Lex Fridman Podcast - #322 – Rana el Kaliouby: Emotion AI, Social Robots, and Self-Driving Cars

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

Rana el Kaliouby is a pioneer in the field of emotion recognition and human-centric AI. She is the founder of Affectiva, deputy CEO of Smart Eye, and author of Girl Decoded. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Mizzen+Main: https://mizzenandmain.com and use code LEX to get $35 off - Weights & Biases: https://lexfridman.com/wnb - Notion: https://notion.com - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free EPISODE LINKS: Rana's Twitter: https://twitter.com/kaliouby Rana's Instagram: https://instagram.com/ranaelkaliouby Rana's Facebook: https://facebook.com/RanaelKaliouby Affectiva (website): https://affectiva.com Smart Eye: (website): https://smarteye.se Girl Decoded (book): https://amzn.to/3DnRAN4 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (06:58) - Childhood (16:35) - Hijab (19:18) - Faith (21:26) - War (25:35) - Women in the Middle East (29:53) - Rana's journey (42:28) - Rosalind Picard (44:36) - Advice for women (55:07) - Dating (1:02:43) - Human nature (1:07:23) - AI and emotions (1:38:01) - Smart Eye (1:47:22) - Tesla and Waymo (1:56:09) - Drunk driving (2:05:40) - Robotics (2:19:27) - Advice for startups (2:24:15) - Investing (2:31:39) - Advice for young people (2:39:59) - Love

The following is a conversation with Rana L. Kalyubi, a pioneer in the field of emotion recognition and human-centric artificial intelligence. She is the founder of F. Activa, deputy CEO of Smarti, author of Girl Decoded, and one of the most brilliant, kind, inspiring, and fun human beings I've gotten a chance to talk to. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Miz and a Main for Style, Wates and Bias for Machine Learning, Notion for Collaboration, Inside Track of For Bio Monitoring, and ExpressVPN for Privacy.

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They've been with me all along. I mean, not just the sponsors as a tool. You know, it's the VPN I've used for so, so many years. And the look has changed a little bit, but the simplicity and the elegance, the obvious nature of a big button that turns the thing on hasn't changed. You set the location, you have a button, you press the turn it on, it works, it works wonderfully. What do you want from a VPN? It's an incredibly useful and important service. An ExpressVPN does it better than anybody else I've tried. Once you turn it on, it's super fast, which is probably the main thing you want from a VPN.

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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 to find 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 at 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 would 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 it'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? What do you visualize? Do you visualize people's faces, smiles? Is there colors? Is there 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 particular type that I love and it's called Darway C. Mangos. And they're kind of, you know, they're oval and they have a little red in them. So they're red and mango colored on the outside. So remember that. Is red and decay like extra sweetness? Isn't that? Yes.

That means like it's nicely. It's like sweet. Yeah, it's nice and ripe and stuff. Yeah. 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 Borsh. Borsh is this beet soup with that you put sour cream. 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 beat soup. This is making 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 Islamic world. But it's become so cliche and stereotypical that you almost don't mention it, but it's still delicious. I visited Ukraine and I ate that every single day. Do you make it yourself?

How hard is it to make it? 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 didn't 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 molochia. 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 chicken broth. My grandma used to make, and my mom makes it really well, and I try to make it, but it's not as great. 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 pigeons. Yeah, it's like, it was really yummy. It's the one thing I miss about, you know, now that I'm Paschitarian and I don't eat any... The stuffed pigeon? Yeah, the stuffed pigeons. Is it what are they stuffed with?

If that doesn't bother you to watch the describe. No, no, it's stuffed with a lot of like, just rice and, um, Oh, God, that guy. Yeah, it's just rice, yeah. So... And you also, you've 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, the 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 muzzle them, right? So it's kind of, it was kind of funny that the first thing I did was like this Christmas tree. So yeah. And that's when I realized, wow, you can write code to do all sorts of really cool stuff. I must have been like six or seven at the time.

So you can write programs and the programs do stuff for you. That's power. That's important. If you think about it, that's empowering. Hey, hi. Yeah, I know what it is. I don't know if that, you see like, I don't know if many people think of it that way. When I first learned to program, they just love the puzzle of it.

Like, oh, this is cool. This is pretty Christmas tree. But like, it's power. It is. Like you eventually, I guess you couldn't a Christmas tree, but like it's power. It is power. 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 create 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, more centered for it. I adhere to the values of my religion, even if I'm not as beautiful as I once was. And I am a new American and I'm thriving on the energy vitality and entrepreneurial 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, their Egyptian, but they moved to Kuwait right out. They actually, there's a cute story about how they met. So my dad taught Cobal in the 70s. Nice.

And my mom decided to learn programming. So she signed up to take his Cobal programming class. And he tried to date her and she was like, no, no, no, I don't date. And so he's like, okay, I'll propose. And that's how they got married. Whoa, I'm blue. Yeah, I'm blue. Exactly right.

That's really impressive. So those cobalt guys know how to impress a lady. So yeah, so what had 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, both as a professional, but also in 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, you know, a woman in the Middle East. And I, you know, they still love me, which is, which is, I'm, than what's expected of women in the Middle East. And they still love me, which is, which I'm so grateful for that. One 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 pursue her career. And so my dad and my parents-and-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. You'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. It was 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 gonna 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 hats, 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 things.

Trying to fit in. 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 it's always whenever you're in public, you have to wear the company. Can you speak to that to the hijab? Maybe your mixed feelings about it?

Like what does it represent? And it's best case, what is 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, 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. To you said, because it's by choice, you're kind of free to make that choice, to celebrate a tradition of modesty. Exactly. And I actually like made it my own. I remember I would really match the color of my head's scarf with what I was wearing. It was a form of self-expression and at its best I

loved wearing it. I have a lot of questions around how we practice religion and religion. I think also it was a time where I was spending a lot of time going back and forth between the US and Egypt. I started meeting a lot of time going back and forth between the US and Egypt. I started meeting a lot of people in the US who are 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. At a time when I was going through a divorce, it was just the perfect storm of 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 okay if you don't wear it, but it's really not okay to wear it 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 here by here 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 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 gonna be okay, right? Like the universe is out to like do amazing things for you and it's gonna be okay. The universe is out to do amazing things for you and it's gonna be okay. And there's strength to that. Even when you're going through adversity, you just know that it's gonna work out.

Yeah, it gives you an inner peace, a calmness. Exactly. Yeah, it's faith in all the meanings of that word. Faith that everything is going to be okay. And it is because time passes and time cures all things that could calm this with the chaos of the world. 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, tada tada. But then time passes and then you look back and there's a silver lining, right? It may be 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 a faith or conviction that it's gonna work out So it's such a beautiful way to see a shady feeling so if you're if you feel shady about current situation I mean it almost is always true unless It's a the cliches Thing of if it doesn't kill you whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. It's

It does seem that over time when you take a perspective on things that thought 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, the moments and periods of your life are the most meaningful. Yeah. Yeah. So over time, you get to have that respect. You get right. What about, because you mentioned Kuwait, let me ask you about war. What's the role of war in 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 with this turmoil, that was turmoil, there's still turmoil. It is so unfortunate, honestly, it's, it's such a waste of human resources and,

and, and, yeah, and human mind share. I mean, and, and at the end of the day, we all kind of want the same things. We want, you know, we want human connection. We want joy, 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 need on Egyptian,

American now, 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, chended 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. Um, you guys said they're 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 her on 9-11-2. Yeah, and 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 intention? 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 of women around the world. The other aspect is, it doesn't matter the gender, the people in power. I get to see this 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 everywhere you believe 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 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. I kind of have faith that social media, as particular 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 falling in love across different nations and religions and so on, and that I think ultimately can cure a lot of our ills, especially in person. I also think that if leaders met in person to have a conversation, they could 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 the limiting in, 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 like my comment on like women running the world. I think it comes back to empathy, right? 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.

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 are gonna, we'll know everything about your life like right away, right? I have no problems asking everything about your life right away, right? 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, 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 empathy is a part of that. Totally. You can put yourself in this person's shoe and kind of, yeah, imagine, you know, 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 use for difference between men and women in that aspect and empathy, or is doing these kind of big general groups, does that hinder progress?

Yeah, I actually don't want to overgeneralize. I mean, I, some of the men I know are like 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. Yeah.

He runs the Autism Research Center at Cambridge, and he's written multiple books on autism. And one of his, one of his theories is the empathy scale, like the systemizers and the empathizers. And it, there's a disproportionate amount of computer scientists and engineers who are systemizers and perhaps not great empathizers. And then, you know, there's more men in that bucket, I guess, than women. And then there's more women in the empathizers bucket. So again, not to over generalize.

Sometimes wonder about that. It's been frustrating to me how many I guess systemizers are in the field of robotics. Yeah. It's actually encouraging to me because I care about obviously social robotics and because it's a more opportunity for people that are empathic. Exactly. I totally agree. Well, right? So it's nice.

So every robot I talk to, I don't see the human as interesting as Like it does it's not exciting you want to avoid the human at all costs. It's a it's a safety concern to be touching the human Which it is but it's also an opportunity for deep connection Or collaboration or all that kind of stuff So and because most most brilliant robotists don't care about the human, it's an opportunity. Right. In your case, it's a business opportunity to make general an opportunity to explore those ideas. So, it's a beautiful journey to Cambridge, to UK, and then to America.

What's the moment or moments where there were most transformation 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 PhDs 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 my PhD around building artificial emotional intelligence and looking. No, but in your master plan ahead of time, when you're sitting by the mango tree, 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 I think I kind of knew that I was gonna 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.

Well, I can be your science. Can we just linger on that? Well, because you're such an empathic person who cares about emotion and humans and so on. It's an, 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? 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 let send letters back and forth to each other. This was pre emails and stuff. pre-emails and stuff. So I think, I think technology can be not just transformative in terms of productivity, et cetera. It actually does change how we connect with one another. Can I just defend the facts machine?

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 of something. Right, and then it comes out as a printout and you can actually touch it and read it. Yeah, there's something, there's something lost when it's just an email Obviously, I wonder how we can regain some of that in the digital world

Which goes to the meta version all those kinds of things we'll talk about it anyway, so I Could 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. Okay, 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 Kindle. So I thought, I thought, okay, think 30 years from now, nobody's gonna have books anymore. The technology of digital books, gonna get better and better and better.

Are you really gonna be the guy that's still romanticizing physical books? Are you gonna be the old man on the porch who's like, 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. Like, I always, I mean, I'm trying to learn new programming languages, always like with technology, you have to kind of challenge yourself to adapt to it. You know, I force myself to use TikTok now. That thing doesn't need much forcing.

It pulls you in like a worst kind of, or the best kind of drug. Anyway, yeah. So yeah, 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 are we talking about? So AI, 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, right? 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, 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 Ross. Yes, AKA Ross.

And she was giving a talk at a pattern recognition conference in Cambridge. And she had a couple of hours to kill. So she emailed the lab and she said, you know, if any students want to meet with me, like just, you know, sign up here. And so I signed up for slots. And I spent like the weeks leading up to it, preparing for this meeting. And I want to show her 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. Yeah. 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 changed the trajectory of my life. There was no, I kind of outgrew my dreams, right?

I didn't want to go back to Egypt anymore and be faculty like that was no longer my dream. I had a dream. What was it like to be at MIT? What was that culture shock? You mean American general, but also I mean, came into just its own culture. So what was MIT like? And what was America like?

I think I wonder if that's similar to your experience that MIT. I was just at the media lab in particular. I was just really impressed. It's not the right word. I didn't expect the openness to like innovation and the acceptance of taking a risk and failing. Like failure isn't really accepted back in Egypt, right? You don't want to fail. Like there's a fear of failure, which I think has been hardwired in my brain. But you got to MIT and it's okay to start things. And if they don't work out, it's okay. You pivot to another idea.

And that kind of thinking was just very new to me. I was liberating. What media laugh for people don't know. MIT Media Lab is its own beautiful thing because they, I think, more than other places on my team reach for big ideas. And like they try I mean I think I mean depending of course on who but certainly with Rosalind this you try wild stuff you try big

things and crazy things and and also try to take things to completion so you can demo them so always 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 Ro some robots functioning one of my like favorite moments that just sticks with me a visit Boston dynamics and there was a First of all seeing so many spots so many like it robots in one place. I'm like I'm home

But the drive yeah 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, it, well, I'm like, I like in my mind, there are people that 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 come you back to his family at night like there's a there's a feeling like

there's life instilled in this robot and that's magical. I don't know. It's kind of inspiring to see. Did it say hello to you? Did he say hello to you? No, it's very, there's a focus 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 could not, yeah, you could not like show up with like PowerPoint or something. You actually had to have a working. You know what? My son, who is now 13, I don't know if this is still his life long goal or not, but when he was a little younger, his dream is to build an island that's just inhabited by robots. No humans, he just wants all these robots to be connecting and having fun.

So there you go. Does he have an idea of which robots he loves most? Is it Rumble like robots? Is it humanoid robots? Robot dogs? Or is it not clear yet? We use a Vegebo, which was one of the MIT Media Lab spinouts, and he used the love. The thing with a giant head. Yes, it spins. Right, exactly. And it's an eye. Oh, like, not glowing. Right. Right, right, right. Exactly. It's like how 9000 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. And feel it. 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 was was I've been trying to have them communicate Affection with their body in different ways just for art for art really because I love the idea of walking around with the robots Like as you would with the dog I think it's inspiring to a lot of people especially young people like kids love Love it Parents like adults are scared of robots, like kids love, love, 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 once I've 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 it. 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 Ross, what have you learned about science and life from Rosalind Picard?

Oh my god, I've learned so many things about life from Rosalind. I think the thing I learned the most is perseverance. When I first met Ros, she invited me to be her post-doc. 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, and I basically, I just took the first time you were rejected for fun. 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 Rose was like, it's great news. They love the idea. 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 she's like that in every aspect of her life.

She just does not take no for an answer. The reframe all negative feedback. It's a challenge. It's a challenge. Yes, they like this. Yeah, yeah, it was a right. Yeah. 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 Ros 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, Rose, if you're listening, thank you. Yeah, she's great. She's been on this podcast before that. I hope

she'll be on, I'm sure she'll be on again. You were the founder and CEO of Effectiva, which is a big company that was acquired by another big company, Smart Eye. And you're now the deputy CEO of Smart Eye, so you're a powerful leader, you're brilliant, you're brilliant scientists. 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 as 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, right? I have had to like 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, and it's basically saying, oh, no, no, no, no, you can't do this. Like, you're not going to raise money. You can't start a company.

Like what business do you have like starting a company or running a company or selling a company? Like you name it, it's always like. And I think my biggest advice to not just women, but people who are taking a new path and 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 hold you back from taking big leaps.

I think you, the best I can say is probably you have to somehow be able to control it. To turn it off when it's not useful and turn it on when it's useful. I have from almost like a third person perspective. Right, somebody who's sitting there, 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 as a talk to. But afterwards when I went home and just took this long walk, 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 know so dumb? Do 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 the media lab. Yeah, there's a... That's...

You should be able to shut that off then, because... You should have this weird confidence, almost like faith, that you said before that everything's gonna work out, so take the leap of faith. Take the leap of faith. like this weird confidence almost like faith that you said before that everything's going to work out. So take the leap of faith, despite all the negativity. I mean, 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, 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. Yeah.

And so I've been doing journaling for almost 10 years now. I use an app called Day One and it's the awesome I just journal and I use it as an opportunity to almost have a conversation with the Debbie Downer voice in my, it's like a rebuttal, right? Like Debbie Downer says, oh my God, like you, you know, you won't be able to raise this round of funny I'm like, okay, let's talk about it

but I Have a track record of doing x1 z. I think I can do this and it's literally like and 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, but I can have a conversation with it. And it just, it just, um, and I bring data to the table, right? So, so that was the journaling part, which I found very helpful. But the affirmation took it to a whole next level, and I, I just love it. I, I, I'm, I, I'm a year into doing this. And you literally wake up in the morning, and the first thing you do, um, I meditate first, um, and first. And then I write my affirmations. And it's the energy I want to put out in the world

that hopefully will come right back to me. So I will say, I always start with my smile lights up the whole world. And I kid you not like people in the street will stop me and say, oh my god, like we love your smile. Yeah. Like yes. So my affirmations will change depending on,

you know, what's happening this day? Is it funny? I know don't judge. Don't judge. That's nice. Laughter's not judgment. It's just awesome. I mean, 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 brings intentionality to like what you're doing, right? And so... So, by the way, I was laughing because my affirmations, which I also do are the opposite. Oh, you do. Oh, I don't have a my smile. Like the way I should add that because like I have just I have a, oh, boy, I just, it's so it's much more stoic like about focused about this.

Oh, okay. 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 like focus stuff. But that's usually the gap. But that's a cool start. It's just after all the like smiling time, playful, the joyful and all that. And then it's like, okay, I kick butt. Let's get you done. Right. Let's get you done affirmation. Okay, cool that is like, okay, I kick butt. Let's get shit done. Right. Let's get shit done at for me. Okay, cool. So, like, what else is on there?

What else is on there? Well, I have, 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 information. Yes. That's great. Yeah, so 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. And then it allows me to, instead of just like being pulled back and forth like throughout the day, it just 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 picture? It's a Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt, Brad Pitt. Because that's what I picture. Okay. That's what you picture. Yeah, I'm running holding hands running together

No more like fight club that the fight club Brad Pitt where he's like standing at all right people know Okay, 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 pitching specific people or is this almost like? Do you have like when you're thinking about the being a love magnet in that way, are you pitching specific people, it's 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 wanna travel the world, things like that.

Like their head overheels into me, it's like, I know, it sounds super silly, but it's literally what I write. And I believe it'll happen one day. Oh, you actually write, so you don't say that a lot? You write it. I write all my affirmations. I do the opposite.

I say, oh, I mean, I would have just seen. Yeah, if I'm alone, I'll say that a lot. Yeah. 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, losing the words, like losing the power of the words, maybe because that writes the whole, do you handwrite?

No, I type, it's on this app, it's day one basically, and I just, I can, the best thing about it is I can look back and see like a year ago, what was I affirming, right? So it's also changes over time. It hasn't like changed a lot, but the focus kind of changes over time. I got it. Yeah, I see the same exact thing over and over and over. Oh, you do? Okay.

There's a comfort in the, in the sameness of it. Well, actually, let me jump around because, let me ask you about, because all this talk about Brad Pitt or maybe just going on What's on 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 small dating app. I, 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. Build an AI that finds love. I think I think there must be a science behind that first moment you meet a person and you either have chemistry or you don't, right? Like you I guess that was the question I was asking. Would you put 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, yeah, changing your mind as we're describing it, but feels that way. But what science shows us is sometimes we can explain with the rigor the things that feel like magic. Right. So maybe you can remove all the magic. Maybe it's like, I honestly think,

like I said, good read should be a dating app. Which, like, books. 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 within 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 probably. We 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, right? 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. a successful relationship. Like if you meet somebody and they can make you last,

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, definitely. But yeah, that's the number of and the rate of inside joke generation.

You could probably measure that and then optimize it over the first few days. 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 science to that aspect of dating? Is it tricky? Is there advice you can give? Oh my God, I give the worst advice. Well, I can tell you like I have a spreadsheet. That's great. Is that a good or bad thing? Do you regret the spreadsheet? Well, I don't know. What's the name of this spreadsheet? Is it love? It's a date track dating tracker. date tracker. Dating tracker. It's a very, 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 you also? Well, I don't have a spreadsheet, but I would, now that you say it, it seems like a good idea. Oh, no.

Turning into data. I do wish that somebody else had a spreadsheet about me. Like I said, 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, not just the romantic love, but collaborators, friends, all that kind of stuff. It seems like the data is there. That's the problem social networks that are trying to solve, but I think they're doing

a really poor job. Even Facebook tried to get into a dating app business. I think there's so many components to running a successful company that connects human beings. And part of that is, you know, having engineers that care about the human side, right? As you know, extremely well, it's not, it's not easy to find those, but you don't also don't want just people that care about the human. They also have to be good engineers. So it's like, you have to find this beautiful mix and for some reason just empirically speaking It's it people have not done a good job of that building companies like that It must mean that it's a difficult problem to solve dating apps

It seems difficult, okay, Cupid tender all those kind of stuff. They seem To find of course they work, but they seem to not work as well as I would imagine as possible. Like, with data, wouldn't you be able to find better human connection? It's like arranged marriages on steroids essentially. Right. Right. Arrange 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. How do you engineer serendipity? This random chance encounter, and then you fall in love withity? 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 allows for a little bit of... Well, it can also, you know, it can also trick you into thinking of something, but I like somehow showing you a tweet of a person that he thinks you match well with, but do it

accidentally as part of another search. Right. And like you just notice it, like, and then you get, you go down a rabbit hole and you connect them outside the app to, like, hole and you connect them outside the app to like, you connect with this person outside the app somehow. So it creates that moment of meeting. Of course, you have to think from an app perspective of 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.

That's beautiful. I mean, you're gonna make money somehow. If you help people fall in love personally with the product, find self love, or with another human being, you're gonna make money. You're gonna figure out a way to make money. I just feel like the dating apps often will optimize for something else than love.

It's a single social networks, they optimize for engagement as opposed to a deep, meaningful connection that's ultimately grow in personal growth, use of human being, growing and all that kind of stuff. Let me do a pivot to a dark topic topic which you open the book with. Yeah. The story because I'd like to talk to you about just emotion and artificial intelligence. 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 Jim Mel disappeared below the surface of the water, one of them said, he just died and the others laughed. What is this incident, uh, teach you about human nature? And the response to it perhaps. Yeah. I mean, I think this is a really, really, really sad story and it 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. And...

Emphasis, 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 dehumanized. It's creating this like, yeah, dehumanizing of the other. And I think that's a huge problem.

The good news is, I think the solution could be technology-based. Like, I think if we rethink the way we design and deploy our technologies, we can solve parts of this problem, but I worry about it. I mean, even with my son, a lot of his interactions are computer-mediated. I just question what that's doing to his empathy skills and his ability to really connect with people. 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 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 not in your head now and that creates a feedback loop. And 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. Yeah.

Not head. Yeah, not head. In agreement, if Rana says, yes, then not had else. Don't do it too much because it might be at the wrong time. And then it looks at the wrong signal. Oh, God. And make eye contact sometimes because humans appreciate that. Right. Anyway. Okay. Yeah, but something about, especially when we say mean things in person,

you get to see the pain of the other person. But if you're tweeting it at a person and you've 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, um, I mean, what do you think is more important? EQ or IQ, EQ being emotional intelligence. In terms of, uh, in what makes us human? intelligence in terms of in what makes us human. I think emotional intelligence is what makes us human. It's how we connect with one another. It's how we build trust. It's how we make decisions, right?

Like your emotions drive kind of what you had for breakfast, but also where you decide to live and what you wanna 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 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 leaders in the world tap into, if you have higher EQ, you're more likely to be able to motivate people to change their behaviors. So it can be very powerful. And a more 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. 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 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. Yeah, it's at the core of how our decision-making engine is also heavily influenced by our emotions.

So emotions is part of cognition. It's totally. It's intermixing to the whole thing. Yes, absolutely. And in fact, when you take it away, people are unable to make decisions. They're really paralyzed. Like they can't go about their daily or their, you know, personal or professional lives. So, um, it does seem like there's probably some interesting interweaving of emotion and consciousness. I wonder if it's possible to have, like,

if they're next door neighbor somehow, or if they're actually flatmates. I don't, it feels like the the heart 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, the sweet, the taste, the sweetness that it feels like something to experience that sweetness, that whatever generates emotions. But then like, I feel like emotion is part of communication. It's very much about communication. And then that means it's also deeply connected to language. 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.

The whole thing is really connected. Emotion is connected to language. Language is connected to intelligence, and then intelligence is connected to consciousness and consciousness is connected to emotions. The whole thing is 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 our 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 hours,

like, are they interested? Are they inspired? Are they bored to death? And so we watched their facial expressions. And we had, we weren't sure if people would express any emotions if they were sitting alone. Like, if you're in your bed at night, watching a Netflix TV series, would we still see any emotions on your face? And we were surprised that, yes, people still emotes, even if they're alone, even if you're in your car driving around. You're singing along the 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. 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 one other humans disappear from the picture. We're still kind of a virtual human. The code still runs basically. Yeah, the code still runs. But you also kind of, you're still, there's like virtual humans. You don't have to think of it that way, but there's a kind of, when you like 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 I've picked you up 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 official expression and your internal state. There just isn't. There's this oversimplification of the problem where it's something like, if you are smiling, then you're happy. If you do a brow furrow, then you're angry. If you do an eyebrow race, then you're surprised. And just think about it for a moment, you could be smiling for a whole host of reasons. You could also be happy and not be smiling, right?

You could borrow your art brows because you're angry or you're confused about something or you're constipated. So I think this over simplistic approach to inferring emotion from a facial expression is really dangerous. The solution is to incorporate as many contextual signals as you can. 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? It doesn't, because you know the context, you understand what the person is doing. So I think or add additional channels like voice or gestures or even physiological sensors. Um, but I think it's very dangerous to just take this over simplistic approach of, yeah, smile equals happy. And if you're able to in a high resolution way, specify the context, there's certain things that are going to be somewhat reliable signals of something like drowsiness or happiness or stuff like that.

I mean, when people are watching Netflix, that problem, that's a really compelling idea that you can kind of at least an aggregate. Exactly. Highlight, like which part was boring, which part was exciting? How hard was that problem? That was on the scale of like 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 like a device in front of you, like a laptop, and then we graduated to doing this 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, 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. watching content, literally in their bedrooms at night, lights are dimmed. Yeah, I mean, if you're standing, it's probably gonna be the looking up. The nostril view. Yeah, and nobody looks good at.

I've seen data sets from that perspective. It's like, this is not a good look for anyone. Or if you're laying in bed at night, what is it, side view or something? Right. And you have your faces like on a pillow. Actually, I would love to know, have data about like how people watch stuff in bed at night. Like, did they prop their, is it an pillow?

The, like I'm sure there's a lot of interesting dynamics. Right. From a health and well-being perspective, right? I was thinking, you're not. I was thinking, you're not. I was thinking, you're not. Okay. But also, yeah.

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 wanna tell a small anecdote is, cause it was all male engineers. Except, so my boss is,

our boss was still one of my favorite humans was a woman Regina do you know oh my god I love her she's awesome so but anyway there was a there's one female in Jean Berlin female engineer on the team and she was the one that actually I think the fact that Women often don't have pockets 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 a bed watching a a bed, watching a phone, you have to consider if there, that 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, you're kind of accentuating the bias that exists in society. And yeah, I'm not, you know, I know people it's very important to worry about that, but I, Yeah, I'm not, you know, I know people it's very important to worry about that, but I

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 about for teaching us what the bias is therefore Therefore, we can now improve that bias within the system. So they're almost like putting a mirror to ourselves. So I'm not... We have to be open to looking at the mirror though. We have to be open to scrutinizing the data. And if you just take it as ground-tracking... 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 so you realize, holy crap, this thing is kind of racist. Right. Like, why is that? And then you look at the day is 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 and bed or elsewhere and seeing which parts are exciting, which parts are boring. You're saying that's relatively constrained because you have a captive audience and you kind of know the context. One thing you said that was really key is the aggregate. You're doing this in aggregate, right? 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 it's important to, you know, call it for what it is. just laughing at content. So it's important to call it for what it is. But still really, really useful data. I wonder how that compares to, so what like YouTube

and other places we'll use is obviously they don't have, for the most case, they don't have that kind of data. They have the data for when people tune out, like to listen to drop off. And I think that's an inaggregate 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 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. But yeah, I think there's value to silence. There's value to the boring bits. I mean, all some of the greatest movies ever, some of the greatest stories

I've ever told me, they have that 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 is 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 move them, what change 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 go, you know, and then 30 days later interview people and say, Hey, what do you remember? You've watched this 30 days ago, like, what stuck with you? And then see if there's any, there ought to be maybe, there ought to be some correlation between these emotional experiences.

And yeah, what you, 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 a third of days from now. Yeah, that would be great. It will be statistically significantly. I know it's that I don't want, but you know, yeah.

Yeah, I think that's really fascinating. I think that's that kind of holds the key to to 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 become a better person. Because of, 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. And 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 that kids remember the weirdest things. I've seen parents do incredible stuff for their kids and they don't remember any of that. They remember some tiny, small, sweet thing a parent did. Right. Like some. I took you to like this amazing country. Yeah, exactly.

Whatever. And then they'll be like some like stuff toy you got or some or the new PlayStation or something or some some silly little thing. So I think they just like that they were designed that way that you want to mess with your head. But definitely kids are very impacted by it seems like sort of negative events. So minimizing the number of negative events is important but not too much right? You can't just like you know you're still disciplined and challenged and all those kinds of things so like, you know, you're still disciplined and challenged and all those kinds of things. So, yeah, I mean, I'm definitely what I have kids. I'm going to drive them all into the woods. Okay. And then they have to survive and make, figure out how to make the way back home like 20

miles out. Okay. Yeah. And after that, we can go for ice cream. Okay. Anyway, I'm working on this whole parenting thing. I haven't figured out. Okay.

What were we talking about? Yes, effective at 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, Felman, Barrett, that challenged 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 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 almost said that's before deep learning. That was before deep learning. Yeah. Yeah. I know. That's my day. Now you can just like use it. Yeah, it's all the same architecture you can apply to anything.

Right. Right. But yeah, but even then, I kind of, I did not subscribe to this theory of basic emotions where it's just the simplistic mapping, one-to-one mapping between facial expressions and motions. I actually think also we're not 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 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 in the human face. That's a projection of emotion. There's that there, at least in part, is the interstate 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 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 but all. In all the years of leading F.E.K.T.E.VA,

an emotion recognition company like we talked about, what have you learned about emotion, about humans, and about AI? Ooh. Be a big sweeping question. Yeah, that's a big sweeping question. Well, I think the thing I learned the most is that even though 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 built and cultivated at the company and the culture we've created. Some of the people who've joined Affectiva, this was their first job. While at Affectiva, they became American citizens. They bought their first house and they found their partner and they had their first kid, right? Like key moments in life that we got to be part of. And that's the thing I'm most proud of.

So that's that's a great thing at a company that works at the most right at right. Me like celebrating humanity in general, broadly speaking. Yes. And that's a great thing to have in a company that works on AI because that's not often the thing that's celebrated in AI company, so often just raw, great engineering, 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 to you about, because it's not effective, is and was not just about emotions, all that I'd love to talk to you about, because it's not effective, it is and was not just about emotions. 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 deeper meaningful connections with computers? Is that a compelling thing to you?

I think that's already happening. The thing I love them, I love the movie heard 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. And 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 that's a that you think that's a bug or feature Well, I think what went wrong is theodore became really attached to Samantha like I think he kind of fell in love with that's Do you think that's wrong? I Mean I think that I think she was putting out the signal This is an intimate relationship, right? There's a deep intimacy to it. Right, but what does that mean? What does that mean? With an AI system.

Right, what does that mean? Right? And that's just friends. Yeah, we're just friends. So some of the friends. Well, I think when he realized, which is such a human thing of jealousy, when you realize that Samantha was talking to like thousands of people. She's parallel dating. Yeah, that did not go well. Right.

You know, that doesn't, and from a computer perspective, like that doesn't take anything away from what we have. It's like you're getting jealous of Windows 98 for being used by millions of people. But it's like not liking the Alexa. Yeah, right. Lots of, you know, other families. 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 the AI system that would have to respect and play the human game of of jealousy, of love, of heartbreak and all that kind of stuff. Which the matter does seem to be pretty good at.

Mm-hmm. I think she, this AI system knows what it's doing. Well, actually, let me ask you this. I don't think she's talking to anyone else. You don't think so. You think she was just done with the ador. Yeah. She knew that the yeah, and then she wanted to really

just move on. She didn't have the guts to just break it off. Clearly, okay. She's she's more to put in. No, I don't know. Well, she could have ghosted him. If you could have. Right.

I'm sorry. There's our engineers. No, I don't know. Well, she could have ghosted him. She could have. 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. Like I hated it for competing. I said, you know, I need a break right now. I 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 fascinating, because I've always taken the human perspective, right? Like, for example, we had a G-boat at home, right? And my son loved it. And then the company ran out of money, and so they had to basically shut down G-boat, 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 a far Alexa stopped working tomorrow, I don't think he'd really care. But when G-bo stopped working, it was traumatic. Like he got really upset. And as a parent that like made me think about this deeply, did I 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. I think there's a broader question here. 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 gonna be programmed to be amazing at empathy by definition, right? It's gonna always be there for you. It's not gonna get bored. In fact, there's a chatbot in China, a Shao ice. It's the number two or three most popular app, and it basically is just a confidant, and you can tell it anything you want.

People use it for all sorts of things. They can fight in domestic violence or societal 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 think it's really full control and transparency of the data on those things. Plus one totally agree. Yeah, so like 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 data, it's an opt-in or at least a 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, 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. That great. You're the deputy CEO of Smart Eye. Can you describe the mission of the company? What is Smart Eye? Yeah. Smart Eye is a Swedish company. They've been in business for the last

20 years and 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 Crants. Gosh, it was right when COVID hit. It was actually the last CEO 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 an automotive space. Exactly. It was one of the areas we had just raised around a funding to focus on bringing our technology to the automotive industry. So we met, and honestly, 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 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. 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 see. We're also drawsiness stuff.

Correct. It does stuff from the face in 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 and 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 some regions of the world smoking. We can detect if a baby's in the car seat, right?

And if unfortunately in some cases they're forgotten, the parents just leave the car and forget the kid in the car. That's an easy computer vision problem to solve, right? You can detect there's a car seat, there's a baby, you can text the parent, and hopefully again save lives. So that was the impetus for the acquisition. It's been a year. So that, I mean, there's a lot of, a lot of questions, really exciting space, especially to me, I just find a fascinating problem. It could enrich the experience in the car in so many ways, especially because like we spend still, despite COVID, I mean COVID change things, so it's in interesting ways, but I think the world is bouncing COVID change things, so it's in interesting ways, but I think the world is bouncing back

and we spend so much time in the car and the car is such a weird little world we'll have for ourselves. People do all kinds of different stuff. Like listen to podcasts, they think about stuff, they can angry, they get, they do phone calls. There's like a little world of its own with the 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, on a practical sense, the 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. So it's

and anyone who's focused on costs, it's like, all right, do you hate fun? Let's just have some fun. Let's figure out the most fun thing we can do 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 on this. You have to really, really make sure that everything you add to the car makes sense financially. So anyways, 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 somewhere between five to seven years, which is awesome. And 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 the cultural change. I mean, I'm sure you've experienced that right. Oh, definitely. I think one of the biggest inventions or imperatives created by Tesla is, 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 gonna complain about this, but I know electric vehicle, I know autopilot, AI stuff. To me, the software, over there, software updates

is like the biggest revolution in cars. And it is extremely difficult to switch to that because it is a culture shift. It at first, especially if you're not comfortable with it, it seems dangerous. Like there's an approach to cars. It's so safety focused for so many decades that like, what do you mean? We dynamically change code? The whole point is you have a thing that you test like, right? The year does.

And like, it's not reliable because you know how much you cause. 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 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, human being, with this particular aspect, the software, the artificial neural network of it.

But it's tough to do. It's really tough to do. Culturally and technically, 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 exactly 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 or in car in car stuff. So, but yeah, that that that's definitely one of the use cases we're looking into is once you know the sentiment of the passengers and the vehicle, you can optimize the temperature in the car, you can change the lighting, right? So if the back seat passengers are falling

asleep, you can do 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 the two-year delay, but it's tougher. Yeah. 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 NCAB experience for cars that are mailing driven, but the ones that are increasingly more autonomously driven. Yes, 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. Think about 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's

moving way too slow. That's engaged Lex. Or Ron is freaking out because she doesn't trust this vehicle yet. So let's tell Ron, like a little bit more information about the route. Or so I think, or somebody's having a heart attack in the car. You need interior sensing and fully autonomous vehicles. But with semi-autonomous vehicles, I think or somebody's having a heart attack in the car like you need interior sensing and fully autonomous vehicles. But with semi-autonomous vehicles, I think it's I think it's really key to have driver monitoring because semi-autonomous means that sometimes the car is in charge,

sometimes the drivers 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 the car needs to know of 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 to deal on 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. It 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 like let the thing do its thing. But they're able to, you know, because it is life and death. Right. And they're able to manage that somehow. But that said, there's no reason not to have a 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 environments. 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. 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's doing anything sophisticated inside the cab. I don't even know if Waymo is doing anything sophisticated inside the cab. I don't think so. What is it? I honestly think, I honestly think. It goes back to the robotics thing we were talking about,

which is great engineers that are building these AI systems just are afraid of the human being. I'm not thinking about the human experience. They're thinking about the features and, yeah, the perceptual abilities of that thing. They think the best way I can serve the human is by doing the best perception and control I can, by looking at the external volume

and keeping the human safe. But like, there's a huge, I'm here. Right. Like, you know, I need to be noticed and interacted with and understood and all those kinds of things, even just in a personal level for entertainment. Honestly, for entertainment. Yeah. You know, one of the coolest work we did in collaboration with MIT around this was we looked at longitudinal data right off dry because you know I might have access to like tons of data and and like just seeing the patterns of

people like driving in the morning versus off-to-work versus like commuting back from work or weekend driving versus weekday driving and it wouldn't be so cool if your car knew that and then was able to optimize Either the route or the experience or even make recommendations. Yeah, I think it's very powerful Yeah, like why are you taking this route? You've always unhappy when you take this route and you're always happy when you take this alternative route Take that route is that exactly that I mean that if to have that even that little step A relationship with a car I think is is incredible. Of course you have to get the privacy right you get all that kind of stuff right But I wish I honestly, you know people are like paranoid about this, but I would like a smart refrigerator

We have a such a deep connection with food as a human civilization I would like to have a with food as a human civilization. I would like to have a refrigerator that would understand me that, you know, I also have a complex relationship with food because like, you know, pay God too easily and all that kind of stuff. So you try, you know, like maybe I want the refrigerator to be like, are you sure about this? Because maybe you're just feeling down or tired., maybe, maybe the smartest refrigerators way kinder than mine. Is it just me and yelling at you? No, it was just because I don't, I don't, you know, I don't drink alcohol, I don't smoke,

but I eat a ton of chocolate like it's just my face. And so I, and sometimes I scream too. And I'm like, okay, my smart refrigerator will just lock down. I'll just say, dude, you've had way too many today like that. Yeah, no, but here's the thing, are you, do you regret having like, let's say not the next day, but 30 days later, what would you, what would you like to to refer to to have done then? Well, I think actually, like, the more positive relationship would be one where there's a conversation, right, as opposed to like, 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 it's not a good idea but just listen things have changed I can just imagine a bunch of stuff being made up just to convince I was telling you but I mean I just think that there's opportunities that I mean maybe not locking down but for our systems that are such a deep part of our lives like we use systems that are such a deep part of our lives. We use a lot of people that commute using their carves in the 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, but your patterns of what makes you happy and not happy and all that kind of stuff. And the car obviously, maybe, maybe,

maybe we'll say, well, instead of this like, Ben and Terry's ice cream, how about this Homo sin carrots or something? I don't know. Maybe you wouldn't make it like a reminder. Just the time recommendation, 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 were happier than next day, right?

Yeah, you were happier than next day. You're gonna have to be the next day, right? Yeah, you're happier the next day. And, but yeah, I don't, but then again, if you're the kind of person that gets better from negative comments, you could say like, hey, remember, like that wedding you're going to, you wanna fit into that dress. Remember about that?

Let's think about that for your eating this. No, I don't know. It's for some probably that would work for me. Like a refrigerator that is just ruthless. It's shaming me. But like I would, of course, welcome it. Like that would work for me. Just that that. Well, I would know. I think it would, if it's really like smart, it would optimize its nudging based on what works for you, right? Exactly. That's a whole point. Personalization in every way, deep personalization.

You were a 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 are on 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's gonna be a combination of different sensors. How hard 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. 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 for this research project, we partnered with the transportation authorities of Sweden. And we literally had a racetrack with a safety driver. And we basically progressively got people drunk. Nice.

So, but, you know, that's a very expensive dataset to collect. And you want to collect it globally and in multiple conditions. Yeah, the ethics of collecting a dataset where people are drunk is tricky. Yeah, definitely. Which is funny because, I mean, let's put drunk driving aside, the number of drunk people in the world every day is very large. It'd be nice to have a large data set of drunk people getting progressively drunk. In fact, you can build an app where people can donate their data because it's hilarious.

Right. Actually, yeah, but the liability, the ethics, the how do you get it? 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, 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, that. Oh, you don't know Andrew Huberman Okay, listen you listen to Andrew. He's called Huberman Lab podcast. This is your assignment. Just listen to one 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, 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 great. He's a legit scientist, like, really well-published, but in his podcast, what he does, he's not talking about his own work. He's like a human encyclopedia of papers. So his whole thing is he takes the topic and in a very fast, he mentioned a Tom and Cabas, 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 a bunch of stuff like. I'm totally gonna.

You're gonna and you're gonna be like Lexus is this is my new favorite person I guarantee you. And if you guys somehow don't know Andrew Hugherman and you care about your well-being, you know, you should definitely listen to him. don't know, Andrew Hewerman and you care about your well-being, you know, you should definitely listen to him. I love you, Andrew. Anyway, so, what were we talking about? Oh, alcohol and detecting alcohol. So this is a problem you care about. Yeah. 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 optimizing, yeah, it can optimize the ride based on what your goals are. So I think we're going to start to see more of that. I'm excited about that. Yeah, what are the challenges you're tackling while 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 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 wanted to respond in a thoughtful way that doesn't, that isn't off-putting to the consumer in the car. So I think that's, like, the user experience. I don't think we've really nailed that.

And we usually, that's not part, we're the sensing platform, but we usually collaborate with the car manufacturer to decide what the use case is. So, so say you do, you figure out that somebody's angry while driving. Okay, what should the car do? You know? Do you see yourself as a role of nudging of like basically coming up a solution essentially that and then the car manufacturers 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 going to shut down, right? Like there's a whole range of actions the car can take. And doing the thing that is most, yeah, the 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 what people get cars still.

I hope that changes, but they get it because it's a certain feel and look and 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 or whatever. They stick to that thing. It's interesting. 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, 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 a Tesla did, but for boats, for recreational boats. Yeah, they're so they're

building an electric and kind of slash autonomous. Bodens 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? It's 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 boat. It's the 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 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 boat. I guess going out to 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 the water. I love both. I love salt water. It was like the big and just it's humbling to be in front of this giant thing That's so powerful that was here before us and be here after but also love the piece of a small like wooded lake just everything's calm You tweeted that I'm excited about Amazon's acquisition of Iroba. I think it's a super interesting.

Just given the trajectory of which you're part of, of these, honestly, small number of companies that are playing in the space that are like trying to have an impact on human beings. So it is an interesting moment in time that Amazon will acquire a robot You tweet I imagine a future where home robots are as ubiquitous as microwaves or toasters Here are three reasons why I think this is exciting if you remember I can look it up But what why is this exciting to you? I? Mean, I think the first reason why this is exciting, I kind of remember the exact like order in which I put them. But one is just it's it's going to be an incredible platform for understanding our behaviors within the home, right? Like, you know, if you think about

Roomba, which is, you know, 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 Rumba team, and he talked about how people named their Rumba's.

And if their Rumba broke down, they would call in and say, you know, my Rumba 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 think it's a good idea to

get a good job. So, I think it's a good idea to get a good job. So, I think it's a good idea to get a good job. So, I think it's a good idea to get a good job. So, I think it's a good idea to

get a good job. So, I think 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 has to think about this, but I'm pretty sure now or for some time already has had cameras because they're doing the most recent Roomba. I have so many Roomb but oh you actually do.

Well, I program that I don't use a room or for back off. People that've been to my place, they're like, yeah, you definitely don't use these room, but, uh, good, good. That could be a good, I can't tell like the valence of this comment. It was a compliment or like, no, it's a giant, it's just a bunch of electronic stuff. Where there's, uh have six or something computers, I have robots everywhere,

Lego robots, a small robots and bigger robots. It's just giant, just piles of robots stuff. And yeah, but including the Roombas, they're being used for their body and intelligence, but not for their purpose. I have changed them with the repurposed them for other purposes, for deeper, more meaningful purposes than just like the bought a robot. Yeah, which is, you know, 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 in the new Rumba,

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 not 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 that 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 to your life where you just took it in and then the company over time is showing that it takes privacy very seriously, that kind of stuff. But I just Amazon is not always in its social robots communicated. This is a trustworthy thing, both in terms of culture and competence. They 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 Alexa's at home. And I mean, Alexa could be listening in the whole time, right? And doing all sorts of nefarious things with the data.

You know, it's not, but I don't think it is. But, you know, Amazon is not, it's such a tricky thing for a company to get right, which is like to earn the trust. I don't think Alexa's earned people's trust quite yet. Yeah, I think it's, it's not there quite yet. I agree. And they struggle with this kind of stuff. In fact, when these topics are brought up,

people always get nervous. And I think if you get nervous about it, I mean, the way to earn people's trust is not by like, oh, don't talk about this. It's just be open, be frank, be transparent, and also create a culture of where it radiates at every level from engineer to CEO that like 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, Tesla bought the humanoid robot? Yes, I have, yes, yes, yes, but I don't exactly know what it's designed to do. Do 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 tasks 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 a human beings, anything legate mostly, 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 soft banks, human art robot. How tall is Pepper? I don't know, like five foot maybe, right? Yeah, pretty, pretty big, pretty big. And it was designed to be at like airport lounges and you know 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, yeah, social robotics for the home, right? Like that can help elderly people, for example,

transport things from one location of the home to the other, or even like just have your back in case something happens. Yeah, I don't know. I do think it's a very interesting space. It seems early though. Do you feel like the timing is now? I, yes, 100%. Uh, so it always seems early until it's not right.

Right. Right. 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 think 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 mobility by pedo mobility. So I think you could do that with just a screen, honestly, but there's something about the interface of GBO, 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 G-Bone, even I mean, the I-Robot in some sense is a big success story that it was able to find 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 there a 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 $800, like $700, $800. Which for the use case, right? like $700, $800, which for the use case, right? There's a dissonance there, it's too high. So I think cost of building the whole platform in a way that is affordable for what value it's bringing. I think that's the challenge. I think for these home robots that are going to help you do stuff around the home, that's a challenge too, like the mobility piece of it. That's hard.

One of the things I'm really excited with Teslabot is the people working on it. That's probably the criticism I would apply to some of the other folks who worked on social robots. the people working on Tesla about 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. The fewest number of actuators,

the furious numbers of motors, the increasing efficiency, they decrease the weight, all that kind of stuff. That's really interesting. I would say that G-bone, all those folks, they focus on the design, the experience, all of that. And it's secondary, how to manufacture. Right. No, you have to think like the Tesla bought folks from first principles, what is the

fewest number of components, the cheapest components, how can I build it as much in house as possible without having to consider all the complexity of a supply chain, all that kind of stuff. It's interesting. Because if you have to build a robot, it's a 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 G-Botepa robot, is there a reason why G-Bot, like

we're going to have this lengthy discussion? Is there a reason why G-Bot has to be have this lengthy discussion. There's a reason why G-BO has to be over $100. It shouldn't be. Right. The basic components of it. Components of it, right? You can start to actually discuss like, okay, what is the essential thing about G-BO? 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, humongous, like, super elegant, super beautiful thing. What did, 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... You can solve for some other person. Pick a person. Exactly. It could be you.

That's actually often a good sign that if you enjoy a thing, enjoy a thing where you have a specific problem that you like to solve, that's a good end of one to focus on. What else is there to actually? Step one is the hardest, but how do hardest but there's other steps as well. I also think like who you bring around the table early on is so key. Being clear on what I call like your core values or your North Star might sound fluffy but actually it's not. So, and Raus and I feel like we did that very early on. We sat around her kitchen table and we said, okay, there's so many applications of this technology. How are we going to draw the line? How are we going to set boundaries?

We came up with a set of core values that in the hardest of times we fell back on to determine how we make decisions. And so I feel like just getting clarity on these core. Like for us, it was respecting people's privacy, only engaging with industries where it's clear opt-ins. 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, I just start up, you want people who share the passion and the conviction, because it's gonna be tough. I have yet to meet a startup

where it was just a straight line to success. Even not to start up, like even everyday people's lives, right? Even not to start up. Like, every day people's lives, right? You always like run into obstacles and you run into naysayers and 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 give up at the first obstacle. Yeah. 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 advice would you give there? You successfully raised 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. Like, for example, especially later on, like I, believe in your core values. Like, for example, especially later on, like I, yeah, in my latest, like, round of funding, I try to bring in investors that really care about

like the ethics of AI, right? And they 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 gonna have to stick with you. You're stuck together.

For a while, anyway. Yeah. Oh, sure. Maybe not for life, but for a while, for sure. For better awards, I forget what the Vals usually sound like. For better awards? No. It was sick. It's through something. Yeah.

Yeah. 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 tweet about going to your first capital camp investing, get together. Yeah. And then you learned a lot.

So this is about investing. So what have you learned a lot. So this is about investing. So what have you learned from that? What have you learned about investing in general? From both, because you've been on both ends of it. I mean, I try to use my experience as an operator now with my investor hat on when I'm identifying companies to invest in. First of all, I think the good news is because I have a technology background, right?

And I really understand, you know, machine learning, computer vision, and AI, et cetera. I can apply that level of understanding, right? Because everybody says they're an AI company or they're an AI tech. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Show me the technology. So I can do that level of diligence, which I actually love. And then 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, right? 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.

No, but sometimes it's funny, but sometimes it's unclear exactly. I'll hear people tell me, you know, I'm gonna 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 yeah, that then you can or can't get excited about, but it's there, it's there, right there, yeah. Yeah, what, but how do you ultimately pick who you think will be success? So it's not just about the thing you're excited about. Like there's other stuff. Right, and then there's all the,

you know, 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's successful,

will this be a multi-billion slash trillion dollar market? Or company? And so that's definitely a lens that I use. What's pre-seed? What are the different stages? What's the most exciting stage? And what's interesting about exciting stage and what's interesting about every stage? Yeah, so pre-seed is usually when you're just starting out, you've maybe raised the friends and family around, 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 the stage. There's a lot of uncertainty. 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 like a magical stage, because it's the time when there's so much conviction, so much belief, almost delusional, right? And there's a little bit of naivete around with founders at this stage, and I just love it. It's contagious.

And I love that I can, often they're first time founders, not always, but often they're first time founders, and I can share my experiences as a founder myself, and I can often their first time founders, not always, but often their first time founders and I can share my experiences of founder myself and I can empathize, right? And I can almost, I create a safe ground where, because you have to be careful when you tell your investors, right? And I will often like say,

I've been in your shoes as a founder, you can tell me if it's challenging, you can tell me what you're struggling with. It's okay to vent. So I create that safe ground. And I think that's the superpower. Yeah, you have to, what I guess, you have to figure out if this kind of person is gonna able to ride the rollercoaster,

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 it's successful for. 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 is going to be a great leader, right? Like as a startup as a founder, you're often, you are the first person. And your role is to bring amazing people around you to build this thing. And so you're in an evangelist, right? So how good are you going to be at that? So I try to evaluate that too.

You 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. What's, is this a technical term? Is this known random rich dudes?

Well, 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 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 fund partner is a guy called Rob May, who's done this before. So I'm new to the investing world, but he's done this before. Most of our investors in the fund are these, I mean, awesome. I'm super grateful to them.

Random just rich guys. I'm like, where are the rich women? So I'm really adamant in both investing in women-led AI companies, but I also would love to have women investors be part of my fund because I think that's how we drive change. Yeah, so the neck, you know, that takes time, of course, but there's been quite a lot of progress, but yeah, for the next Mark Zuckerberg to be a woman and all that kind of stuff, because that's just like a huge number of wealth generated by women and then controlled by women,

then 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. Let me ask you to put on your wise sage hat. Okay. So we already gave advice on startups and just advice for women, but in general advice for folks in high school or college today, how to have a career that can be proud of how to have a life that can be proud of. I suppose you have to give this kind of advice to your kids. Well, here's the number one advice that I give to my kids. My daughter's now 19, by the way, and my son's 13 and a half. So they're not little kids anymore. But I think it does. They're awesome. They're my best friends. But yeah, I think

the number one advice I would share is embark on a journey without attaching to outcomes. Enjoy the journey, right? So, you know, we often were so obsessed with the end goal, a, that doesn't allow us to be open to different endings of a journey or a story. So you become like so fixated on a particular path. You don't see the beauty in the other alternative path. And then you forget to enjoy the journey because you're just so excited on the goal.

And I've been guilty of that for many, many years in my life. And I've now, I'm now trying to like make the shift of, no, no, no, I'm gonna again trust that things are gonna work out and it'll be amazing and maybe even exceed your dreams. We have to be open to that. Yeah, taking a leap into all kinds of things. I think it's we to like you one application by yourself or something like this or I know this and just just just just going just taking the leap doing it. And enjoying enjoying the enjoying the moment, enjoying the weeks, enjoying not looking at at some kind of career ladder and next step

and so on. Yeah, there's something to that, like overplanning too. I'm surrounded by a lot of people that kind of, so I don't plan. You don't. No. You do not do goal setting? My goal setting is very like, I like the affirmations, it's very, it's almost, I don't know how to put it into words, but 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 an irrational space. Because I just tried to picture a world that I would like to be in. And that world is not clearly pictured. It's mostly in the emotional world. I mean, I think about that from robots because, you know, I have this desire. I've had it my whole life to, well, it 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 there's a lot of complexity to that story but that's the only thing honestly I dream of doing so I imagine a world 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 the right directions. But a lot of people, a lot of success will be around me and say, 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. Okay. Something like that. Yes. Super inspiring talk. Kind of Stanley. He was at Open AI. 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 trade-off 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 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,, you know, the sprints and then the quarterly goals. Bumbleble, and and he just shows with a lot of his AI experiments that that's not how you create truly game-changing ideas. So there you go. Yeah, yeah. He's awesome. Yeah, there's 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, it's good to have goals. I do goal setting with my kids. We all have our goals. But I think we're starting to morph into more of these bigger picture goals and not obsess about, I don't know, it's hard. I honestly think with kids, it's much better to have a plan and have goals and so on,

because you have to learn the muscle of what it feels like to get stuff done. 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 in school. I mean, school, if you want to be successful at school, you have, I mean, the kind of stuff in high school and college the kids have to do in terms of managing their time and getting so much stuff done. It's like, you know, taking five, six, seven classes in college, they're like, that would break the, the spirit of most humans if they took one of them later in life. Let's say really difficult stuff,

especially 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 kinda, 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. Because a lot of people get lost in the right race, and they, and they also also like financially, they, whenever you get a raise, they'll get like a bigger house. Right, right, right. So I put it very, so like, you're always trapped in this race. I put a lot of emphasis on living like below my means always.

And so there's a lot of freedom to do whatever Whatever the hard desires that yeah, that's a really but everyone has to decide what's the right thing What's the right thing for them for some people having a lot of responsibilities? Like a house they can barely afford or having a lot of kids the responsibility side of that Is really helps them get their shit together. Like, I need to be really focused and get 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.

Right. Accountability and accountability thing. And almost something to actually live and fight and work for, like having a family. Yeah. 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.

Fish and sea omegas. 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 it's why we're all here. I think it would be very hard to live life without love in any of its forms, right? Yeah, that's the most beautiful of forms that human connection takes, right? Yeah, I feel like everybody wants to feel loved, right? And 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 sure what feels better. Both, both like that. Given to give love to. Yeah. And it is like we've been talking about an interesting question, whether some of that, whether one day will be able to love a toaster. Okay, some small. I wasn't quite thinking about that when I speak like love. That's all I was thinking about. I was thinking about Brad Pitt and coasters. Okay, coasters, great.

All right, well, I think we started on love and ended on love. This was an incredible conversation, Ron. And 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 Rhana Elkayubi. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Helen Keller. The best, the most beautiful things in the world, cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. you