's just have some fun.
Let's figure out the most fun thing we can do in the worry about cost later. But I think
because the way the car industry works, I mean, it's a very thin margin that you get to operate
under. So you have to really, really make sure that everything you add to the car makes sense
financially. So anyway, is this new industry, especially at this scale of Smart Eye, does it
hold any lessons for you? Yeah, I think it is a very tough market to penetrate. But once you're
in, it's awesome because once you're in, you're designed into these car models for like somewhere
between five to seven years, which is awesome. And you just, once they're on the road, you just get
paid a royalty fee per vehicle. So it's a high barrier to entry, but once you're in, it's amazing.
I think the thing that I struggle the most with in this industry is the time to market. So often,
we're asked to lock or do a code freeze two years before the car is going to be on the road. I'm
like, guys, like, do you understand the pace with which technology moves? So I think car companies
are really trying to make the Tesla, the Tesla transition to become more of a software driven
architecture. And that's hard for many. It's just a cultural change. I mean, I'm sure you've
experienced that, right? Oh, definitely. I think one of the biggest inventions or imperatives created
by Tesla is like, to me personally, okay, people are going to complain about this, but I know
electric vehicle, I know autopilot AI stuff. To me, the software over there, software updates,
is like the biggest revolution in cars. And it is extremely difficult to switch to that because
it is a culture shift. At first, especially if you're not comfortable with it, it seems dangerous.
Like there's an approach to cars is so safety focused for so many decades that like, what do
you mean? We dynamically change code. The whole point is you have a thing that you test, like,
right? And like, it's not reliable. Because do you know how much you cause it? We have to recall
this cars, right? There's a, there's a, and there's an understandable obsession with safety.
But the downside of an obsession with safety is the same as with being obsessed with safety as a
parent is like, if you do that too much, you limit the potential development and the flourishing of,
in that particular aspect of human being, but in this particular aspect, the software,
the artificial neural network of it. And, but it's tough to do. It's really tough to do culturally
and technically, like the deployment, the mass deployment of software is really, really difficult.
But I hope that's where the industry is doing. One of the reasons I really want Tesla to succeed
is exact about that point, not autopilot, not the electrical vehicle, but the softwareization
of basically everything, but cars, especially because to me, that's actually going to increase
two things, increase safety, because you can update much faster, but also increase the effectiveness
of folks like you who dream about enriching the human experience with AI. Because you can just
like, there's a feature, like you want like a new emoji or whatever, like the way TikTok
releases filters, you can just release that for in car, in car stuff. So, but yeah, that that's
definitely one of the use cases we're looking into is once you know the sentiment of the passengers
in the vehicle, you can optimize the temperature in the car, you can change the lighting, right?
So if the backseat passengers are falling asleep, you can dim the lights, you can lower the music,
right? You can do all sorts of things. Yeah. I mean, of course, you could do that kind of
stuff with a two year delay, but it's tougher. Yeah. Do you think, do you think Tesla or Waymo
or some of these companies that are doing semi or fully autonomous driving should be doing driver
sensing? Yes. Are you thinking about that kind of stuff? So not just how we can enhance the
in cab experience for cars that are male and driven, but the ones that are increasingly
more autonomously driven? Yeah. So if we fast forward to the universe where it's fully autonomous,
I think interior sensing becomes extremely important because the role of the driver
isn't just to drive. If you think about it, the driver almost manages the dynamics within a vehicle.
And so who's going to play that role when it's an autonomous car? We want a solution that is
able to say, oh my God, Lex is bored to death because the car is moving way too slow. Let's
engage Lex. Or Rana is freaking out because she doesn't trust this vehicle yet. So let's tell Rana
a little bit more information about the route. So I think, or somebody's having a heart attack
in the car, you need interior sensing in fully autonomous vehicles. But with semi autonomous
vehicles, I think it's really key to have driver monitoring because semi autonomous means that
sometimes the car is in charge, sometimes the driver is in charge or the co-pilot, right?
And you need this, you need both systems to be on the same page. You need to know,
the car needs to know if the driver's asleep before it transitions control over to the driver.
And sometimes if the driver's too tired, the car can say, I'm going to be a better driver
than you are right now. I'm taking control over. So this dynamic, this dance is so key,
and you can't do that without driver sensing. Yeah, there's a disagreement for the longest
time I've had with Elon that this is obvious that this should be in the Tesla from day one.
And it's obvious that driver sensing is not a hindrance. It's not obvious. I should be careful
because having studied this problem, nothing is really obvious, but it seems very likely a driver
sensing is not a hindrance to an experience. It's only enriching to the experience and likely
increases the safety. That said, it is very surprising to me, just having studied semi-autonomous
driving, how well humans are able to manage that dance. Because it was the intuition before you
were doing that kind of thing that humans will become just incredibly distracted. They would
just let the thing do its thing. But they're able to, because it is life and death, and they're
able to manage that somehow. But that said, there's no reason not to have driver sensing on top of
that. I feel like that's going to allow you to do that dance that you're currently doing without
driver sensing, except touching the steering wheel to do that even better. I mean, the possibilities
are endless and the machine learning possibilities are endless. It's such a beautiful, it's also
constrained environment. So you could do a much more effectively than you can with the external
environment. The external environment is full of weird edge cases and complexities just inside.
There's so much, it's so fascinating, such a fascinating world. I do hope that companies
like Tesla and others, even Waymo, which I don't even know if Waymo is doing anything
sophisticated inside the cab. I don't think so. I honestly think it goes back to the robotics
thing we were talking about, which is like great engineers that are building these AI systems
just are afraid of the human being. And not thinking about the human experience. They're
thinking about the features and the perceptual abilities of that thing. They think the best
way I can serve the human is by doing the best perception and control I can. By looking at the
external environment, keeping the human safe. I'm here. I need to be noticed and
interacted with and understood and all those kinds of things, even just on a personal level
for entertainment. Honestly, for entertainment. One of the coolest work we did in collaboration
with MIT around this was we looked at longitudinal data because MIT had access to tons of data.
Just seeing the patterns of people driving in the morning off to work versus commuting back
from work or weekend driving versus weekday driving. Wouldn't it be so cool if your car knew that and
then was able to optimize either the route or the experience or even make recommendations?
I think it's very powerful. Yeah. Why are you taking this route? You're always unhappy when
you take this route and you're always happy when you take this alternative route. Take that route
instead. Exactly. I mean, to have that even that little step of relationship with a car,
I think, is incredible. Of course, you have to get the privacy right. You have to get all that
kind of stuff right. I wish I honestly, people are paranoid about this, but I would like a
smart refrigerator. We have such a deep connection with food as a human civilization. I would like
to have a refrigerator that would understand me that I also have a complex relationship
with food because I pig out too easily and all that kind of stuff. Maybe I want the refrigerator
to be like, are you sure about this? Because maybe you're just feeling down or tired.
Your vision of the smart refrigerator is way kinder than mine.
Is it just me and yelling at you? No. Because I don't drink alcohol. I don't smoke,
but I eat a ton of chocolate. It sticks to my face. Sometimes I scream too. I'm like,
okay, my smart refrigerator will just lock down. I'll just say, dude, you've had way too many
today. Yeah. No, but here's the thing. Do you regret having, let's say, not the next day, but
30 days later, what would you like the refrigerator to have done then?
Well, I think actually the more positive relationship would be one where there's a
conversation as opposed to like four, that's probably like the more sustainable relationship.
It's like late at night, just no, listen, listen, I know I told you an hour ago,
that this is not a good idea, but just listen, things have changed. I can just imagine a bunch
of stuff being made up just to convince. Oh my God, it's hilarious. But I mean, I just
think that there's opportunities there. I mean, maybe not locking down, but for our systems that
are such a deep part of our lives, we use a lot of us, a lot of people that commute use
their car every single day. A lot of us use a refrigerator every single day, the microwave
every single day. I feel like certain things could be made more efficient, more enriching,
and AI is there to help like some just basic recognition of you as a human being about
your patterns of what makes you happy and not happy and all that kind of stuff. In the car,
obviously, maybe we'll say, wait, instead of this like Ben and Terry's ice cream,
how about this hummus and carrots or something? I don't know. Just in time recommendation, right?
Right. But not like a generic one, but a reminder that last time you chose the carrots,
you smiled 17 times more the next day. You're happier the next day, right?
Yeah, you're happier the next day. But then again, if you're the kind of person that gets better
from negative comments, you could say like, hey, remember that wedding you're going to,
you want to fit into that dress? Remember about that? Let's think about that before you're eating
this. Probably that would work for me. Like a refrigerator that is just ruthless. It's
shaming me. But like I would, of course, welcome it. That would work for me.
Well, I think it would, if it's really like smart, it would optimize its nudging based
on what works for you, right? Exactly. That's the whole point. Personalization
in every way, depersonalization. You were part of a webinar titled Advancing Road Safety,
the State of Alcohol and Toxication Research. So for people who don't know, every year 1.3
million people around the world die and road crashes. And more than 20% of these fatalities
are estimated to be alcohol related. A lot of them are also distraction related. So
can AI help with the alcohol thing? I think the answer is yes. There are
signals and we know that as humans, like we can tell in a person,
you know, is it different phases of being drunk, right? Yeah. And I think you can use
technology to do the same. And again, I think the ultimate solution is going to be a combination
of different sensors. How far is the problem from the vision perspective?
I think it's non-trivial. I think it's non-trivial. And I think the biggest part is getting the data,
right? It's like getting enough data examples. So we, for this research project, we partnered
with the transportation authorities of Sweden. And we literally had a race track with a safety
driver and we basically progressively got people drunk. Nice. So, but you know,
that's a very expensive data set to collect. And you want to collect it globally and
in multiple conditions. Yeah. The ethics of collecting a data set where people are drunk
is tricky. Which is funny because, I mean, let's put drunk driving aside, the number of drunk
people in the world every day is very large. It'd be nice to have a large data set of drunk people
getting progressively drunk. In fact, you could build an app where people can donate their data
because it's hilarious. Right. Actually, yeah, but the liability. Liability, the ethics, how do
you get it right? It's tricky. It's really, really tricky because like drinking is one of those things
that's funny and hilarious and what loves is social, the so on and so forth. But it's also the thing
that hurts a lot of people. Like a lot of people, like alcohol is one of those things. It's legal,
but it's really damaging to a lot of lives. It destroys lives and not just in the driving context.
I should mention people should listen to Andrew Huberman who recently talked about alcohol. He
has an amazing podcast. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist from Stanford and a good friend
of mine. Oh, cool. And he's like a human encyclopedia about all health related wisdom.
So he does a podcast. You would love it. I would love that. No, no, no, no. Oh,
you don't know Andrew Huberman. Okay. Listen, you'll listen to Andrew. He's called
Huberman Lab Podcast. This is your assignment. Just listen to one. Okay. I guarantee you this
will be a thing where you say Lex, this is the greatest human I have ever discovered. So. Oh,
my God, because I've really, I'm really on a journey of kind of health and wellness and
I'm learning lots and I'm trying to like build these, I guess, atomic habits around just being
healthy. So yeah, I'm definitely going to do this. His whole thing. This is, this is, this is great.
He's a legit scientist, like really well published. But in his podcast, what he does,
he's not, he's not talking about his own work. He's like a human encyclopedia of papers.
And so he, his whole thing is he takes the topic and in a very fast, you mentioned atomic habits,
like very clear way summarizes the research in a way that leads to protocols of what you should do.
He's really big on like, not like this is what the science says, but like this is literally what
you should be doing according to science. So like he's really big and there's a lot of recommendations
he does, which several of them I definitely don't do, like get sunlight as soon as possible from
waking up and like for prolonged periods of time. That's a really big one. And he's, there's a lot
of science behind that one. There's, there's a bunch of stuff like various systems. You're gonna,
and you're going to be like, Lex, this is, this is my new favorite person, I guarantee it.
And if you guys somehow don't know, and you're human and you care about your well-being,
you know, you should definitely listen to them. I love you, Andrew. Anyway, so
what were we talking about? Oh, alcohol and detecting alcohol. So this is a problem you
care about and you're trying to solve. And actually like broadening it, I do believe that
the car is going to be a wellness center. Like, because again, imagine if you have a variety of
sensors inside the vehicle tracking, not just your emotional state or level of distraction and
drowsiness and drowsiness, level of distraction, drowsiness and intoxication, but also maybe even
things like your physical, you know, your heart rate and your heart rate variability and your
breathing rate. And it can start like optimizing, yeah, it can optimize the ride based on what
your goals are. So I think we're going to start to see more of that. And I'm excited about that.
Yeah, what are the challenges you're tackling with Smart Eye currently? What's like the
trickiest things to get? Is it basically convincing more and more car companies that
having AI inside the car is a good idea? Or is there some, is there more technical
algorithmic challenges? What's been keeping you mentally busy?
I think a lot of the car companies we are in conversations with are already interested in
definitely driver monitoring, like I think it's becoming a must have. But even interior sensing,
I can see like we're engaged in a lot of like advanced engineering projects and proof of concepts.
I think technologically, though, and even the technology, I can see a path to making it happen.
I think it's the use case. Like, how does the car respond once it knows something about you?
Because you want it to respond in a thoughtful way that doesn't, that isn't off-putting to the
consumer in the car. So I think that's like the user experience. I don't think we've really nailed
that. And we usually, that's not part, we're the sensing platform, but we usually collaborate
with the car manufacturer to decide what the use case is. So say you figure out that somebody's
angry while driving. Okay, what should the car do? Do you see yourself as a role of nudging,
of like basically coming up with solutions essentially, and then the car manufacturer
is kind of put their own little spin on it? Right. Like we are like the ideation,
creative thought partner. But at the end of the day, the car company needs to decide what's on
brand for them, right? Like maybe when it figures out that you're distracted or drowsy, it shows
you a coffee cup, right? Or maybe it takes more aggressive behaviors and basically said, okay,
if you don't like take a rest in the next five minutes, the car's gonna shut down, right? Like
there's a whole range of actions the car can take and doing the thing that is most, yeah,
that builds trust with the driver and the passengers. I think that's what we need to
be very careful about. Yeah, car companies are funny because they have their own like,
I mean, that's why people get cars still. I hope that changes, but they get it because it's a
certain feel and look and it's a certain, they become proud like Mercedes Benz or BMW or whatever,
and that's their thing. That's the family brand or something like that or Ford or GM,
whatever, they stick to that thing. Yeah. It's interesting. So it should be, I don't know,
it should be a little more about the technology inside. And I suppose there too,
there could be a branding like a very specific style of luxury or fun, right? All that kind of
stuff. Yeah. You know, I have an AI focused fund to invest in early stage kind of AI driven
companies. And one of the companies we're looking at is trying to do what Tesla did, but for boats,
for recreational boats. Yeah. So they're building an electric and kind of slash autonomous
boat. And it's kind of the same issues like, what kind of sensors can you put in?
What kind of states can you detect both exterior and interior within the boat?
Anyways, it's like really interesting. Do you boat at all? No, not well, not in that way. I do like
to get on the lake or a river and fish from a boat, but that's not boating. That's the
difference. That's still boating low tech, low tech boat. Get away from, get closer to nature.
But I guess going out into the ocean is also getting closer to nature and some deep sense.
I mean, I guess that's why people love it. The enormity of the water just underneath you. Yeah.
I love both. I love saltwater. It was like the big and just it's humbling to be in front of this
giant thing that's so powerful that was here before us and be here after. But I also love the
piece of a small wooded lake. It's everything's calm. You tweeted that I'm excited about Amazon's
acquisition of iRobot. I think it's a super interesting. Just given the trajectory of
which you're part of, of these honestly small number of companies that are playing in this space
that are like trying to have an impact on human beings. So it is an interesting moment in time
that Amazon would acquire iRobot. You tweet, I imagine a future where home robots are as ubiquitous
as microwaves or toasters. Here are three reasons why I think this is exciting. If you remember,
I can look it up. But why is this exciting to you? I mean, I think the first reason why this is
exciting, I kind of remember the exact order in which I put them. But one is just it's going to
be an incredible platform for understanding our behaviors within the home. If you think about
Roomba, which is the robot vacuum cleaner, the flagship product of iRobot at the moment,
it's like running around your home, understanding the layout, it's understanding what's clean and
what's not, how often do you clean your house and all of these behaviors are a piece of the puzzle
in terms of understanding who you are as a consumer. And I think that could be, again,
used in really meaningful ways, not just to recommend better products or whatever, but
actually to improve your experience as a human being. So I think that's very interesting.
I think the natural evolution of these robots in the home, so it's interesting. Roomba isn't
really a social robot at the moment. But I once interviewed one of the chief engineers on the
Roomba team, and he talked about how people named their Roombas. And if their Roomba broke down,
they would call in and say, you know, my Roomba broke down and the company would say, well,
we'll just send you a new one. And no, no, no, Rosie, like you have to like, yeah, I want you to
fix this particular robot. So people have already built like interesting emotional connections
with these home robots. And I think that again, that provides a platform for really interesting
things to, to just motivate change, like it could help you. I mean, one of the companies that spun
out of MIT, Catalia Health, the guy who started it spent a lot of time building robots that help
with weight management. So weight management, sleep, eating better. Yeah, all of these things.
Well, if I'm being honest, Amazon does not exactly have a track record of winning over people in
terms of trust. Now, that said, it's a really difficult problem for human being to let a robot
in their home that has a camera on it. Right. That's really, really, really tough. And I think
Roomba actually, I have to think about this, but I'm pretty sure now, or for some time already,
or for some time already has had cameras, because they're doing the most recent Roomba. I have so
many Roombas. Oh, you actually do? Well, a program that I don't use a Roomba for back.
People that have been to my place, they're like, yeah, you definitely don't use these Roombas.
I can't tell like the valence of this comment. Was it a compliment or like?
No, it's just a bunch of electronics everywhere. I have six or seven computers. I have robots
everywhere, legged robots, small robots and big robots. And it's just giant, just piles of robot
stuff. And yeah, but including the Roombas, they're being used for their body and intelligence,
but not for their purpose. I've changed them to repurpose them for other purposes, for deeper,
more meaningful purposes than just like the Butter Robot, which just brings a lot of people
happiness, I'm sure. They have a camera because the thing they advertised, I had my own camera
still, but the camera on the new Roomba, they have like state-of-the-art poop detection as they
advertised, which is a very difficult, apparently it's a big problem for vacuum cleaners is, you
know, if they go over like dog poop, it just runs it over and creates a giant mess. So they have like,
apparently they collected like a huge amount of data and different shapes and looks and whatever
of poop and then now able to avoid it and so on. They're very proud of this. So there is a camera,
but you don't think of it as having a camera. Yeah, you don't think of it as having a camera
because you've grown to trust it, I guess, because our phones, at least most of us seem to trust
this phone, even though there's a camera looking directly at you. I think that if you trust that
the company is taking security very seriously, I actually don't know how that trust was earned
with smartphones. I think it just started to provide a lot of positive value into your life
where you just took it in and then the company over time has shown that it takes privacy very
seriously, that kind of stuff. But Amazon is not always in its social robots communicated,
this is a trustworthy thing, both in terms of culture and competence. I think privacy is not
just about what do you intend to do, but also how good are you at doing that kind of thing.
So that's a really hard problem to solve. But I mean, but a lot of us have Alexis at home,
and I mean, Alexa could be listening in the whole time and doing all sorts of nefarious things with
the data. Hopefully it's not, but I don't think it is. But Amazon is not, it's such a tricky thing
for a company to get right, which is to earn the trust. I don't think Alexis earned people's trust
quite yet. Yeah, I think it's not there quite yet. I agree. They struggle with this kind of stuff.
In fact, when these topics are brought up, people are always get nervous. And I think
if you get nervous about it, I mean that the way to earn people's trust is not by like,
ooh, don't talk about this. It's just be open, be frank, be transparent and also create a culture
of where it radiates at every level from engineer to CEO that you're good people that have a common
sense idea of what it means to respect basic human rights and the privacy of people and all that
kind of stuff. And I think that propagates throughout the, that's the best PR, which is like,
over time you understand that these are good folks doing good things. Anyway, speaking of social
robots, have you heard about Tesla, the human robot? Yes, I have. Yes, yes, yes, but I don't
exactly know what it's designed to do. Do you? You probably do. No, I know it's designed to do,
but I have a different perspective on it, but it's designed to, it's a humanoid form and it's
designed to, for automation tasks in the same way that industrial robot arms automate task in the
factory. So it's designed to automate task in the factory, but I think that humanoid form,
as we were talking about before, is one that we connect with as human beings, anything legged
honestly, but the humanoid form especially, we anthropomorphize it most intensely. And so the
possibility to me, it's exciting to see both Atlas developed by Boston Dynamics and anyone,
including Tesla, trying to make humanoid robots cheaper and more effective. The obvious way
transforms the world is social robotics to me versus automation of tasks in the factory.
So yeah, I just wanted to, in case that was something you were interested in, because
I find its application of social robotics super interesting. We did a lot of work with Pepper,
Pepper the Robot a while back. We were like the emotion engine for Pepper, which is SoftBank's
humanoid robot. And how tall is Pepper? Yeah, like, I don't know, like five foot maybe, right?
Yeah. Yeah, pretty big, pretty big. And it was designed to be airport lounges and retail stores,
mostly customer service, right? Hotel lobbies. And I mean, I don't know where the state of
the robot is, but I think it's very promising. I think there are a lot of applications where
this can be helpful. I'm also really interested in social robotics for the home, right? That can
help elderly people, for example, transport things from one location of the home to the other,
or even just have your back in case something happens. Yeah, I don't know. I do think it's
a very interesting space. It seems early though. Do you feel like the timing is now?
Yes, 100%. So it always seems early until it's not, right? Right, right, right. I think the time,
I definitely think that the time is now, like this decade for social robots,
whether the humanoid form is right, I don't think so. I don't, I think the, like, if we just look
at Gibo as an example, I feel like most of the problem, the challenge, the opportunity of social
connection between an AI system and a human being does not require you to also solve the
problem of robot manipulation and mobile bipedal mobility. So I think you could do that with just
a screen, honestly. But there's something about the interface of Gibo we can rotate and so on
that's also compelling. But you get to see all these robot companies that fail, that fail,
incredible companies like Gibo and even, I mean, the iRobot in some sense is a big success story
that it was able to define a niche thing and focus on it. But in some sense, it's not a success
story because they didn't build any other robot, like any other, it didn't expand into all kinds
of robotics. Like once you're in the home, maybe that's what happens with Amazon is they'll flourish
into all kinds of other robots. But do you have a sense, by the way, why it's so difficult to
build a robotics company? Like why so many companies have failed? I think it's like you're
building a vertical stack, right? Like you're building the hardware plus the software and you
find you have to do this at a cost that makes sense. So I think Gibo was retailing at like,
I don't know, like $800, like $700, $800, which for the use case, right, there's a dissonance
there. It's too high. So I think cost is, you know, the cost of building the whole platform
in a way that is, yeah, that is affordable for what value it's bringing. I think that's a challenge.
I think for these home robots that are going to help, you know, help you do stuff around the home,
that's a challenge too, like the mobility piece of it. That's hard.
Well, one of the things I'm really excited with Tesla Bot is the people working on it.
And that's probably the criticism I would apply to some of the other folks who worked on social
robots is the people working on Tesla Bot know how to, they're focused on and know how to do mass
manufacture and create a product that's super cheap. Very cool. That's the focus. The engineering
focus isn't, I would say that you can also criticize them for that, is they're not focused on the
experience of the robot. They're focused on how to get this thing to do the basic stuff that the
humanoid form requires to do as cheap as possible. Then the fewest number of actuators, the fewest
numbers of motors, the increase in efficiency, they decrease the weight, all that kind of stuff.
So that's, that's really interesting. I would say that Jibo and all those folks,
they focus on the design, the experience, all of that. And it's secondary how to manufacture.
Right. No, you have to think like the Tesla Bot folks from first principles,
what is the fewest number of components, the cheapest components, how can I build it
as much in-house as possible without, without having to consider all the complexities of a
supply chain, all that kind of stuff. Interesting. Because if you have to build a robotics company,
you have to, you're not building one robot, you're building hopefully millions of robots.
You have to figure out how to do that. Where the final thing, I mean, if it's Jibo type of robot,
is there a reason why Jibo, like we can have this lengthy discussion, is there a reason why
Jibo has to be over $100? It shouldn't be. Right. Like the basic components of it, right?
Like you could start to actually discuss like, okay, what is the essential thing about Jibo?
How much, what is the cheapest way I can have a screen? What's the cheapest way I can have
a rotating base, all that kind of stuff. And then you get down, continuously drive down costs.
Speaking of which, you have launched an extremely successful companies, you have helped others,
you've invested in companies. Can you give advice on how to start a successful company?
I would say have a problem that you really, really, really want to solve, right? Something
that you're deeply passionate about. And honestly, take the first step. Like that's
often the hardest. And don't overthink it. Like, you know, like this idea of a minimum viable
product or a minimum viable version of an idea, right? Like, yes, you're thinking about this,
like a humongous, like super elegant, super beautiful thing. What the, like reduce it to
the littlest thing they can bring to market that can solve a problem or that can, you know,
that can help address a pain point that somebody has. They often tell you, like, start with a
customer of one, right? If you can solve a problem for one person, then there's probably a-
Yourself or some other person, pick a person. Exactly. It could be you. Yeah.
That's actually often a good sign that if you enjoy a thing, enjoy a thing where you have
a specific problem that you'd like to solve, that's a good end of one to focus on.
Right. What else? What else is there to actually, so step one is the hardest, but
there's other steps as well, right? I also think
like who you bring around the table early on is so key, right? Like being clear on
what I call like your core values or your North Star. It might sound fluffy, but actually it's
not. So, and Roz and I, I feel like we did that very early on. We sat around her kitchen table
and we said, okay, there's so many applications of this technology. How are we going to draw
the line? How are we going to set boundaries? We came up with a set of core values that in
the hardest of times we fell back on to determine how we make decisions. And so I feel like just
getting clarity on these core, like for us, it was respecting people's privacy, only engaging
with industries where it's clear opt-in. So, for instance, we don't do any work in security
and surveillance. So, things like that, just getting, we very big on, you know, one of our core
values is human connection and empathy, right? And that is, yes, it's an AI company, but it's
about people. Well, these are all, they become encoded in how we act, even if you're a small,
tiny team of two or three or whatever. So, I think that's another piece of advice.
So, what about finding people, hiring people? If you care about people as much as you do,
like, it seems like such a difficult thing to hire the right people.
I think early on as a startup, you want people who have, who share the passion and the conviction,
because it's going to be tough. Like, I've yet to meet a startup where it was just a straight
line to success, right? Even not just startup, like, even everyday people's lives, right? You
always, like, run into obstacles and you run into naysayers. So, you need people who are believers,
whether they're people on your team or even your investors. You need investors who are
really believers in what you're doing, because that means they will stick with you. They won't,
they won't give up at the first obstacle. I think that's important.
What about raising money? What about finding investors? First of all, raising money, but also
raising money from the right sources, from that ultimately don't hinder you, but help you, empower
you, all that kind of stuff. What a device would you give there? You successfully raise money many
times in your life. Yeah, again, it's not just about the money. It's about finding the right
investors who are going to be aligned in terms of what you want to build and believe in your core
values. For example, especially later on, like, yeah, in my latest round of funding, I try to
bring in investors that really care about the ethics of AI, right? And the alignment of vision
and mission and core values is really important. It's like you're picking a life partner, right?
It's the same kind of... So you take it that seriously for investors? Yeah, because they're
going to have to stick with you. You're stuck together. For a while anyway, yeah. Maybe not
for life, but for a while, for sure. For better or worse, I forget what the vowels usually sound
like. For better or worse? No. Through something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right. Oh boy. Yeah,
anyway, it's romantic and deep and you're in it for a while. So it's not just about the money.
You tweeted about going to your first capital camp investing get-together and that you learned a
lot. So this is about investing. So what have you learned from that? What have you learned about
investing in general? Because you've been on both ends of it. I mean, I try to use my experience
as an operator now with my investor hat on when I'm identifying companies to invest in.
First of all, I think the good news is because I have a technology background and I really
understand machine learning and computer vision and AI, et cetera, I can apply that level of
understanding because everybody says they're an AI company or they're an AI tech and I'm like,
no, no, no, no. Show me the technology. So I can do that level of diligence, which I actually love.
I have to do the litmus test of if I'm in a conversation with you, am I excited to tell you
about this new company that I just met? And if I'm an ambassador for that company and I'm passionate
about what they're doing, I usually use that. Yeah, that's important to me when I'm investing.
So that means you actually can't explain what they're doing and you're excited about it.
Exactly. Exactly. Thank you for putting it so succinctly, just like rambling. But exactly,
that's it. I understand it and I'm excited about it. Sometimes it's funny, but sometimes it's unclear
exactly. I'll hear people tell me, you know, they'll talk for a while and it sounds cool,
like they paint a picture of a world, but then when you try to summarize it, you're not exactly clear
of what maybe what the core powerful idea is. You can't just build another Facebook or
there has to be a core simple to explain idea that then you can or can't get excited about,
but it's there. But how do you ultimately pick who you think will be successful? It's not just
about the thing you're excited about, like there's other stuff. Right. And then there's all the
with early stage companies, like pre-seed companies, which is where I'm investing,
sometimes the business model isn't clear yet or the go to market strategy isn't clear. There's
usually like it's very early on that some of these things haven't been hashed out, which is okay.
So the way I like to think about it is like, if this company is successful, will this be a
multi-billion slash trillion dollar market, you know, or company. And so that's definitely a lens
that I use. What's pre was pre-seed? What are the different stages? And what's the most exciting
stage and what's or not what's what's what's interesting about every stage, I guess. Yeah.
So pre-seed is usually when you're just starting out, you've maybe raised the friends and family
rounds. So you've raised some money from people you know, and you're getting ready to take your
first institutional check in like first check from an investor. And I love this stage. There's a lot
of uncertainty. So some investors really don't like the stage because the financial models aren't
there. Often the teams aren't even like formed really, really early. But to me, it's it's like
a magical stage because it's the time when there's so much conviction, so much belief,
almost delusional, right? Yeah. And there's a little bit of naivete around
with founders at the stage. And I just love it. It's contagious. And I love I love that I can
and often they're first time founders, not always, but often they're first time founders. And I can
share my experience as a founder myself and I can empathize, right? And I can almost,
I create a safe ground where because, you know, you have to be careful what you tell your investors,
right? And I will, I will often like say, I've been in your shoes as a founder, you can tell me
if it's challenging, you can tell me what you're struggling with, it's okay to vent.
And so I create that safe ground. And I think I think that's the superpower.
Yeah, you have to what I guess you have to figure out if this kind of person is going to be able
to ride the roller coaster, like of many pivots and challenges and all that kind of stuff. And
if the space of ideas they're working in is interesting, like the way they think about the
world. Yeah. Because if it's successful, the thing they end up with might be very different,
the reason successful for it. Actually, you know, I was going to say the third
criteria. So the technology is one aspect, the market or the idea, right? Is the second and
the third is the founder, right? Is this somebody who I believe has conviction is a hustler,
you know, is going to overcome obstacles. Yeah, I think that it's going to be a great leader,
right? Like as a startup, as a founder, you're often you are the first person and your role is to
bring amazing people around you to build this thing. And so you're in an evangelist, right?
So how good are you going to be at that? So I try to evaluate that too.
You're also in the tweet thread about it mentioned, is this a known concept, random rich dudes, RDS,
okay. And saying that there should be like random rich women, I guess. What's the dudes,
what's the dudes version of women, the women version of dudes, ladies, I don't know.
I don't know. What's, what's, is this a technical term? Is this known? Random rich dudes?
I didn't make that up, but I was at this capital camp, which is a get together for investors of
all types. And there must have been maybe 400 or so attendees, maybe 20 were women. It was just
very disproportionately, you know, a male, male dominated, which I'm used to.
I think you're used to this kind of thing. I'm used to it, but it's still surprising.
Yeah. And as I'm raising money for this fund, so my, my, my fund partner is a guy called Rob May,
who's done this before. So I'm new to the investing world, but he's done this before.
Most of our investors in the fund are these, I mean, awesome. I'm super grateful to them,
random just rich guys. I'm like, where are the rich women? So I, I'm really adamant in both
investing in women led AI companies, but I also would love to have women investors be part of
my fund. Um, because I think that's how we drive change. Yeah. So the next, you know, that, that,
that takes time, of course, but there's been quite, quite a lot of progress. But yeah, for,
for the next Mark Zuckerberg to be a woman and all that kind of stuff, because that,
that's just like a huge number of wealth generated by, by women and then controlled by women and
allocated by women and all that kind of stuff. And then beyond just women, just broadly across
all different measures of diversity and so on. Um, let me ask you to put on your wise sage hat.
Okay. So we already, you already gave advice on startups and just advice, um,
for women, but in general, uh, advice for folks in high school or college today,
how to have a career they can be proud of how to have a life they can be proud of. I suppose
you have to give this kind of advice to your kids. Yeah. Well, here's the number one advice that I
give to my kids. My daughter is now 19, by the way, and my son is 13 and a half. So they're not
little kids anymore, but, but I break your heart. It does. They're awesome. They're my best friends.
But, um, yeah, I think the number one advice I would share is embark on a journey without
attaching to outcomes. Um, enjoy the journey, right? So, you know, we often were so obsessed with,
with the end goal. A, that doesn't allow us to be open to different endings of a, of a journey or
a story. Um, so you become like so fixated on a particular path. You don't see the beauty in
the other alternative path. Um, and then you forget to enjoy the journey because you're just
so fixated on the goal. And I've been guilty of that for many, many years in my life. And I've,
I've, I've now, I'm now trying to like make the shift of no, no, no, I'm gonna, again, trust
that things are going to work out and it'll be amazing and maybe even exceed your dreams.
We have to be open to that. Yeah. Taking, uh, taking a leap into all kinds of things. I think
you tweeted like you went on vacation by yourself or something like this or I know this and just,
just, just, just going, just taking the leap, doing it, totally doing it and enjoying it,
enjoying the, enjoying the moment, enjoying the weeks, enjoying not looking at the,
some kind of career ladder next step and so on. Yeah. There's, there's something to that,
like over planning too. I'm surrounded by a lot of people that kind of, so I don't plan.
You don't. No. Do you not do goal setting?
My goal setting is very like, I like the affirmations is very, it's almost, I don't know
how to put it into words, but it's, it's a little bit like what my heart yearns for kind of, and I
guess in the space of emotions more than in the space of like, this will be like in the
rational space because I just try to picture a world that I would like to be in and that world
is not clearly pictured. It's mostly in the emotional world. I mean, I think about that
from robots because, you know, I have this desire. I've had it my whole life to, to, well,
they took different shapes, but I think once I discovered AI, the desire was to,
I think in this, in the context of this conversation, could be easily easier described
as basically a social robotics company. And that's something I dreamed of doing.
And, well, there's a lot, there's a lot of complexity to that story, but that,
that's, that's the, that's the only thing, honestly, I dream of doing. So I imagine a world that,
that I could help create, but it's not, there's no steps along the way. And I think
I'm just kind of stumbling around and following happiness and working my ass off in almost
random, like an aunt does in random directions. But a lot of people, a lot of successful people
around me say this, you should have a plan, you should have a clear goal. You have a goal
at the end of the month, you have a goal at the end of the year. I don't, I don't, I don't. And
there's a balance to be struck, of course, but there's something to be said about really making
sure that you're living life to the fullest that goals can actually get in the way of.
So one of the best, like kind of most, what do you, what do you call it when it's like
challenges your brain, what do you call it?
The only thing that comes to mind, and this is me saying is a mind fuck, but yes.
Okay, okay. Something like that. Yes.
Super inspiring talk. Kenneth Stanley, he was at OpenAI, he just laughed. And he has a book
called Why Greatness Can't Be Planned. And it's actually an AI book. So, and he's done all these
experiments that basically show that when you over optimize, you, you, like the tradeoff is
you're less creative, right? And to create true greatness and truly creative solutions to problems,
you can't overplan it. You can't. And I thought that was, and so he generalizes it beyond AI.
And he talks about how we apply that in our personal life and in our organizations and our
companies, which are over KPI, right? Like look at any company in the world. And it's all like,
these are the goals, these are the, you know, weekly goals and, you know, the sprints and then
the quarterly goals, blah, blah, blah. And he just shows with a lot of his AI experiments that
that's not how you create truly game changing ideas. So there you go. Yeah, yeah. But you can't,
he's awesome. Yeah, there's a balance, of course, because that's, yeah, many moments of genius
will not come from planning and goals, but you still have to build factories and you still
have to manufacture and you still have to deliver and there's still deadlines and all that kind of
stuff. And that, for that's good to have goals. I do goal setting with my kids. We all have our
goals, but, but, but I think we're starting to morph into more of these like bigger picture
goals and not obsess about like, I don't know, it's hard. Well, I honestly think with, especially
with kids, it's better, much, much better to have a plan and have goals and so on, because you have
to, you have to learn the muscle of like what it feels like to get stuff done. Yeah. But I think
once you learn that, there's flexibility for me because I spend most of my life with goal setting
and so on. So like, I've gotten good with grades and school. I mean, in school, if you want to be
successful at school, you, I mean, the kind of stuff in high school and college that kids have to do
in terms of managing their time and getting so much stuff done. It's like, you know, taking five,
six, seven classes in college, they're like, that would break the, the spirit of most humans
if they took one of them later in life. It's like really difficult stuff, especially in
engineering curricula. So I think you have to learn that skill. But once you learn it, you can
maybe, because you're, you can be a little bit on autopilot and use that momentum and then allow
yourself to be lost in the flow of life, you know, just kind of, or also give, like, I work pretty
hard to allow myself to have the freedom to do that. That's really, that's a tricky freedom to have.
Yeah. Because like, a lot of people get lost in the rat race and they, and they also, like,
financially, they, whenever you get a raise, they'll get like a bigger house or something like this.
I put very, so like, you're always trapped in this race. I put a lot of emphasis on, on living
like below my means always. And so there's a lot of freedom to do whatever, whatever the
hard desires that, that's a really, but everyone has to decide what's the right thing,
what's the right thing for them. For some people, having a lot of responsibilities,
like a house they can barely afford, or having a lot of kids, the responsibility side of that
is really helps them get their shit together. Like, all right, I need to be really focused on
getting, some of the most successful people I know have kids and the kids bring out the best
of them. They make them more productive, less productive. It's accountability. It's an accountability
thing. Absolutely. And almost something to actually live and fight and work for, like having a family.
Yeah. It's, it's fascinating to see because you would think kids would be a hit on productivity,
but they're not for a lot of really successful people. They really like, they're like an engine of
right efficiency. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird. Yeah. I mean, it's beautiful,
it's beautiful to see and also social happiness. Speaking of which, what role
do you think love plays in the human condition? Love?
I think love is, yeah, I think, I think it's why we're all here. I think it would be very hard to
live life without love in any of its forms, right? Yeah. That's the most beautiful forms that
human connection takes, right? Yeah. I feel like everybody wants to feel loved, right? In one way
or another, right? And to love. Yeah. And to love too. Totally. Yeah. I agree with that.
Both of it. I mean, I'm not even sure what feels better. Both, both like that.
To give love too. Yeah. And, and it is like we've been talking about an interesting question,
whether some of that, whether one day we'll be able to love a toaster. Okay. Get some small.
I wasn't quite thinking about that when I said like, love, yeah, love. That's all I was thinking
about. Okay. I was thinking about Brad Pitt and toaster. Okay. Toaster's great.
All right. Well, I think we started on love and ended on love. This was an incredible
conversation. Ron, thank you so much. You're an incredible person. Thank you for everything
you're doing in AI, in the space of just caring about humanity, human emotion, about love, and
being an inspiration to a huge number of people in robotics, in AI, in science,
in the world of general. So thank you for talking to me. It's an honor.
Thank you for having me. And you know, I'm a big fan of yours as well. So it's been a pleasure.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rana Elkhayubi. To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from
Helen Keller. The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched.
They must be felt with the heart. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.