The Tim Ferriss Show - #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World

Starting point is 00:00:00 optimal minimal at this altitude i can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking can i answer your personal question now what is your appropriate time i'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton this episode is brought to you by ag1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven

Starting point is 00:00:45 formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday,

Starting point is 00:01:33 I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time. Because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free. It's always going to be free. And you can learn more at Tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's Tim.blog forward slash Friday.

Starting point is 00:02:11 I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very

Starting point is 00:02:40 limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. And welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where my dog is yawning and it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of various types from military to entertainment, to academia, to sports, chess, everything in between and tease out the routines, habits, favorite books, et cetera, that you can use.

Starting point is 00:03:26 In this episode, we have Luis Von Ahn, V-O-N-A-H-N, who is an entrepreneur and computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is known for inventing CAPTCHAs, and we'll get into that, being a MacArthur Fellow, which is often nicknamed the Genius Grant, and selling two companies to Google in his twenties. Luis has been named one of the 10 most brilliant scientists by popular science magazine. One of the 50 best brains in science by discover one of the top young innovators under 35 by the MIT technology review. And one of the 100 most innovative people in business by fast company Magazine. He has many things, many interests that keep him busy, but the primary is Duolingo. Luis is currently the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo,

Starting point is 00:04:12 a language learning platform created to bring free language learning to the world. They have more than 100 million users, including yours truly, and that makes it the most popular way to learn languages in the world. And it is the most downloaded app in the education category on both iTunes, where it has a five-star average and more than 3,300 reviews, and Google Play. I first met Luis as an early investor in Duolingo. I tracked them down, which was very hard. I tracked Luis and his co-founder Severin down after you guys, my fans, actually told me I had to see it. It was in beta at the time. And via Twitter and Facebook, you guys informed me. I reached out to them. That's how that came together. And every time I meet Luis, I learn something new. And certainly, I hope you

Starting point is 00:04:55 will learn a lot in this episode. We talk about his favorite books and resources he'd recommend to entrepreneurs, language learning tips, the very clever way he caught cheating students at Carnegie Mellon, which is a great story, early mentors and key lessons tips, the very clever way he caught cheating students at Carnegie Mellon, which is a great story, early mentors and key lessons learned, the story of building and selling companies like Recaptcha, how to recruit and vet technical talent, the most surprising sources of users for Duolingo, and it goes on and on. So we talk about quite a lot. Please say hello to Luis on Twitter at Luis Von Ahn. L-U-I-S-V-O-N-A-H-N. Say hi on the interwebs and please enjoy my conversation with Luis. Luis, welcome to the show.

Starting point is 00:05:39 Thanks for having me, Tim. And I thought we could start where a lot of people start in the morning, which is breakfast. You mentioned this briefly when we were doing a soundcheck. What did you have for breakfast this morning? I had a Greek yogurt. And you added some context. Is that that you've had the same thing for breakfast for the last year? Possibly two or three years.

Starting point is 00:06:01 It's the identical Greek yogurt. It's the Faye Greek yogurt, the one that you have to combine the fruit, but the spoon never fits in there. That's the one. And do you have meals that you repeat for lunch and dinner? Have you standardized your daily routine in other ways besides breakfast? Not that well. Breakfast is pretty standardized.

Starting point is 00:06:32 My lunch is pretty different every day. We get free lunch at Duolingo and I eat that. Got it. Now, standardized, the word makes me think of testing. And when I think of testing, I actually got pinged by a former student of yours. And the student said, ask him to explain how he catched. How he catched. Boy, here we go. I need to study English. Was it him or was it you? Catched. Yeah, catched.

Starting point is 00:06:55 No, I said this, unfortunately. Caught cheaters in one of your classes at Carnegie Mellon. And I was hoping maybe you could explain how that went. Yeah, I did quite a bit. So I used to teach this class. I'm on leave. I'm a professor, but I'm on leave. I used to teach this class called Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science,

Starting point is 00:07:17 which is kind of the hardest class most people have ever taken in their lives. And it's basically discrete math. And it's pretty hard. Now, a lot of people used to cheat. It's a large class. It's about 200 kids. A lot of people used to cheat in different ways. And I started becoming really obsessed with catching people cheating. I didn't even do anything bad to them after I caught them cheating. It was more like a fun game for me. So, for example, one of the things they couldn't do is some of the assignments, I said, it is against the class policy to Google.

Starting point is 00:08:00 Now you can think what you want about that policy. I don't think it's that great of a policy, but that's a policy that I inherited. That class has always basically said you cannot Google for assignment solutions. So one of the things I did was I would, you know, sometimes I would assign homework and I would actually seed the answers to some of the things in websites that were crawled by Google, but that I owned. And I could tell people's IP addresses and everything. I would catch people cheating that way. I basically set up honeypots for people to cheat. And you could say that's entrapment, but that's what I did. Do you recall any examples offhand? Yeah. I mean, well, of the exact websites, I don't know where they are.

Starting point is 00:08:46 Or the terms. I mean... Yeah. I mean, one of them was... There was one that was called Guillermo Cristo's puzzle. It's made up, but I made that word up beforehand. I made sure there was no such thing on Google. And I made a website that had the right solution, but it recorded everybody's IP address. And at CMU, you can figure out, you know, their dorm from their IP address. So I can figure out which person was actually checking. Turns out that time of the 200 students, about 40 Googled for the answer. And that was fun. I used to do all kinds of things like that. And then the students were pretty, they were all usually scared of almost everything being a trick. So I would do that in the first one or two assignments. And then afterwards, they would learn not to cheat.

Starting point is 00:09:39 So the story, the progression I've heard is that you would bring up slides silently. Did you do this? I did do that. A screenshot of whatever it is, the Glorblar problem or whatever, circled. Then a screenshot of the who is for the domain site or the domain that people would go to with your name circled since you own it. Yep. That's when you could see the whole class. You could see their faces change.

Starting point is 00:10:07 It was pretty fun. Now, but you didn't have to actually hunt down each identity, right? I mean, did you offer them a choice? I mean, tell me if this is true. So the story, the lore is that you offered them the option of confessing and take a zero for the homework. Otherwise, they would get reported? Or is it not? Who have you been talking to? That was the case.

Starting point is 00:10:37 That was exactly the case because it took a little bit of effort to go and figure out who was who. So I would say if you just confess, you get a zero on the assignment. And all kinds of people confess. I even had some people confess that didn't even actually do anything. They just said, well, I don't know what the hell I was doing. So I'm just going to throw my name in there. I'd rather take a zero on the assignment. So if we rewind the clock, so that's as a professor. When did you become, at what age did you become a professor at Carnegie Mellon?

Starting point is 00:11:11 I was probably 25. 25. Yeah. And was it clear that you were going to be involved with computer science from a very young age? Could you describe for people where you grew up a little bit about your childhood? Yeah, sure. I grew up in Guatemala, which is, by the way, that's not where they keep the prisoners. That's Guantanamo. Do you get that a lot? I get that a lot. It's like, is that where they keep the prisoners? No, it's not. It's also not where they invented the avocado sauce. That's guacamole. mole uh different um so the uh yeah i grew up in guatemala uh i i started liking computers at about

Starting point is 00:11:49 age eight my my mom i really wanted a nintendo because everybody wanted nintendo or my friends all had nintendos and and i told my mom but my mom instead got me a commodore 64 computer i remember commodore 64 yeah a little on a spy hunter on commodore 64 yeah So I played a lot of games there. Uh, but at first, when I first got it, I was pretty pissed off because I thought, man, I want a Nintendo. Um, but instead she got me that and she said, well, you figure that out. Uh, and so I, uh, I had to figure out how to use the computer to play games. Um, and then I started trying to figure out, you know, because she only would buy me a couple of games, um, a year and I would get bored of them. I started trying to figure out, you know, because she only would buy me a couple of games a year and I would get bored of them. I started trying to figure out how to get more and more games.

Starting point is 00:12:30 And, you know, the best way to do that was basically to copy them from other people. So I started doing that at a young age. I think the statute of limitations has passed by now, but I was basically pirating games in large scale in Guatemala City is basically what I was doing. And what did you learn in those early days of copying games that helped you later or gave you an indication that you had a proclivity for using computers and computer science? I was pretty good at it. I mean, most of these things had some sort of copy protection. Usually it was like hidden files or something that if you just knew how to list a directory by showing the hidden files, you could see them. So it was not that hard.

Starting point is 00:13:13 But basically I started getting good at using computers. And I was usually the better kid in my class at anything having to do with computers. And I think that's kind of what got me going. When did you leave Guatemala? I was 17. I had just turned 17. I came here for college. I wanted to become a math major. And it turns out in this little country, there was no way to become a math major. And so I left for college. I thought I would return four years later, but then I started liking it here. The whole not being scared of kidnappings,

Starting point is 00:13:46 et cetera, that was pretty nice. The luxuries. The luxuries of life, like electricity reliably, all that stuff was nice. So I kind of stuck around. And what did your parents do? And what was your upbringing like? What were your parents? Yeah, my parents were both doctors, medical doctors. But my mother, she was a doctor, but she only practiced for like six months. After that, she inherited a candy factory from her mother. So my mother owned a candy factory. And that's what she did. And it was pretty awesome because I grew up basically in a candy factory.

Starting point is 00:14:32 So it's like there were, I assume, no Oompa Loompas or any some such Willy Wonka elevators, which would be nice. But like you said, electricity not reliable. No, there was none of that. But there were huge machines that made humongous pieces of candy that had to be cut off. And it was fun. I didn't really like it because I guess I ate way too much of it at first and then I stopped liking it. Uh, but it was really fun to take the machines apart and I guess people didn't like that, but I, it was fun to take the machines apart. So you worked on taking the machines apart. I, I, I, I did not work on putting them back together cause I had no idea how to do that. But you took them apart. I did.

Starting point is 00:15:01 Must've been a real crowd pleaser with the employees. Yeah, yeah. And did your parents do anything in particular in terms of parenting style or interacting with you that you could see doing with your own kids at some point? My mom was great. I mean, she was, she really, you know, one of the things she did was she always told me, you know, I've read this after the fact, but I noticed she did it. She always told me – when you congratulate your kids, you always tell them, oh, you're so smart. She would say that I was smart every now and then, but most of the time she would say something like, oh, you worked hard on that. Right. And she did that a lot, and I guess that's probably why I'm now a workaholic. But yeah, she did that a lot. And I guess that's probably why I'm now a workaholic. But yeah, she did that a lot.

Starting point is 00:15:47 So that, I think I want to say Carol Dweck, I might be getting this researcher's name wrong, wrote a book called Mindset about this. How if kids believe that their intelligence is a fixed trait and they're told, you're so smart, you're so smart, that when they fail, they assume it is an unfixable problem, right? And then when you're told, you worked really hard, congratulations, then you become more resilient and adaptable when facing setbacks and whatnot. What did your path look like through college and then immediately after graduation? Where did you go undergraduate? I went to Duke. I had never been to North Carolina before I showed up. I did not really realize that North Carolina was the South.

Starting point is 00:16:38 It does have North in the name. It does have North in the name. But yeah, the first day I showed up, I went to McDonald's because I had heard a lot. Well, I mean, we have McDonald's in Guatemala, but it was a restaurant I knew. So I went to McDonald's and I could not, I spoke English, but I could not understand the person asking me what I wanted to order. The Southern accent was way too thick for me. But I was at Duke. I was there. I studied computer science. I loved it. I loved basketball while I was there for exactly four years. And then the day after I graduated, I stopped liking it. But I loved it while I was there. That's the religion.

Starting point is 00:17:16 Yeah, yeah. Then I went to get a PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon. I went to Carnegie Mellon because of my PhD advisor, who's a guy named Manuel Blum, who is, you know, many people consider him the father of cryptography, you know, like encryption and all that stuff. So he's amazing. So I came to Carnegie Mellon to study computer science. Where is Manuel Blum originally from the U.S.? Or is he from outside of the u.s he was born in venezuela but he lived there for like a year and then he grew up in new york city what did you learn from him are there any lessons in particular or or or principles or takeaways

Starting point is 00:17:59 that you've carried with you or that you can remember from working with him yeah i learned i learned a lot from him i mean he's he's, he's very funny. He's, he's, he's an older man now. I mean, he's, he's in his late 70s. And he's, he always, you know, by when I met him, which was like 15 years ago, I guess I was, he was in his 60s. But he always acted way older than he actually was. He just acted as if he forgot everything. He really acted like he forgot a lot of things. Meaning like an absent-minded doc from Back to the Future type of person? Yeah, but I think it was a bit of an act.

Starting point is 00:18:38 Because at first, the way he treats his PhD students is he meets with them once a week, and they have to, like, explain to him what they're doing. So I had to explain to him what I was working on, which at the time, by the way, what I was working on was this thing that became very popular, which is CAPTCHAs, these distorted characters that you have to type all over the Internet. To prove you're not a robot of some type. Right. It's very annoying. That was the thing I was working on. And I had to explain it to him, but it was very funny because usually I would start explaining something.

Starting point is 00:19:12 And he, you know, in the first sentence he would say, I don't understand what you're saying. And then I would try to find another way of saying it. And, and the whole hour would pass. And I,

Starting point is 00:19:20 I was not, I would, I could not get past the first sentence. And he would say, well, the hour's over. Let's meet next week. And this happened for like, this must've happened for months. And at some point I started thinking, I don't understand why people think this guy's so smart. I mean, he's won, like, for example, you know, there's no such thing as the Nobel

Starting point is 00:19:40 prize in computer science. Cause I guess there was no computers when Nobel was around. So there's a thing called the Turing Award, and he won the Turing Award. So he's like, basically won the Nobel Prize for Computer Science. And I just could not understand how people thought this guy was smart. But it turns out later, now I understand. This is basically just an act. I mean, essentially, I was being unclear about what I was saying. And I did not fully understand what I was trying to explain to him. And he would just, he was just trying to drill deeper and deeper and deeper until I realized every time that I actually, there was something that I didn't have clear in my mind. And that's something that, you know, he just, he really taught me how to think deeply about things.

Starting point is 00:20:22 And I think that's something that I just, I have not forgotten. And when you understand something really, really deeply, you can explain it in a really short way, usually. And that's great. That's part of the

Starting point is 00:20:40 reason, particularly since I'm incompetent when it comes to physics, but I've always had a lot of respect for teachers who can develop a style like that of the late richard feynman right being able to take very perceived as complex concepts in theoretical or applied physics and explaining them using and say an apple and a pencil to a third grader and being able to have them get it, not just get it, but remember it. Yeah, I think that's true understanding. I think when you're able to explain something so simply that almost anybody can understand

Starting point is 00:21:14 it, that means you really understand it. And for anyone who hasn't seen it, it's a little hard to find. I have found it on YouTube before. I'm sure you can find it on some Chinese version of YouTube somewhere. But the joy of finding things out, which was a Nova program, it's not that long, which is an interview of Richard Feynman about his experience with his father, among other things, and how his father taught him to explore the world. Really fascinating. So you mentioned, you mentioned CAPTCHA. Could you walk us through or not walk us through, but what were the milestones for CAPTCHA and what ended up happening to it? Sure. So that was, so the way this whole thing got started, it was about the year 2000. I had just started my PhD at Carnegie Mellon. I was looking for a PhD thesis project. I mean, I had just started and I was looking for something. I really didn't have a research project. And this guy,

Starting point is 00:22:09 a pretty awesome guy, his name is Udi Manber. He was the chief scientist at Yahoo. He now works at Google. But at the time, he was the chief scientist at Yahoo. And Yahoo at the time, in the year 2000, was really the biggest thing in the world. Sure. Udi Manber? Manber. How do you spell this? M-A-N-B-E-R. Got it.

Starting point is 00:22:27 He came to Carnegie Mellon to give a talk about 10 open problems that Yahoo did not really know how to solve. And my guess is this was a recruiting talk. Now that I understand how the world operates, my guess is he was coming to recruit engineers of some sort. But he gave a talk about 10 problems that they didn't really know how to solve. And there were a bunch of different problems there. I went home and I said, well, I'll try to figure out how to solve all of these.

Starting point is 00:22:56 I had no idea how to solve any of them except for one. And I didn't really know how to solve it, but I thought I could probably come up with something for that. And the problem that he had that they didn't know how to solve is that at the time they had a free email service, and I guess they still do, where the problem they were having is that people were writing bots to sign up for millions of email accounts. That's what they were trying to do, or that's what they were doing.

Starting point is 00:23:25 And then the people at Yahoo did not know how to stop this. They were trying all kinds of things and whatever they did, the people who wrote the bots would kind of one-up them. And so I kind of thought about it. I thought about it with my PhD advisor, Manuel, and together we came up with this solution, which is why don't we test whether the thing that's trying to sign up is a human or a computer that's trying to sign up for millions of accounts. And we came up with this idea of a test. And the test is basically just giving some distorted characters and having the entity read it. And it turns out humans can read these pretty well, whereas computers can't read it as well. And that was it.

Starting point is 00:24:08 It took a few months to come up with this idea, then we developed it, and then we showed it to him, to Udi Member, and he had it running on Yahoo two weeks later. Which I also now, in retrospect, realize how big of a problem this must have been

Starting point is 00:24:24 for them. Yes, that's a miracle for that to be implemented. Because it's a miracle for any large company to do anything in two weeks. But he had it running pretty quickly after that. And from then on, every other website started using these. And so that happened. Then by this, this was still a year about 2000. By the year about 2005, I had gone on to work on other things.

Starting point is 00:24:50 But by then, essentially every single website was using it. And at some point, I did a little back of the envelope calculation about how many of these were typed by people around the world. And it turns out the number I came up with was about 200 million. So about 200 million times a day, somebody would type one of these CAPTCHAs. And that's when I started thinking, I wonder if we can do something with this time, because the thing is, each time you type one of these, not only are they annoying, but also they waste about 10 seconds of your time. And if you multiply 10 seconds by 200 million, you get the humanity as a whole is wasting like 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying captchas. So I started thinking, you know, can we do something? I

Starting point is 00:25:33 started feeling bad, first of all, because it's like 500,000 hours and it's kind of my fault. So I started feeling bad and I started thinking, you know, can we do something good with this or useful? And that's when I came up with the idea. It's kind of the second round of CAPTCHA. It's a system called reCAPTCHA, which the idea is that we're, not only are people authenticating themselves as a human as they're typing these, but they're also helping to digitize books. And the way that works is that, okay, so first of all, digitizing books, there's, so Google, for example, is digitizing all the world's books or was digitizing all the world's books, where the idea is you start with a physical book and you scan it. Now, scanning a book, literally what it consists of is sending the book to India and somebody in India taking a digital photograph of every page of the book. That's literally what scanning a book, yes. Now, the problem is that the next step of the process, the computer needs

Starting point is 00:26:26 to be able to decipher all of the words in these pictures of the pages. But computers can't do that very well or not as accurately as humans. So what we do is we take all of the words that the computer cannot recognize in these scans, and we get people to read them for us while they're typing captchas on the internet. So that's the idea of reCAPTCHA. As people are typing these captchas, they're also helping to digitize books. And what, from the conception and development of reCAPTCHA to its, it was the technology was acquired or licensed? What was the ultimate outcome? reCAPTCHA turned into a company.

Starting point is 00:27:02 So it was a company that what we were doing, so we, we, at first, this was a Carnegie Mellon. I was a professor at Carnegie Mellon, and it was, this was research project Carnegie Mellon. But then at some point, we realized that we could digitize a lot of things, you know, in a large scale, because what happened is we, so we launched this ReCAPTCHA service. Pretty quickly, Facebook started using it. So basically, anybody who signed up for Facebook was helping us digitize one word out of something. Who provided the books? Was that... Right. So at first, nobody was providing the books, really. We just had some small amount

Starting point is 00:27:41 of scans that we had gotten from somewhere. But I was giving a talk somewhere and in the audience was the CTO of the New York Times. He said, hey, we have archives of the New York Times. We have 130 years of New York Times archives that we have scanned, but we just cannot finish the digitization process because the scans are not very good. So maybe you can do this for us. And I said, sure. So pretty soon we started digitizing the New York Times and started charging them for doing that. And that was at that point we had to leave the university because we were doing,

Starting point is 00:28:20 apparently you cannot do work for hire inside a nonprofit university. Who knew? And so we formed the company mainly because the New York Times wanted to pay us to digitize their archive. And so they started paying us. They were paying us quite a bit. They were paying us about $50,000 per year of content. For 130 years, that's a lot. For 130 years. Yeah, so that was, we didn't need an invaluable contract.

Starting point is 00:28:49 We didn't need any venture funding or anything. That's how we spun it out into a company. And we were in the middle of that contract and we were going at it. But at some point Google was having the exact same problem with their book digitization process that it, you know, their, the computers were not as accurate, um, as humans. So they kind of approached us and we ended up deciding to sell the company to them. Question on Carnegie Mellon and technology transfer.

Starting point is 00:29:16 So for those people who are not familiar, if you were to go to say a place like MIT or many, many universities, if you develop, and I'm sure this varies in the fine print, but if you are a faculty member or maybe even a student and you develop technology at the university, am I correct in saying that in some cases that is the intellectual property of the university? How did you- That is correct. So how did you navigate that with Carnegie Mellon?

Starting point is 00:29:43 So most universities, what happens is if you are an employee of the university or if you're a student and you are funded somehow through the university. So, for example, PhD students that are funded through grants or something, then the university can, if they choose so, take ownership of your intellectual property. And usually also universities have some sort of licensing agreement in case you want to form a company out of a university. So this is actually what happened with Google. Google was developed inside Stanford. And there's many other companies like that. And usually there's some sort of licensing agreement where if you start a company,

Starting point is 00:30:24 the university now owns a certain fraction of your company. And that varies per university. And exactly the terms of this vary per university. Carnegie Mellon is pretty nice. What's nice about it is that it's really simple. Carnegie Mellon owns 5% of your company, period. Now, if you raise funding, their ownership dilutes. But at the time of company formation, if you're taking technology out of the university, they

Starting point is 00:30:52 own 5% of the company. And that's it. What's nice about that is you don't have to fuss with them. I mean, many others have some sort of negotiation or variable amount depending on milestones or whatever, and you end up having to negotiate all kinds of things. But here, it's just a standard thing. Very simple. Yep. So Carnegie Mellon owned 5% of reCAPTCHA. That's what happened. And looking back at, I want to say URI, but I guess it's URI's presentation and the 10 open

Starting point is 00:31:23 problems and how you recognized it later in retrospect as a recruiting trip, most likely, for engineers. Have you developed a particular approach or what is your approach for recruiting engineers for your startups? Like for instance, in the current day or when you were just putting together the initial team for Duolingo, how do you recruit and vet engineers? Yeah, that was... So the initial team was actually relatively easy at Duolingo. I basically took... Because I was a professor and essentially I was teaching a class that every single student had to take in computer science. So I pretty much knew who the best students were. You got to see all the fresh meat coming in. I knew who the best students were in the whole university.

Starting point is 00:32:11 I mean, I knew that. So it was relatively simple at the beginning. I essentially just emailed my top 10 that I knew, and that was it. And some of them already had jobs, and some of them were very interested, and I hired some of them. But those I didn't even have and I hired some of them. But those I didn't even have to interview because I knew them. I mean, I had taught them and I knew how good they were. Things changed after that.

Starting point is 00:32:34 Now that we have to hire more. Now with Duolingo, we have about 60 people. And, you know, what we do, we go to universities. We recruit from usually kind of East Coast universities. So MIT, Harvard, Princeton, CMU, et cetera. We usually to universities. We recruit from usually kind of East Coast universities, so MIT, Harvard, Princeton, CMU, et cetera. We usually go there. We give a talk. What type of talk? Usually technical but entertaining.

Starting point is 00:33:03 But I think what's most useful is showing that you have really difficult problems. That is what works the best. Because difficult problems attract good people? have really difficult problems. That is what, that is what works the best. So because difficult problems attract good people. Yeah. Difficult problems. They're like, Oh, I'm intelligent. I have to, you know, I'm going to go solve difficult problems. So, you know, you basically pick the hardest problems that your company's working on, uh, and give a talk about how they're so hard and, and your solution and how your solution is so clever, but still could be improved and it could be improved by you if you come work for us. So that's usually the type of the talk that you give. And then we got a bunch of resumes. And then we interview. We're very strict on the

Starting point is 00:33:40 interview. This is something that really matters. We're pretty strict on our interview in terms of making it a high bar for hiring. I think that's something that I've learned over the years, that hiring mistakes are very expensive. So what would be an example of that strictness? What is it? Well, a lot of technology startups follow a very similar routine. I mean, and, you know, Google follows a very similar routine. It's basically so we do two phone screens. So the first thing that we do is we call them. So first of all, we do them on the phone and we do an interview. And it's usually, because it's on the phone, it's not that difficult of a problem, but it's something, you know, some computer science problem that they have to solve. Like something to the effect of like, I give you some, I don't know, I give you some numbers in some way. Can you sort them in some other way by only doing this type of operation or something like that? And you give a problem. I usually, we do it through Google Docs. So they have to write their solution so that we can watch it while they're writing their solution.

Starting point is 00:34:55 Yeah. So we do that. We do two of these phone screens. So if they pass the first one, we do a second one. And then after that, that we bring them on site and then we do, uh, usually four, four different interviews on site where we, you know, some of them, they have to solve some problems on the board and these are problems of the form. I don't know. Um, this is kind of logic type problems that are related to computer science. Um, and, uh, and then, and then afterwards they have to, um, do a pair programming with one of our engineers. So they sit there and actually try to fix a bug, an actual bug that, you know, it's usually the same bug, but an actual bug that has occurred at Duolingo.

Starting point is 00:35:38 They have to fix it. Now, so pair programming, for those who aren't familiar, it's often talked about as a great way to learn how to code or to get employees up to speed. So you have Pivotal Labs and other companies like this that can bring on, say, coders who know one language and get them up to speed in the language you need them to be proficient with in a startup and do so very quickly and help them to build prototypes and so on. But in this case, you're using it to vet someone. So you have one of your engineers sitting at a computer and then you have someone else sitting right next to them. And what are they doing? Well, usually we let the interviewee drive. I mean, they're the ones using the computer. And so our engineer is usually helping them of the form, oh, because they're the ones using the computer. And so our engineer is usually helping them, you know, of the form, oh, you know, because they're navigating our code base.

Starting point is 00:36:29 So our engineer is usually telling them, oh, you know, go to this directory to open that file. That's where that would be. And then they essentially have to track down a bug and solve it, you know, fix it. That's usually what they do. And it is amazing how much you find out from doing that for just 45 minutes. And do you then take people for any additional test drive? For instance, Matt Mullenweg has been on the podcast, one of the lead developers of WordPress and now CEO of Automatic. And when they hire people for Automatic, which is fully distributed, they do text or IM. I guess it would probably be IM interview as opposed to voice. And then they'll audition them for two weeks. And I think the standard rate is

Starting point is 00:37:11 something like $25 an hour, whether it's a CFO or an entry-level customer service person or a coder. And they just, they do it in off hours, you know, at night or on the weekends. But do you audition people after that? Or is that... We don't. That's it. After we do two phone screens and four on-site interviews, we are done. There you go. We've tried the auditioning. At first, we were kind of doing that. But we found that a lot of people would tell us, well, you well, I have an offer from Google. Right, yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:47 I'm not going to put up with this circus. I'm not going to put up with two weeks of crap from you. I'm also in school, especially for fresh grads. I'm also in school, and I have finals coming. And so we found that they just were pretty – they were not that open to that. Got it. I'm saying got it a lot today. I guess that's my catchphrase.

Starting point is 00:38:07 It's like my Buzz Lightyear to infinity and beyond for this conversation. But it's got it. I also never realized that Tim Allen did that voice for those people who are wondering who Buzz Lightyear's voice is actually attributed to in real life. But I digress. I wanted to ask you if you were advising, say, a very bright young would-be entrepreneur who is going to be starting their first tech company. It could be any type of company. But if you could just give them two or three books or resources to help increase the likelihood of them succeeding? What would you point them to? Let's see. So I like Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. Zero to One, yeah. I love that. One that I've recently started really liking, I guess I like it because it's it's kind of it makes me feel good

Starting point is 00:39:05 because they have very similar problems that i've had um it's the the startup podcast yeah yeah yeah the giblet media guys yeah i i love it uh because they you know it's a lot of times it's just like yep we had that exact same problem and i love the fact that you guys completely fumbled it. And so did we. And now I feel better about myself. And so I think it, at the very least, makes you feel good about yourself. So zero to one, the Startup Podcast, which everybody can find on iTunes or in a podcast player. I like Overcast quite a lot for listening. What else might you point them to? I like this one, but it's not for very new entrepreneurs. I found it very useful. I actually, well, I didn't really read it. I don't read books. I just listen to them.

Starting point is 00:39:56 Reading, I don't know, for some reason, I just stopped reading like 10 years ago. But I quote unquote read twice,, twice, uh, the hard thing about hard things. Uh, right. That's, uh, yeah, the first time I found it not very useful because it just was stuff that was just not, it was not applicable to me because, uh, you know, I, I was not at the time running a company really. And, and I had never really run a company. Recapture only reached nine people.

Starting point is 00:40:29 So that was it. And whereas he talks about problems of companies with hundreds of people. But now I recently read it again in the last month or so, and it is amazing how much good advice there is in there. For somebody that is running a company of around, in our case, 60 employees, it is amazing. I loved it. So what would the profile be of the entrepreneur for whom that book would be appropriate or most useful, do you think? I think somebody that is running a company that has already, you know, more than like 30 people is my guess. Um,

Starting point is 00:41:10 that's my sense. Yeah. The hard thing about hard things has been recommended to me, maybe not within this podcast, but certainly offline by at least four or five of the best, uh, tech entrepreneurs who've been on this podcast. It's come up repeatedly. I mean, but these are people who are also running

Starting point is 00:41:29 as by definition, larger organizations. The Zero to One book by Peter Thiel is fantastic. And I would also encourage people who are interested in digging even deeper to try to track down the Blake master's transcriptions or notes from the original class that was taught at Stanford, which formed the basis for that book, because Peter goes very, very deep into specific hiring decisions and equity and negotiating term sheets and things like this. He gets very, very granular on things that were not put into the book because they wouldn't be applicable to a very broad audience necessarily, what it seemed to inside baseball. But the original class notes are just fantastic. And he brings in guest lecturers and so on, who are a lot of the icons in Silicon Valley that

Starting point is 00:42:19 the both of us would recognize. Silicon Valley. So Silicon Valley has this vaunted mythological place in the minds of a lot of people. It's, you know, the Mount Olympus of tech, the epicenter of all good things related to innovation, et cetera. Yep. Why have you chosen to remain in Pittsburgh and what have the benefits, the pros and cons been of staying there as opposed to going to SF or New York city? Listen, Pittsburgh is absolutely the best place on earth. All right. No, I actually, I like Pittsburgh quite a bit. Um, and I'll tell you, I, I, it is really unclear. One of our, um, one of our board members, um, Bing Gordon from, from Kleiner Perkins, um, he visited us He visited us and he said to me,

Starting point is 00:43:06 would you start Duolingo in Pittsburgh again? And I said to him, honestly, I don't know. Well, his answer at least made me feel good. He said, well, you're like in the 99th percentile of startups, so things seem to have worked out for you, so you're, you know, you're, you're like in the 99th percentile of startups. So, uh, seems things seem to have worked out for you. So, uh, you know, you're fine. Uh, but it's at first, you know, we, we started here because I was a professor at Carnegie Mellon and Carnegie Mellon's, uh, you know, a top school for computer science. Um, and we were around here and we kind of just never left.

Starting point is 00:43:40 Um, and, and what we, what we tell ourselves is, uh, and I think it's true. Um, it has been a, a pretty awesome recruiting tool, uh, for engineers. We've been able to recruit really amazing engineers. Um, you know, as a company, we, when we were only 20 people, we had like eight people with eight people with, with PhDs in computer science, um, which is a pretty, pretty hard thing to do anywhere else, including Silicon Valley. So I think we've had a great time recruiting engineers.

Starting point is 00:44:10 I think for that, it's been very helpful. I think it's also been very helpful in terms of being able to, you know, we're not affected so much. You know, one of the things that I noticed about Silicon Valley is there's definitely trends that happen, that come and go. And we're not affected too much by that. And I like that, that we're, you know, we're kind of, we know what we're doing with Duolingo.

Starting point is 00:44:38 We know what kind of company we're creating and we're sticking to it. And, you know, it's not the case that next time there is the next whatever, um, yik yak or whatever app is the next, uh, awesomest thing. You're, um, you're, you're changing your whole product to look more like theirs. Right. Yeah. You're outside of the, the echo chamber. Yeah. And then I think that has been helpful for us. Now, can I tell you for a fact that we would have been less successful in Silicon Valley? I have no idea. And another thing is we're now really starting. I think up until now, I don't think it has been a problem that we've been in Pittsburgh.

Starting point is 00:45:17 We're now starting to have a couple of issues. One of them is in terms of the infrastructure of things. So, for example, finding office space here was a pain in the ass because everybody here wants a 10-year lease because that's who they rent to, 10-year leases. And we're like, yeah, we cannot take a 10-year lease. I assure you that in 10 years, we will either have gone away, massively grown, but we're not going to be the same size. So, you know, the infrastructure here is just not the same. And the other thing that we're having a harder time is with people with previous startup experience. There's not very many here. It's, there's, Google has a pretty, people don't know this. Google has a pretty big office here. It's about 600 engineers. Um, and so we can hire good engineers from Google, for example, even, even, uh, you know, seasoned engineers from Google, but people with previous startup experience, especially

Starting point is 00:46:16 outside of engineering, there's not very many here. It's, uh, I was having a chat with the, uh, the, the founders of Shopify not too long ago because I was the first advisor to Shopify in 2008 or 2009. And they IPO-ed six or 12 months ago, six or nine months ago, I guess. And they've done very well. And they're based's actually been a huge gift in a way because they are the only game in town. So from a recruiting standpoint, not only are they the go-to tech company in a lot of respects, but on top of that, they don't have a lot of attrition. Because people are settled in Ottawa and they're not getting poached by Facebook, Google, Uber. They're not going into that bloodbath of bidding wars. So we see exactly that. For us, that's great. I mean,

Starting point is 00:47:13 so it's funny. We sometimes go to events. A lot of times these tech events or sometimes our investors have events. For example, one of our investors is Union Square Ventures. They have these amazing... I'll try to throw a picnic with some paper plates for you guys. Yeah, you should. You're, you're also one of our investors. You have not had us in any of your events. Okay. Um, so one of, you know, union square ventures there, they have these great events where

Starting point is 00:47:37 they, they bring in everybody, uh, you know, for example, they, they have, uh, a marketing event and it's all the people that are in the portfolio companies that do marketing or they have a design events and it's all the people that are in the portfolio of companies that do marketing. Or they have a design event, and it's all the people that do design in the portfolio of companies. And so we send people to all of these events, and it's pretty amazing how when you're talking to people, it really does seem like the average tenure of a person in one of these companies, and a lot of them, it's like a year and a half. After a year and a half, it's like, oh, going to the next one. Whereas for us, I mean, people really don't leave. I mean, it's just that because we really are the,

Starting point is 00:48:14 in terms of startups, we're not exactly the only game in town. I mean, that's unfair to say, but there's not very many games in town. What do you think the likelihood is that you will stay, that your HQ, the majority of your employees will be in Pittsburgh in, say, two years' time? I think that's pretty high. We just started an office in, well, if you could call it an office. We just started an office with two people in San Francisco. You met one of them, Gina. I did. And they're there. They're working off of the Google Capital office

Starting point is 00:48:53 for now, but they're getting their own office pretty soon. And I think we're probably going to have about, in the next year, we're probably going to staff it with about 15 people. So it's not going to be super tiny, but it's still not going to be the biggest one. And for those people who are not familiar with Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson, who's one of the, I think he's still a general partner there, isn't he? Yeah. He has a fantastic blog for people interested in tech and venture capital entrepreneurship, which is AVC. And I think it's just avc.com if I'm not mistaken, but you could certainly Google Fred Wilson and AVC and it'll pop right up is

Starting point is 00:49:31 how many employees did you have at recapture when the company was, was absorbed by Google? Um, uh, we were between seven and eight. And then inside Google, we started, you know, the team grew,

Starting point is 00:49:48 but that was it. And between that point, I assume you kind of vested in peace for a while, as they say. I mean, did you remain, were you at Google for a period of time? I was at Google for about a year and a half. Year and a half.

Starting point is 00:50:03 And when did, and how did Duolingo get started? I mean, what were the, when did that idea start to germinate? That started right after, right after the acquisition with Google. I mean, I was in a, I was in a pretty good place in my life where I didn't really have to work anymore. And I was, I wanted to do something that was related to education. And, and I started, you know, at the same time, I had a PhD student, Severin, who was my co-founder, he was my PhD student. We, we went, we wanted a PhD project for him. And I thought, well, you know, I really am passionate about education. Let's try to do something related to education.

Starting point is 00:50:46 Now, my views on education have always been very influenced by where I'm from, because I'm from Guatemala. And it's a very poor country. Now, the thing about Guatemala and poor countries, a lot of people say that education is the thing that can bring equality to the different social classes. But I always saw it as quite the opposite. I always thought that education actually was something that brought inequality, because what happens is the people who have money can buy themselves the best education in the world. And because of that, they remain having a lot of money, whereas the people who don't have very much money barely learn how to read and write, and therefore remain not having very much

Starting point is 00:51:25 money. So I wanted to do something with education that would give equal access to everybody. That's what I wanted. Now, education is very general. So we decided to concentrate on just one type of education, which is learning a foreign language, which, you know, if you're in the US, it doesn't sound like that big of a deal. But outside of the U.S. or generally outside of English speaking countries, this is a massive deal. Generally learning English. There's 1.2 billion people in the world learning a foreign language. And so, you know, we decided that we wanted to do something to teach foreign languages. But this is a funny market, the language learning market. The majority of

Starting point is 00:52:05 the people learning a foreign language, 800 million of them, satisfy three properties. First of all, they're learning English. Second, the reason they're learning English is to get a job or a better job. And third, they're of low socioeconomic conditions. So most people are trying to learn English in order to get out of poverty. That's the people who are learning a language. But at the same time, most of the ways they are to learn a language are usually very expensive, especially before Duolingo came around. Like Rosetta Stone, for example, think about that. It's like between $500 and $1,000. So this was kind of the irony. It seemed like you needed $1,000 in order to get out of poverty. And so we thought we could do better. And that was the idea with Duolingo,

Starting point is 00:52:42 was to give a 100% free way to learn languages. That's what we wanted to do. And how did you develop the idea or the model? And what did those early conversations look like? Yeah, at first we started thinking, well, if it's going to be free, we got to figure out a way to pay for it. Get a good idea. Yeah. We hadn't discovered what we now know, which is you can always raise more VC funding. I'm kidding. That's not a good way to pay for things.

Starting point is 00:53:18 Eventually, mom and dad, i.e. VCs on the board, stop giving you allowance. Well, you know, somebody on our board said said a good a good thing uh he said eventually you can't find a bigger fool right right i think that's about about right um so yeah that's not our business model uh but at first we had a business model which we've actually moved away from it was a i thought a pretty clever business model but uh we there are reasons for which we've moved away from which i'll tell you

Starting point is 00:53:49 about but our our first business model that we thought was okay here's what we're gonna do uh much like the idea with recapture where as people are typing captures we're actually capturing some value uh from them could we do the same for learning a language? Could we get people to give us something of value while they're learning a language? And what we thought, the answer to that was yes. And we thought we could get people to help us translate stuff while they were learning a language. So the idea, and this still works, and we're still doing it. So the idea is the following.

Starting point is 00:54:24 After somebody would learn a lesson on Duolingo, idea and this still works and we're still doing it so the idea is the following after you know after somebody would learn a lesson on Duolingo they would learn you know a lesson about food like they would learn all the food words um at the end we would say hey if you want to practice um the things you just learned uh here's this document that comes from the web that is related to what you just learned so in this case it may be like a food blog or something and we would say uh it's in the language you're learning. Do you want to help us translate it to your native language to practice? And what would happen is some people said yes to that.

Starting point is 00:54:54 And a number of people would get the same document and they would kind of all translate it together, kind of edit each other's translations, et cetera. And they were translating from the language they were learning to their native language. And at the end, we would come up with one translation and that was a translation. And in some of the cases, those documents came from,

Starting point is 00:55:12 for example, CNN. CNN is one of our clients. They wrote all their news in English. They sent it to us. And we had our people who were learning English translated into their native languages. And then we would send the translations back to CNN and CNN would pay us for having translated their documents.

Starting point is 00:55:28 This is still going on. CNN is still one of our clients. So it's been about two years and they're still at it. So that means the quality of the translations is high enough that they haven't fired us. So that was the business model. And it was a pretty good business model, but we moved away from it because we realized

Starting point is 00:55:44 the more we worked on it, the more we realized we started turning into a translations company as opposed to an education company. So because that's kind of where the money came from. So we started just more and more developing translation and translation and not working on the education side. And at the same time, we realized that also translation is a crappy business to be in because it's kind of a race to the bottom, uh, how much you charge for translations. Uh, you know, if you can do it for one cent a word, you can always find somebody else that

Starting point is 00:56:15 can do it for half a cent a word. Um, so we decided to move away from that. I was willing to try for half a cent a word. Yeah. So we, uh, so we decided to move away from that. Um, uh, and now we have different business models, but, but that was our original one. Can you elaborate on the other business models? Sure. We have two now. Um, the, the main one, the one that we were, we've been at it for longer. Um, it's, uh, English language certification. Well, generally language certification, but what matters here is English. So the idea is this. There are... Just to, sorry, not to interrupt, but I will briefly, because I think that to put in perspective for native English speakers who might not get the magnitude, and maybe you can call BS on this

Starting point is 00:57:01 or confirm, but I've heard, for instance, that in China alone, I mean, we could talk about a place like Brazil also, but there are more people learning English in China than all the native speakers of English combined. Yes, there are 400 million people learning English in China. Yeah. So for those people listening, big market. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, learning English is humongous, right? I mean, for teaching languages, that is what you want to teach. I mean, it's funny, there are companies in China that are venture funded, that only teach English, and that only teach English to hotel employees. That is a big enough market for a startup. Wow. So, I mean, that's how big the market is in China for learning English.

Starting point is 00:57:45 I threw you off course that you were talking about this certification. Yeah. So the thing is this with certification. So, you know, exactly with English, people need to learn English, but after they've learned English, they also need to prove that they know English and particular to get a job or to go to school, et cetera. So about two years ago, we started getting a lot of emails like that with people saying, thank you for teaching me English. I did not have the resources to pay for English software for classes or something, and now I can learn it because of Duolingo, but now I have a problem. I need a certificate that says that I know English

Starting point is 00:58:21 because I need to apply for a university or I need to get a job, et cetera. And they're requiring some sort of certificate that says that I know English. And so we thought, well, let's look into this whole certifying that people know English, this whole market. It turns out this is a humongous market. It's about $15 billion a year spent on people certifying that they know English. You use that, for example, if you're from outside of the US and you want to apply to enroll in a US university, you have to take a test that proves that you speak English. That test is called the TOEFL. If you want to get a job at a multinational corporation in a non-English speaking country, you usually have to

Starting point is 00:59:04 take a test to prove that you know English, you usually have to take a test to prove that you know English. If you want to get a work visa in the UK, you have to take a test that proves that you know English. So there's these standardized tests. In total, $15 billion are spent a year on these tests. They're all very similar to each other. There's a few of them.

Starting point is 00:59:19 There's like three or four that are big ones. The way this process works is you have to it's it's kind of similar to taking the sat you have to take this test um you pay about 250 bucks for it uh you usually have to take it well you always have to take it at a testing center so you have to go to a a place to take the test um because of that you usually have to make an appointment you know several weeks in advance and that, you usually have to make an appointment, you know, several weeks in advance. And so several weeks in advance, you make an appointment, you pay 250 bucks, you go somewhere, you take a test and you get your results another maybe four weeks later. So at the end, you spent eight weeks, you spent 250 bucks, and you have a certificate that says,

Starting point is 01:00:02 you know, this is your test score for English. And this measures your English proficiency. Now, so that's the process. And this sounds kind of annoying, but it's actually way worse because most of the people that are taking this are in developing countries. Now, there, the thing is $250 in a developing country is a month's salary. Also, the testing centers are not in every city. They're just in certain cities. So you have to travel to take a test to prove that you know English. Right. And just to also add some color to that, I mean, traveling might not be, it's not hopping on a bus and going 20 minutes necessarily.

Starting point is 01:00:38 If you're in a village, like a Shipibo village in Peru, and you're trying to get to Lima. Several hours. And it also costs you money. So this actually happened to me when I was applying to come to school here in the US. I had to take this test to prove that I knew English. What happened is Guatemala ran out of tests. There were no more seats for that year in the testing centers. So I had to fly to the neighboring country of El Salvador to take the test. So for me, this cost a thousand bucks and it involved a trip outside of the country. So we thought, you know, when we saw that,

Starting point is 01:01:17 we thought, man, we can do a lot better than that. That's really ridiculous. It seems like technology from a hundred years ago. So we launched this thing called the Duolingo Test Center, which is basically an app. It's also a website that helps you certify your knowledge of English. And the idea is that it's only $20. It's not $250. And also, you take it from a device, you don't have to go to somewhere to take it. So you don't have to go to a testing center. And now the tricky thing here was that when, you know, the reason people have to go to a testing center to take the test is to make sure that they're not cheating. Because, you know, you, for example, instead of you could, for example, send your cousin to take your test

Starting point is 01:02:00 instead of you, or you could show up with a bunch of books. So the way we, you know, we have to prevent cheating with our test. And the way we've decided to prevent cheating is, or we're able to do it is when you're taking the test from your phone, we actually turn on the front facing camera and the microphone, and we actually record you taking the test. So we record your face, and the ambient noise and everything. And then a real human proctor watches you take the test and makes sure that you were not cheating and you were actually looking at the screen, etc. And it turns out this works. That's very cool. And how hard has it been or how – let me ask a better question.

Starting point is 01:02:42 How have you been able to get buy-in from companies to accept this? Yeah, that's been, that's the hardest part, probably the, you know, the technology, we, we, we figure that out relatively easily. The, the, the, the hardest part has been getting, you know, getting accepted by, uh, universities and companies, et cetera, but we're, we're getting, we're making good traction. Um, we're, let's see. Um, we, so in terms of universities, so some departments of Harvard University take it, some departments of Carnegie Mellon University are starting to take it. Some departments of the Max Planck Institute in Germany are starting to take it. And this year, we're going to run a study with 12 very well-known name brand universities here in the US, like, you know, Yale and that type of name. So 12 of them are going to be running a study where all of their applicants are going to be taking both the standard test that they're taking and our test.

Starting point is 01:03:35 And the idea is they're going to look at the correlation between that. And if it's high enough, then all these universities are also going to start accepting our test in addition to the other one. So we're doing that. We've been also doing a lot of work with different companies. So Uber, for example, is a good one. They have, in many countries, they're starting to roll out a new Uber service called Uber English, which is, you know, your driver speaks English. And we have a partnership with them where the idea is that in order to certify that the drivers speak English,

Starting point is 01:04:08 they have to take the Duolingo test. So we're doing a few of these companies, and the way we're getting it done is basically by going at first to kind of the blue-chip places, you know, the Harvards of the world, and, you know, after that, the sale is much easier because you say, look, it's good enough for Harvard. Um, it's probably should be good enough for you. Yeah. That, uh, the H the H name works in a lot of places. MIT too. The very powerful in Asia. Yep. The DC, we've been talking about English. What other languages are currently available on Duolingo for people to learn, for English speakers to learn?

Starting point is 01:04:46 There's a bunch. You know, I used to know them all. Now I don't. So, you know, we have the big ones like Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese. We have some lesser known ones. We have like Irish, Esperanto. Esperanto is a funny one. Danish, Swedish, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish. You'll notice we have no Asian languages

Starting point is 01:05:12 right now. Why is that? It's because it's harder to teach them. We're working on it, but it's just, it has not been our highest priority because it's kind of low ROI in the following respect. The investment is high because they're actually harder to teach them. And the return is not very high because if you actually look at from for English speakers, for example, for English speakers of the people who are learning a language that are English speakers, 52 percent of them are learning Spanish. 26 percent of them are learning Spanish. 26% of them are learning French. Then the next big one is German at 6%, and Chinese is somewhere at 4% or so. So ROI is not super high, and this is why we haven't done it. But we want to do it.

Starting point is 01:05:58 A lot of my fans want Japanese. That's been very common. I know. That's the most requested one. It's the most requested one it's the most requested one and it really is just we're on it we're on it now if you when you develop the ability or the curriculum you you code the program for say english speakers to learn japanese does that how much additional work is required like-wise to have it move in the opposite direction, to teach Japanese people English, for instance?

Starting point is 01:06:33 And does that dictate which Asian language you might choose? Korea, well, China would be a huge market, I would imagine, for teaching English. But Korea as well, right, where they have super teachers who fill up entire stadiums for particular subjects. That's a mouthful of a question. But if you develop it in one direction, does it make it easier to then teach in the opposite direction? Yeah, it does. And we've done that for a lot of languages. So we do already teach English to Chinese speakers. We teach English to Japanese speakers and to Korean speakers and Vietnamese speakers and Indonesian speakers. So we do teach English to most Asian, large Asian languages. So that makes it easier to go the other way around. I mean, truthfully, the main problem that we have not yet really worked on solving, it's not impossible to solve it in terms of ideas.

Starting point is 01:07:30 It's just we just haven't gotten to it. It's teaching you the writing system. Yeah, the orthography is tricky. Yeah, and it's pretty tricky, particularly for the ones that don't have an alphabet. I mean, like Chinese. It's pretty tough. And so that's just we just we just, you know, that is, it's pretty tough. And so that's just, we just, we just, you know, we have a long list of priorities. This is somewhere in there, but it is not the

Starting point is 01:07:51 highest one. I bet a lot of folks out there who would want to learn Japanese, I mean, speaking as someone who's studied a lot of Japanese and lived there, I would imagine a lot of folks who are hoping to learn Japanese are doing it for out of cultural interest. They're doing it, speaking of English speakers, or conversational interest. They may not be. I would imagine if you gave them the choice, and maybe people can tell you, it's just at Luis Von Ahn on Twitter, right? So that's at L-U-I-S-V-O-N-A-H-N. Maybe folks who are listening can let Luis know.

Starting point is 01:08:28 Thanks, Tim. Yeah. Well, no, if you gave them the option, say, of conversational Japanese without any writing system, no hiragana, no katakana, no kanji, in a year or six months, whatever it might be, versus, say, the entire ball of wax, the whole nine yards with writing systems in hypothetically two or three years, I bet a lot of people would take the former. Yeah. Yeah. And we've seen that.

Starting point is 01:08:54 We've actually started. So what we have started doing, so we did this with Russian. So Russian, you also have to teach the alphabet. It's much easier because there's- The Cyrillic, yeah. Yeah. It's much easier, though. I mean, there's only about 15 letters that are different. So you basically just have to learn the alphabet. It's much easier because there's much easier though. There's only about 15

Starting point is 01:09:05 letters that are different. So you basically just have to learn 15 letters. But we started doing this. We basically have started teaching romanizations for people who don't want to learn the alphabet. We just romanize it. That seems to be working out

Starting point is 01:09:21 relatively well. So we may end up doing that something like that for Chinese like piny. So we may end up doing something like that for Chinese, like pinyin. We may end up doing that. Pinyin can work. Here, I'll throw, you know what, I would be so happy if this happened, and I think people would probably come after me with pitchforks, but there is a separate romanization approach to Chinese that I think is actually better for Mandarin.

Starting point is 01:09:42 This is how I learned it, but it's less standard, which is why most people default to pinyin. So with the pinyin, you'd have to deal with the diacritical marks, meaning the slanting lines to indicate tone, right? So in Chinese, you have four tones for people who aren't familiar. So you'd have like ma, ma, ma, ma, which are all different things. They sounded like four things of the same thing for me. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:10:03 And so Chinese tongue twisters are a bitch. They are crazy. But there's a system called GR or Guoyu Romadzi. So I think it was developed in Taiwan. And what's cool about that is they build the tone into the spelling. And so if you remember the romanization, and I'm highly visual, so I remember the spelling of words, then you automatically remember the tones. Oh, wow.

Starting point is 01:10:29 So students who are taught using GR have, in my experience, and this is what was used at Princeton, which has a very good East Asian Studies department, one of the best in the world, the retention of tones and consistency of tones of Princeton students was outstanding compared to many other schools that used pinyin. Of course, that wasn't the only difference in the pedagogy, but for instance, if you had like guo, which is country, or like guo, it's like past tense, I have gone, you know, you've gone, something like that. Then you would have, and I haven't done this in so, so long, but it would be like GWO would be the second tone. And then first tone would be G U O. And then fourth tone would be like G U O H. And that H at the end indicates it's a falling tone. And I really want to resurrect and popularize this system because I feel like it's so much more effective. It's just not as common. Uh, so it's not often used anyway. That's my, I'll, I'll throw,

Starting point is 01:11:31 throw that one. That's, that's good to know. You know, sometimes when we do things, um, we, we, we've done some things that are a little, um, you know, kind of unexpected and we end up getting really good results. I mean, for example, we started teaching Irish, which I think a lot of people were very surprised by the fact that we launched Irish before, like, you know, I don't know, Turkish or Russian or Japanese. Right. So how do you justify that investment? Yeah. Well, it was very easy was the was the was the point. The you know, that was actually done by volunteers, not by, not by us. And we didn't have to make a single change to the app.

Starting point is 01:12:13 Our system just allowed it to just go through with the volunteers. So it was just done by volunteers. So we didn't have to be involved almost at all. So the reason was just because it was relatively easy. But one of the funny things is when we launched it, there's 94,000 native Irish speakers. But we have about a million people learning Irish on Duolingo, like actively. That's wild. So we're, you know, if we put something there, a lot of times we can actually have a big impact on the language itself just by

Starting point is 01:12:46 putting it there so Duolingo ostensibly at some point could have a role not just in preserving but even resurrecting languages depending we've thought about that we have a few

Starting point is 01:13:01 one of the funny ones we're working on is not us but volunteers at Klingon. That's an interesting one. Do you have any plan? Do volunteers have any plans for Dothraki or anything like that? Well, you know, a few of those, they're kind of, I think they're like copyrighted or something. Oh, yeah, you're right. I remember I tried to do something in, I spoke to the gentleman who developed Navi or the language for the Navi people in Avatar, which is largely based on Japanese people might find interesting to know.

Starting point is 01:13:32 But yeah, so it's – I see. So you might not have the ability. That's so stupid. Wow. We kind of asked for permission for Dothraki and we were told no. And then – For that massive Dothraki textbook market that told, uh, no. And then, you know, for that massive Dothraki textbook market that they want to capitalize on. I know we, and we thought, you know, we probably

Starting point is 01:13:51 thought we could like anyways do it, but we didn't really want to get into trouble. So whatever. Right. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Don't really want to fight home HBO or whoever owns the company. I still want to watch their shows is the thing. Now, this is a bit of a left turn, but actually before we move on, I wanted to flash back to Google for a second, but how do you know or do you know how Duolingo compares to, say, college instruction for any language? Yeah, we spend time, we actually have a,

Starting point is 01:14:28 we spend quite a bit of time measuring how well Duolingo works. We have a, we have, we have a team that's whose job it is to do that. Um, the, we have a lot of internal studies. Um, the one that we have that's external, uh, so done by somebody else, not Duolingo people. What they did is they measured how much people learn on Duolingo. And the way you measure how people learn is basically you do this thing called pre and post test. So you have people take a test before they start doing Duolingo, then they do Duolingo for a while, then they take the test again. And then you see how much they improved. And the measurement they got was that if you use Duolingo for 34 hours, you learn the equivalent of one semester of college, the first semester of college of instruction in that language. So that's the semester. And usually a semester takes a lot longer than 34 hours of active time.

Starting point is 01:15:26 So that's, you know, we think that that's pretty efficient. Do you have any, and feel free to punt this if you don't want to get into it, but I've had enough people ask me that I figured I would relay it. Do you have any plans for allowing people to practice conversation or oral skills? Yes, yes, we have plans. It is not what you would think. Everybody would like us to do this one thing, which is basically pair up our users with each other or pair up our users with teachers of some sort and do kind of a video, you know, like a Skype type thing. A lot of people have asked us for this. A lot of people inside the company have thought that this would be a good idea, but that is not what we're going to do. But we are going to do

Starting point is 01:16:16 conversation. I think within, we've been working on this for a while and we're pretty happy with where we're at. And I think we're going to, you know, we've been working on it mainly in terms of, you know, the hardest part has been just coming up with the right way to do this. And we think we have a pretty good way of doing it that we're probably going to launch in maybe, I don't know, three, four months. That's exciting. All right. Yeah. And it's going to be, I'm very excited about it because it's really, I think that's the main thing that Duolingo is lacking right now. The ability to actually practice real conversations.

Starting point is 01:16:52 And I think we're going to be able to do it pretty well. Very cool. So this is, we're recording this mid-January 2016. So hopefully, I guess Q2, Q3. Yeah, we're hoping, I'm hoping, so this is going to be one of those things that's going to get better over time. I think that we're going to have something in Q2. So let's say, you know, May-ish. But that, I think, every month, it will just get better over time. So the next question that I've been asked surprisingly often, which may not be

Starting point is 01:17:30 surprising to you, is does Duolingo have any plans or could you foresee Duolingo moving from teaching just languages to teaching anything? And for whatever reason, a lot of people have asked about philosophy, which I would be curious to see actually implemented. But how do you answer that question? Yes, we do have plans. We definitely have plans. From the beginning, our goal was to do all of education. We've stuck around with only languages for a while, but we do have plans. So we're on it. I can tell you we are going to launch another app this year. I cannot tell you what the app is about,

Starting point is 01:18:16 but we are definitely going to launch another one. It is not philosophy. That is not the second subject that we are going to teach. Irish philosophy, that's a big one. Yes, it's Irish philosophy of the 17th century. No, it's not that. But we are going to launch another app this year. That's for sure. So we're

Starting point is 01:18:34 definitely going to get into other areas of education. And the way we see this, for one, if you look at education, the education category of either the iTunes or Google Play, we're consistently, you know, in the vast majority of countries, we're the number one app in all of education. And so and we only teach languages. Whereas I think there are many of these education apps that teach like everything, basically. And, you know, with just languages, we've been able to do a pretty good job. So we

Starting point is 01:19:08 think that this approach of, you know, not a MOOC, not video lectures, but a really kind of gamified, you know, mobile native app to teach you something, we think that that approach is a pretty good approach. And we're going to try to replicate it with other things. It's not going to look just like Duolingo. It's going to, you know, they're going to look like, you know, each subject requires different things. I have no idea how you would teach philosophy, but I can give you pretty good ideas of how

Starting point is 01:19:41 you would teach, you know, certain areas of math, certain areas of physics or reading and writing. A lot of these things can be taught pretty well with an interactive app. Can't wait to see it. I'm going to hit the rewind button to go back because I wanted to pick up on this and the story may or may not be interesting, but you mentioned you were at Google for one and a half years. Does that mean you left before you finished vesting? That is correct. Okay. So for people who, can you explain how that usually works to people who aren't familiar with when companies get acquired? Yeah, usually when companies get acquired. So when you hear of an acquisition price,

Starting point is 01:20:23 and this is, by the way, I'm going to generalize a lot here because every deal is a little different. But when you hear of an acquisition price, let's say your company was acquired for 100 million bucks by a larger company, you know, like a Google or a Facebook or something. Usually that acquisition has usually two components, kind of an upfront payment that is some fraction of it. And then the other component is what they call a stay bonus, which is basically you get it over time if you stick around for a while. And it makes a lot of sense for companies to do this because when they acquire another company, they don't want everybody to leave. Split most of it. Yeah, and especially for multimillion-dollar acquisitions where there are several tens of millions of dollars.

Starting point is 01:21:12 And especially the founders, usually after the next day, they see themselves sitting there with several tens of millions of bucks in the bank. You wouldn't want them to leave the next day. So that's why you hold out for another large chunk that says, if you stick around for one year, you get this much. If you stick around for two years, you get this much. If you stick around for three years, you get this much, et cetera. What would be a typical percentage of the total payout? You know, I don't know what it, I can, I, I have sample size of, well, I, of the ones that I actually have knowledge of, I have sample size of three. So, and there is variance. So I don't know. I mean, uh,

Starting point is 01:21:57 would it be fair to say that it's often more than 50%? No, the, um, the stay bonus is often less than 50%. Okay. It's from my experience, but not a lot less. Let's say, you know, this I'm just going to throw out, but let's say it's 40%. Got it. But, you know, I've heard enough variants, and this is something that gets negotiated. I mean, of course, the startup that is being sold would like that stay bonus to be zero, and the big company that is buying it would like that stay bonus to be zero. And the big company that is buying it would like that stay bonus to be a hundred percent. And so some sort of, you know, negotiation happens. Um, but

Starting point is 01:22:32 that's usually, that's usually the case. How did you, why did you decide to leave after a year and a half? Because of Duolingo. Um, uh, it was, I was very excited about it um and it was it was something that was so my student was so i i was at carnegie mellon for a while you know as a professor then i started recaptcha and i went on leave from carnegie mellon to to have this startup then i went to google and i was still on leave at carnegie mellon but i had a PhD student, Severin. Severin. This whole time he was a PhD student there. What's his last name? Hacker, which is awesome. Best name of all time.

Starting point is 01:23:09 It's like Harry Potter meets the computer age. It's amazing. It was crazy because the first time I met him, he showed up to my office and he said to me, Hi, I'm Severin Hacker. And I just looked at it with such confusion. And I said, Wow, you're hired. I did not make a mistake, fortunately. But yeah, he was a PhD student while I was at Google.

Starting point is 01:23:35 And in that time, I was working on, it was his PhD thesis, Duolingo. But at the time, we weren't really going to turn it into a company. At first, it was just really his PhD project. But then at some point, after I had been at Google for about a year and a half, we had a meeting and we thought, yeah, we see a lot of future on this. Let's do it. But in order to actually develop it, I had to leave Google. I was actually quite happy at Google. I love Google as a company. And now there are investors and I really love them. Um, but I, I was much more excited by this next thing.

Starting point is 01:24:18 What for, for people who are using Duolingo or thinking of it, what is, have you seen any optimal usage schedule or frequency of use for Duolingo? I mean, I mean, just like lifting weights or a workout. I mean, it's not always a more is better. Yeah, so here's what you need to do. 48 straight hours when you start is a winner. Do not stop for 48 hours. How often are you using it over 48 hours? Not a stop. I'm kidding.

Starting point is 01:24:43 No, actually, we see a lot of people binging when they start. That is not a good strategy. So these people that when they start, you know, they go on for like several hours. That's usually not a good strategy for learning anything. So what we see is most successful. This is from our data, just kind of looking at traces. We see about between 20 and 30 minutes a day, between, you know, at least five times a week, that seems to do a pretty good job. If you want to kind of really be serious about it. And I'm just taking it taking a note do you find are there any other type any other tools

Starting point is 01:25:29 that uh people use in conjunction with duolingo to accelerate progress uh progress in any way yeah some people um so let's see some people do flash cards of some sort like a maybe they use a super memo or an anki or something like that. Right. SuperMemo, Anki, some go old school and just flashcards. That's me. I'm really analog in old school. Right. Like a flashcard. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:25:53 So some people do that. So some form of flashcards is something that people do. Another thing that I've heard a lot of people complimenting it with are a couple of things. Podcasts in the language that they're learning. There's one that's like news in slow Spanish or something like that, that I've heard. Oh, very cool. Yeah, I've heard of a lot of people listening to that.

Starting point is 01:26:13 And movies in the language that they're learning. Those are pretty great. Because usually, you know, even if you're like watching the, you know, not like a movie made originally in that language, but just watching the Hollywood blockbusters, those a movie made originally in that language, but just watching the Hollywood blockbusters. Um, those are pretty great, uh, for, for learning a language. Yeah. I, uh, actually prefer to watch English native, uh, English spoken movies with subtitles in my target language. Yeah. So that's actually my preference because if you,

Starting point is 01:26:46 if you miss something in the written word, you can always go back and pause. If you miss it in the spoken word, but you can't discern it just like a robot trying to read a captcha. If, if you don't, if you will lack sort of the phonetic familiarity to pick it out of the spoken word,

Starting point is 01:27:01 then you'll oftentimes just be lost in the dark. Just have a gap in the understanding, right? If you're watching, if you're trying to watch a movie in Mandarin, for instance, with English subtitles and you miss a sentence, you might just be screwed.

Starting point is 01:27:15 Whereas vice versa, you could watch diehard with Mandarin subtitles that maybe not the best example, since you have to learn the characters, but say Spanish subtitles. And that's actually how I, that's how I raise my languages from the dead. When I'm going to travel,

Starting point is 01:27:31 I'll spend two or three weeks each night watching a film with subtitles in my target language. Yeah. I think that's, that's pretty good. I mean, and we've yeah, we hear of people doing that a lot of some,

Starting point is 01:27:44 some, some sort of strategy with movie subtitles. And for people who want other tips on language learning, I've written a lot about this, and obviously I'm a fan of Duolingo, but you could search just language learning in my name. Also, if you go to 4hourblog.com, that's my blog and search. Benny Lewis is another one. There's actually an entire topic category, which is just language learning if you really want to dig into all sorts of little tips and tricks. Let me shift gears just a little bit. Actually, complimentary question. Do you have any other tips for how to best learn languages? Any other

Starting point is 01:28:25 recommendations? So this is, this is a recommendation, but it's really hard. I, I just, it, I'll tell you what it is. It's really hard. And we've really noticed this. Um, the people that we've noticed are best at learning a language are usually not because they're smarter, not because they're anything. It's really just that they have no trouble sounding stupid. And so they just speak. And I think that if you're able to get yourself to just say stuff and speak it, I think that that makes a huge difference

Starting point is 01:29:04 because those people are just getting way more practice. So what happens is, you know, when they start, they're going to, they're going to sound kooky, of course, but, you know, over time, they're just going to get way more practice than the quiet person who is waiting until it's, they're perfect to speak. And that's just going to take a really long time. I say it's hard because that really depends a lot on your personality. And there's just some people that just can't do that. But if you can, just get yourself to speak. I mean, this is, for example, Benny Lewis. I think that's one of the reasons he's so good is he just starts speaking.

Starting point is 01:29:37 Yeah, I think that a way to deliberately do that if your personality is not predisposed to being the class clown. This is what I do. People wouldn't guess this perhaps, but I'm very naturally introverted. Myers-Briggs is INTJ. I spend a lot of time alone recharging. And it is not actually natural for me to run around being the class clown or life of the party, kind of making a fool of myself. I do make a fool of myself accidentally a lot. But in foreign languages, I will go out of my way in the beginning to learn a few expressions that locals find funny. Right. And once you get them laughing, you feel less inhibited because the entire interaction is less serious.

Starting point is 01:30:25 That's a really good trick. That's a really good trick. get them laughing, you feel less inhibited because the entire interaction is less serious, right? That's a really good trick. That's a really good trick. And another way you can make it even funnier is if you have a weird regional expression. So, for instance, in Argentina, if somebody gives you a compliment, you can say, mentime que me gusta. Mentime que me gusta. And they get all excited and they're like, lie to me because I like it. Lie to me. I love it. Yeah. They get excited because they're like, oh me because i like it lie to me i love it you know uh yeah they get excited because they're like oh man that's really regional uh yeah and and people find it so weird especially because it's argentine spanish right so the menti menti is the like command form is really weird and um but i use that and it breaks the ice with any spanish speaker they're like

Starting point is 01:31:00 what like this guy looks like he's from american History X and he's using weird Argentine slang. Or I'll be like, yeah, soy Argentino trucho. And they're like, what the hell? What is your story? But you can do that. A very easy way to do that is to find some funny proverbs. And you have to make sure that people actually use them. Yeah, not from 50 years ago, right? Yeah, not from 50 years ago or the equivalent of Middle English and Japanese because people are just going to be confused. But, you know, the expressions like,

Starting point is 01:31:31 monkeys also fall from trees. It's kind of like, no matter how good you are, you still stumble, right? That's a Japanese expression. So you can pick up like one or two of these in German or whatever it might be. There's a good one in German, like, even the devil eats flies, which is a funny one, which is sort of like desperate times call for desperate measures.

Starting point is 01:31:50 And people just love it. It gets them to laugh a little bit because it's so weird. And then the ice has been broken. So I will deliberately look for stuff like that. For instance, I think it's in Greek, where if you're bidding someone farewell, I kind of picked up what I understand is a very archaic kind of Shakespearean way of doing it that is still universally understood. But you say like, and I do this really melodramatic bow and then walk off and people are like, what the fuck? But if I would do that at the hotel, automatically the person at the front desk thought i was hilarious even though i just premeditated the whole thing right and then you can you feel free to experiment so that's that's been an approach of mine uh let me ask

Starting point is 01:32:36 you some questions that i like to ask all guests when you hear the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind and why? Oh, man. Probably Larry Page. And why is that? Well, I am a huge fan of Google. I just think that everything they do, they don't always succeed. But usually the approach they take, I'm like, yeah, they're smart. So, yeah, I'm a huge fan. And yeah. Is there if you had to choose who would your second person be?

Starting point is 01:33:20 Boy, who who would my second choice be? Successful. I mean, it's the usual ones. I'm so into the mainstream culture of success in startups that it's the usual people that everybody I think thinks of. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg. And when you say the word success, that's kind of what I think. Right. Elon Musk, as they say in Silicon Valley, the show. I've heard of this name, yes. I'm familiar. What is the book or books that you've given most often as a gift?

Starting point is 01:33:55 Or what do you gift, if not books? Because I don't read very much, I really just listen. I haven't really gifted books. I really just listen. I haven't really gifted books. I mean, I really do recommend Zero to One to people. I say you should really read Zero to One. Let's see, what do I gift? My gifts are usually pretty lame to people. I give gifts cards because I don't have to think much about them.

Starting point is 01:34:26 And I compensate by giving higher amounts of money. I compensate by that. I'm like, yeah, it's easier just here. Very Chinese. Do you listen to any fiction? I do. I do. Not as much. I mainly kind of read, well, not read, listen to nonfiction books. I have listened to fiction, just not as often. Do you have any favorite fiction? You know, I used to really like Borges. Yeah, Jorge Luis Borges. Yes. I used to really like it. But I have just not really over the last like three years, I just have not, I've really only listened to, you know, what I do is I listen to books while I'm working out in the mornings. That is the sole time when I listen to books and it's

Starting point is 01:35:18 always just some sort of nonfiction thing. What is your workout in the mornings? It's well, it's a crazy, some people, some people say I'm going to have a heart attack. Um, I basically run at absolute maximum speed that I can, which is about 9.8 miles an hour, uh, for about 16 minutes. That's it. That's it. That is my workout. And now do you have a warmup lap or anything like that or just go for it? Go. You just go.

Starting point is 01:35:48 I'm not saying that this is recommended. This is just what I do. And it has worked. I lost 40 pounds. That's a lot. Yeah, yeah. And so from then I stuck with it. And I just go. Mainly I'm trying to be optimal with time that I spend. Well, I don't know if it's optimal, but I'm trying to save time. So for those people who haven't heard of Jorge Luis Borges, B-O-R-G-E-S, highly recommend at least checking out some of his short stories. And I think there's one where he sits down at the bank of a river and meets his older self or his younger self,

Starting point is 01:36:23 one of the two, and they're sitting side by side. People can find it on Google, but fantastic writer. Speaking of Argy's, I believe he's Argentine. He is Argentine, yep. Do you have any favorite documentaries or movies? Well, my favorite movie is still The Matrix. It's old school by now, but it's just my favorite movie. My mind was blown when I watched that.

Starting point is 01:36:51 And documentaries? Do you watch any documentaries or do you have any favorites? The one I saw relatively recently, a lot of people have seen it. I saw it's Jiro Dreams of Sushi. I like that a lot. Jiro Dreams of Sushi is fantastic. Yeah. I had a chance to go to Tokyo and...

Starting point is 01:37:08 Did you eat there? I didn't eat at his restaurant. I ate at his younger son's restaurant, which is the mirror image of his because one of them is right-handed and one of them is left-handed. Is it really? Oh, that's hilarious. There was a cancellation. We ended up being the earliest table. I got to talk with

Starting point is 01:37:24 his youngest son. I was the only Japanese speaker there because I was with a few friends who were all native English speakers with no Japanese. And so we sat there and I just got to talk to him for about an hour. And the coolest guy ever, his restaurant is in Roppongi Hills. I've been there. Yeah, I've been there. I usually don't spend a lot of time in Noppongi, but this restaurant was great. And we ended up really bonding well. And he recommended a number of restaurants in Okinawa that we ended up going to. And he's like, tell them I sent you. And so, of course, that turned into its own adventure, which was just fantastic. We went to this restaurant, and it was in a grandmother's house with three or four tables. People traveled from all over Japan just to have a meal there. And she was a former radio personality, but she would dress up in traditional kimono and come out

Starting point is 01:38:14 and sit at each table for like 10 minutes each and just rotate through. It was amazing. Wow. Really, really surreal. What $100 or less purchase has most positively impacted your life in the last six months or recent memory? Well, man, you know, I don't buy much. I really just don't buy much for myself. Do I have? I don't know. I don't think this was under $100, but it was close. I bought a Tumi backpack that really has changed my life in terms of travel.

Starting point is 01:38:54 I just need it a lot. Does it have a separate compartment for the laptop and all that? Yes. The key is to make it so that it is easy to take out when you're going through the stupid security thing. Yeah, I need to replace my backpack for that reason exactly. Do you have it within arm's reach? Do you know which one? I do not.

Starting point is 01:39:12 I do not have it within arm's reach. But it really is very nice that you can easily take it out and put it back in. That just makes, you know, I don't know what it is. It's not like it saves that much time, but it just makes your life a little better. It's just, you know, your life is the small things repeated often. I don't know if you travel enough. Yes. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 01:39:31 The security is just, yep. What time do you tend to go to bed and wake up? 11.30, go to bed, uh, wake up at about six 30. What are the, what are the first things that you do in the morning? Like the first 30 to 60 minutes of your day? What does that look like? I wake up, I check my email. Uh, I, let's see, basically I opened my laptop.

Starting point is 01:39:59 I check my email. I check, uh, some sort of Duolingo metrics. Uh, what type of, what type of, uh, dashboard do you guys use for that? Um, we have our own dashboard that we made. It runs on top of this thing called mix panel. Um, and, uh, we have our, you know, so I, I usually open it to see the previous day, how we performed, et cetera. Um, I don't know if this is a smart move or not. I do it, but I don't know if it is a smart move or not. I do it, but I don't know if it's a smart move because it really determines my mood for the first several hours. Uh, in terms of, you know, if we did well the previous day, it's like, uh, I'm a happy

Starting point is 01:40:34 camper. If we did not do well the previous day, for some reason, like, you know, somehow traffic is a little lower than the previous than the day before that or something, I'm not in a great mood. So I think I'm going to stop doing that. I don't think this is healthy. I do that, and then I go work out for 16 minutes, and then I eat a yogurt. That's my morning routine. And then off to the office, or what's after that? Yeah, well, I shower, and then I go to the office, basically.

Starting point is 01:41:01 What metrics do you pay the most attention to? Well, no end. Let's keep it to one question for a change. So we pay a lot of attention to two right now. One is how well people are learning. The way we measure that, we basically, some of the exercises we're giving you are not there for teaching. They're literally, we're just testing you. And we're testing previous things just so that, you know, just to know whether we're, you know, how well we're teaching you. And we do, you know, we make changes to try to

Starting point is 01:41:37 make it so that you will answer these test questions, you know, correctly more often. So we pay attention to this. We have a kind of composite score of how well our users are learning. I pay attention to that. That one doesn't change that much per day. That one really only changes whenever we do an experiment.

Starting point is 01:41:56 And we do multiple experiments a week, but it doesn't change like that per day. The one that is a little less outside of our control is the number of active users that we had the previous day. Active daily users. And by active, I mean they didn't just look at the website. I mean they completed a lesson on Duolingo. So I look at that.

Starting point is 01:42:20 What have been your most surprising sources of users? Oh, whoa. What have been your most surprising sources of users? Oh, well, we have had, well, let's see. What are good ones? Surprising sources of users. We've had, you know, sometimes we get users that we get huge spikes that we cannot explain. And later we figure out that it's TV. It's very funny that we cannot even see tweets about it. We see nothing and somehow there's just a huge spike.

Starting point is 01:42:53 We had a... Television in the US or outside? Outside, usually outside. I mean, some in the US, but that one you can usually find on Twitter. We get a lot of users on St. Patrick's Day learning Irish for one day. They don't stick around. So it's funny.

Starting point is 01:43:14 We do see that type of thing where, you know, this is another one which was interesting. When the Paris attacks happened, our French course got a bump of users in the week after that. Makes sense to me. Yeah, so that type of thing happens. What are others that are interesting? We get, what are others? Well, we've been in... This one's just interesting. We've been in fashion advice magazines.

Starting point is 01:43:52 Sometimes we're there for some reason and we get a bunch of users. Oh, another one was also interesting. Shawn Mendes. Help me out. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's the thing. It shows that you are not a 17-year-old girl. I'm guessing Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube.

Starting point is 01:44:10 No, he is supposedly the next Justin Bieber, but he's clean, you see. That's like a shtick. He does have a pretty catchy song. It's called Stitches. I actually had heard the song, but I didn't really know who he was. But then there were some people in the office who were, let's say they were female and they were younger. They all knew who he was and they were like, oh, my God, I cannot believe. So he started using Duolingo and he started tweeting about it a lot.

Starting point is 01:44:41 He started basically saying, you know, tweeting a lot about how he was using Duolingo and how he is learning Spanish, et cetera. And that was, that was an interesting source of users. We got, I don't know how many users we got, but we got a good number of them from him just tweeting a lot that he was

Starting point is 01:44:55 learning Spanish. You know, those are the ones that come to mind. It's pretty good sampling. Do you have any evening routines, anything you do to wind down? Well, you know, those are the ones that come to mind. It's pretty good sampling. Do you have any evening routines? Anything you do to wind down? Well, you know, I bought it. Well, no, I didn't buy them.

Starting point is 01:45:11 Somebody gave them to me in the office. Somebody from the office heard that I was having some trouble sleeping. And they gave me these glasses that block out blue light. Are they orange? What color are they? Yeah, they're like these big orange glasses because I wear glasses so they're kind of go on top of my glasses so i look like i'm like you know 90 years old or ready to go to the shooting range or ready yeah so i put that on for the last like hour of the day that i'm awake you know i i hate to admit it because I made a lot of fun of this before until this person in my office gave me the glasses as a gift.

Starting point is 01:45:50 I kind of made fun of this, but it really does seem to work. After I started putting those on for one hour before I go to sleep, I really can sleep a lot better. Very cool. I might have to try that the other laptop equivalent and it might be on uh on mobile as well as flux seven features yes a lot of people in the office use that um yeah f.lux for people who want to type it into their browser is very cool uh it changes the the type of light or the spectrum of light that is that is emitted from your laptop so that it changes based on sunrise and sunset.

Starting point is 01:46:30 Yeah, it's pretty cool. You know what? Our designers started using that, and now we get cookie colors because... Oh, because they're thrown off when they're designing after sunset. Now when they... I'm like, I want to see it tomorrow morning, please. they're thrown off when they're designing at after sunset. Now, now when they, you know, I'm like, I want to see it tomorrow morning,

Starting point is 01:46:46 please. That's, that's hilarious actually. Yeah. That could be really dangerous for designers. Now that I'm thinking about it. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:46:57 And how did you guys come up with the green owl by the way? Yeah. So that was, there's a story behind that. There's, um, we were, um, we were just getting started with's, um, we were, um, we were just getting started with Duolingo and, and, um, we had hired a Canadian company to help with our

Starting point is 01:47:12 branding. Um, at the time we didn't really have any designers, but it's an awesome company. It's called silver orange. They made the Firefox logo, for example. Oh, great logo. Um, yeah. So this is a great company. Um, we love working with them and, uh. And, you know, in one of our first meetings about the branding of the company, my co-founder Severin, he said, you know, I don't know much about design and I don't particularly care, but I'll tell you this. I hate the color green. I hate it. We all thought it would be hilarious if our mascot was a green thing. And so that's why it's green. We are playing a joke on our co-founder. Ever since then, every day of his life, he has to see this. He shouldn't have said that oh man that that is funny and the owl was that the the was that knowledge knowledge wisdom yeah it's funny because now you know when we started it was kind of you know we were here and knowledge wisdom makes sense but now that we're expanding we or we've expanded to the whole world this is not true in every other

Starting point is 01:48:21 country right uh yeah owls like bad luck in certain cultures? You know, I don't know if they're bad luck, but certainly in China, people are like, why an owl? And no, actually in China, because it's green, they're like, why are you using a parrot? A fat parrot. Yes. This happened. That actually would kind of make sense, actually. Yeah, a parrot. Yeah. this happened that actually would kind of make sense actually the parent yeah uh that's another

Starting point is 01:48:47 one of those jokes uh that uh i used to try to disarm people if i'm gonna make a fool of myself in spanish later is is the the because i mean in certain spanish-speaking cultures people are very polite it's kind of like japan i mean if you were like i hungry want food please and they're like oh your spanish is so good you know if that's how you sounded please? And they're like, oh, your Spanish is so good, you know, if that's how you sounded in Spanish. They're very polite. And so my thing, you know, I would say, well, I'm just a really good parrot, right? So I'd just say, you know, soy un papagayo, papagayo,

Starting point is 01:49:17 depending on if I'm an Argentine or not. And so that makes sense to me that it could be a parrot. Have you, what have you changed your mind about in the last few years and why? That's a good organization than I thought before. You know, before I kind of worked at, I always worked at a company or something that somebody else had made the culture or the organization or something. And it's so easy to find bad things about things, about, you know, company cultures. Pick out the flaws. It's so easy. find bad things about things, about company cultures. Pick out the flaws. It's so easy.

Starting point is 01:50:07 Yeah. Nothing's perfect. And you're just like always. But now that I'm the one in charge of building an organization, it is really hard. And I am now even more impressed at the people who have built companies with 10,000 employees. It's just impressive how the culture at Google still remains. It's just impressive. It is astonishing.

Starting point is 01:50:33 Because when you're just here, we have 60 employees, and already we see all kinds of issues. One of the standard things that people, that startups go through, and fortunately we went through it and it worked out well, but at the beginning it's flat. Everybody has, you know, there's no management. Nobody really has a boss. It's kind of flat.

Starting point is 01:50:59 There's no hierarchy. It's a flat work chart. This sounds great. This really sounds great. We are a flat company, et cetera. Unfortunately, this just does not work after a certain number of employees. And you get to chaos. At about 25 employees, it starts becoming chaotic.

Starting point is 01:51:15 And so you have to start coming up with some sort of structure and some sort of hierarchy. And out of every startup that I've heard, there is an allergy against that. Because it's like, oh, man, now we're going to have managers. What's next? Yeah, what's next? Are we going to have to start filling out TPS reports? What is going on here? But it takes a little bit of time to really convince people that this is actually worthwhile.

Starting point is 01:51:45 But fortunately, we've gone through this now and we're fine. But this was much harder than I thought it would be. What resources, people, books, anything did you find? Have you found helpful in thinking about building an organization? Well, this is one of the ones where the hard thing about hard things was helpful. He talks a lot about building organization and how to do that. I found, let's see, in some cases, I found a few blogs. Well, Fred Wilson's blog is great.

Starting point is 01:52:29 Which came up earlier at AVC. Yeah, so that one was good. And also our board members. I mean, we have really good board members for Duolingo. And I've asked them a lot of questions. I mean, the latest one, our board member from Google Capital, Layla, she's amazing. She basically, I sat with her and I'm like, okay, we're going to reorganize the company. Let's do it.

Starting point is 01:52:53 And we basically just sat there for a few hours and came up with a reorg of the whole company. And that was pretty useful. I want to say it was either a biography of Home Depot. It might have been both, or it was a little outdated now, but the making of a Blockbuster, which was about Wayne Huizenga, if I'm saying his name correctly, and the building of Blockbuster when it was just the behemoth. When it was awesome. When it was awesome. Back when it was awesome.

Starting point is 01:53:21 Yeah, back when it was awesome. But he was very good at acquiring companies. And as he absorbed all these companies, of course, he needed to incorporate all of the bits and pieces. And I want to say that he hired one of the top people from McDonald's, either as a consultant or a full-time employee. And the first thing he did when he met them is he said, all right, help draw or draw the org chart for me. I want to see what the org chart looks like. And that was one of the most consistent questions. And I never thought... It didn't strike me until much later. In fact, in the last few years, how important that is. And so when I meet people who seem to have very smoothly operating companies, that's one of the first questions that I ask if it seems like a decent opportunity.

Starting point is 01:54:12 So I'll just say, what does your org chart look like? Draw your organization for me. Yeah, it is amazing. For somebody who has never had to design an organization, it is amazing how hard that is. It's just not easy. It's not intuitive. No, it's not. Is there anything that you believe to be true, even though you can't prove it? What is something that I believe to be true even? I'll say this. I believe that it was a good choice to start Duolingo here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Starting point is 01:54:53 I can't prove that, but I believe it was a pretty good choice. If you could put one billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say? Yes, it would be this. This I can answer because I've thought about this. It would be a billboard right across the street from the Google office here in Pittsburgh that says, we at Duolingo are hiring and yes, we can match your salary. Google would love that. Sorry, Google investors. But yes, that is the billboard that I would put because I have thought of this. That seems achievable.

Starting point is 01:55:36 It is. It is very achievable. I just don't know how they would feel. There are investors and everything. That's true. That whole dynamic is something I didn't think about. You could get into some real, some real trench warfare where you create the, you could, you could get one of those billboard it, quote, break down, end quote, in the middle of, I think it was Piccadilly Circus in London a few days before one of his concerts. For those people who haven't seen it, I think it's just called The Legend of Shep Gordon. But the Super Mench is the name of the documentary and it was done by Mike Myers of Wayne's world fame about

Starting point is 01:56:25 this incredible, eclectic, extremely eccentric and hilarious music manager. I suppose is what he would be. Talent manager named Shep Gordon. But yeah, I didn't think about the investor angle. That could be a little thorny.

Starting point is 01:56:40 What advice, how old are you now? I am 36. 36. What did, and Duolingo started how many years ago uh four four okay what advice would you give to your 30 year old self then so that would be two years before start Duolingo, make an Android app sooner rather than later. That would have been good advice for us to have. Is that just because of the market size or? It's crazy.

Starting point is 01:57:14 I mean, we're, um, you know, that was the last step we made. So we started, well, not technically. I mean, we, we didn't make a windows app after, but, um, we started with a website, then an iPhone app, then an Android app today 55 of our traffic is android um so we should have done android sooner um i guess one piece of it i probably would tell myself to work less to be honest i think i think that i i would tell myself to do that because there's a there's a point of diminishing returns yeah i've i've you know i've I've really gotten much better at this over the last year, and I think I still have. This is kind of one of the things I want to do this year.

Starting point is 01:57:51 It's really be better at not working all the time. I actually think I am more effective, not just efficient, obviously more efficient, but also more effective in general if I don't work all the time. And it's for a couple of reasons. One is like, personally, I just, I feel, you know, more rested, et cetera. But actually, I've realized that this is, you know, this is one of the things that is really helping me scale the company. It's, you know, it used to be the case that I really was on top of everything. And it actually helps when I'm not on top of things, uh, because other people really rise up. Um, and I think that that has, that is actually a good thing for Duolingo that I'm not working,

Starting point is 01:58:35 uh, all the time. And I think that that's probably, and I should have probably done that earlier. Uh, I probably would have had a, a, a more enjoyable life too. Do you think you will be able to work less by simply resolving to work less? And the reason I ask is that type A personalities and builders that I know are only able to do that if they displace work with other activities. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So you can't just say like, I'm going to just not, I'm just going to go home now. You can't quite do that.

Starting point is 01:59:09 That won't work. No, I just have to get into something else. So, you know, it's the type of thing I've gotten more into. I've gotten more into podcasts. I've gotten more into learning about different things. You know, I'm just trying to learn all kinds of different things. And I think that that's something. I actually want to start a separate project that is not a company of any form,

Starting point is 01:59:35 just to occupy myself more so during the weekends, so that I'm really spending less time on being on top of every single little thing at Duolingo. You could try indoor rock climbing. I bet in Pittsburgh they have one or two. They do. They have pretty awesome ones. Yeah. They're so much fun.

Starting point is 01:59:56 And you can do bouldering because it doesn't require a belay partner. And that's just a fantastic way to get out of your head. I've done it. I've done it. I've done it. In fact, I was doing it quite a bit. It's really great for strength. Yeah, it's outstanding. And it's also mobility, hip mobility, everything in it. And it, it requires you to do the opposite of what you do when seated at a desk or at a laptop. It causes you to look up and arch your

Starting point is 02:00:20 thoracic and use your legs. It's a fantastic exercise. And I'll give you a podcast recommendation also, which is Hardcore History. Hardcore History? Yeah. And start with, there's a series called Wrath of the Khans, which is about Genghis Khan. The Genghis guy?

Starting point is 02:00:38 Genghis Khan, as Dan Carlin, the host, says. But it is amazing. And you will get sucked into that. Most people do. It's just incredible. I'm writing this down. Yeah. When people ask me,

Starting point is 02:00:49 what's your favorite podcast? I say there are a lot of good podcasts out there. By far and away, no close second place. Hardcore History is my favorite. I like that. That is awesome. You know, I liked the first season of Serial.

Starting point is 02:01:01 Yeah. I mean, it's impressive any way you slice it. I like Hardcore History mm-hmm yeah it was i mean it's impressive any way you slice it i just yeah the i like hardcore history because not only is it it scratches the non-fiction addiction that i have the i should be learning something useful voice that nags when i'm doing fiction sometimes uh at this but at the same time you have entertainment in the form of Dan Carlin's storytelling and his what if, you know, imagine if, blah, blah, blah, X, Y, and Z. And simultaneously, you're learning lessons.

Starting point is 02:01:36 I think there's a lot to be learned from Genghis Khan. And not learned. The Geng. In terms of how he built and ran an organization. There are a lot of leadership principles. An organization that consisted of 10% of the world or something like that. Oh, it's just mind-boggling.

Starting point is 02:01:56 And in fact, I'm not going to mention names because these are in private conversations. They might not want to be named. But a number of the most impressive tech icons have recommended to me a book called Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and said it was their favorite book of the last year. So that's another one. Are these people really, are they trying to be the Genghis Khan of today? If they are in terms of dominance, then they're getting close or they already are. These are people who are like everybody listening would know these names.

Starting point is 02:02:27 That's great. Really, let's copy Genghis Khan. Yeah, I mean, minus the, like, raping and pillaging, probably a good idea. But nonetheless, hardcore history is a good way to keep your hands away from the keyboard, maybe for a few hours. And you could listen to it while you're rock climbing. Okay, so these are two things. What about a hobby? I really need like a hobby.

Starting point is 02:02:54 Hobby, I would suggest drumming. I would suggest some type of drumming. Yeah, it could be hand drumming. It could be like a djembe. Why is that? Well, and I'm projecting a little bit here personally, but drums are an instrument that you can have fun playing, relieve stress playing, and sound decent playing even if you suck balls.

Starting point is 02:03:23 And that is hugely reinforcing for someone like me who's very impatient i don't want to sound terrible on i see but you're not talking about like the big drum set for like a rock band no you could i mean you could do a five like a five piece which would be a you know you're talking about like the little little kind of ethnic thing that you i love that the guy the guy from Guatemala is calling this ethnic. Hey, listen. You could do something like a djembe, which is a really nice floor drum that's a hand drum

Starting point is 02:03:53 nonetheless, D-J-E-M-B-E. But I think that the... I think you would appreciate just knowing you on some level as I do. I would say you should actually take a lesson with the five piece because the coordination of hands and feet just utilizes your brain in a way that you probably haven't utilized it before. You will feel like you have runners high or you'll have a combination of fatigue Like you've just played a chess game or go or something like that.

Starting point is 02:04:27 Probably closer to go. You'll have that mental fatigue, but you'll also have a, the feeling of runner's high after say an hour long session on the drums where you're using your feet to work the high hat and the base and hitting the snare drum and so on. It's a, I think that is something that would be,

Starting point is 02:04:43 it would give you enough reinforcement early that you might continue to carve out time for it. So I would just prepay for, you know, five to 10 lessons with a good drum teacher. I think that would be a good hobby to try to tackle. So my objective would be to keep you off of laptops, right? So the rock band game is not enough for, for learning how to do this. It's, it's not as gratifying as the crack of a, of a nice snare drum and the thump of a, of a bass.

Starting point is 02:05:13 It's hard to compare. Just the kinesthetic feedback is, I think a integral piece of the entire experience. Well, next time we see each other, I will give you a concert, an amazing drumming concert. Yeah. Or you could, or you could try to pick up breakdancing.

Starting point is 02:05:28 We can have a breakdance battle. We could do that also. That, I assure you, I'm just not going to do. This will not happen. Maybe locking or popping. For those people who want to get into it but don't want to break their shoulders, popping and locking is not a bad way to go. Well, this has been

Starting point is 02:05:46 a lot of fun. I have just one or two more questions. Let's go with advice to your 20-year-old self. What advice would you give to your 20-year-old self or 25 you can choose? Not 30, but 20-year-old self. Yeah, 20 or 25 and you can

Starting point is 02:06:04 choose and then you can tell us where you were at the time. Um, wow. That's a, let's see, what would I have said to my, okay. To my 20 year old self, I probably would have said, um, how to run a business in college. There's probably some good classes. I mean, when I was in college, I was just, all I took was like,

Starting point is 02:06:33 you know, kind of, uh, either, either computer science classes or English classes, uh, for writing. I really liked kind of writing.

Starting point is 02:06:42 Um, but everything else, I just, I did not want to take any classes. And I should have taken advantage of... I'm sure there were some great classes on how to run a business. That's advice I would have

Starting point is 02:06:54 given to my 20-year-old self. Specifically, if you had to choose what aspects of running a business? You know, probably just, um, generally how to be a manager. Right. I think, I think that, that, um, that I think I I've had to learn, you know, I've had to learn over the years, kind of in the, through the hard way, how to be a manager. I think it's, it's it's been um you know giving

Starting point is 02:07:26 giving somebody feedback uh what especially when it's not positive is uh tricky uh firing somebody is is really i've learned i now know how to do this pretty well uh but i sucked the first few times i had to fire somebody in fact there was somebody that I had to fire like three times because they did not understand that I was trying to fire. Oh God. I was that bad. Terrible. I was terrible.

Starting point is 02:07:54 I've learned really the trick is to start the conversation by saying, I'm going to have to let you go. Like you just start that. And if you do that, then there's no – see, working up to it is bad. Because if you start by trying to build up an argument so that at the end you say, and that's why I'm going to have to let you go, the problem is they start arguing midway. Like, you say, well, you know, last week when you did that, they're like, no, that's not what happened. And then after they argue three or four of your points, your whole thing is gone. Your lead-up has been derailed.

Starting point is 02:08:29 It's over. And usually you don't have as much information as they do. And so you're not getting all the details right. And it's usually much better to just get it over with and then explain or whatever. So I've gotten much better at that. So yeah, classes on how to manage would have been great. Got it. For your 20-year-old self.

Starting point is 02:08:50 And then 25? Start working out. I did not start working out until I was like 31, 32. And that was, between ages 25 and 30, I gained 40 pounds and then I lost them again at around age 31. And that was, uh, that was not good. Kettlebell swings, folks, two handed kettlebell swings. Everybody's got time.

Starting point is 02:09:15 Everybody's got space for one kettlebell. Search the perfect posterior on Google. And I'm sure some torrented version of that version of that chapter in my book will pop up. What do you think of the seven-minute workout? This is a question I have. The app that I've seen people using? Is this the calisthenic workout that people go to? This is the thing that you search for.

Starting point is 02:09:36 It wasn't in the New York Times and everything. It's just the thing that you just search for seven-minute workout where it's like some push-ups and some sit-ups and a plank. Yeah, I'd have to check it out. I mean, I'm sure it's better. The best and some sit-ups and like a plank and yeah i'd have to check it out i mean i'm sure it's better the the best workout is the workout that you do right so if if the seven minute workout in concept in presentation gets people to actually follow the protocol then i'm all for it i don't have huge, I don't have any real familiarity with it, but suffice to say, you don't need to exercise for a long time to get into great shape. Losing fat is dietary. It's dietary driven. Like if you want to lose fat, you lose fat in the

Starting point is 02:10:16 kitchen, you build muscle in the gym. That's it. Period. End of story., at least from an effectiveness standpoint. So I would say if it's just a time restriction, I would actually go back to kettlebell swings. I think if you do kettlebell swings two or three times per week, 50 to 75 repetitions, building up to doing it in a single set, taking breaks as needed in the beginning. And let's say just arbitrarily, obviously, talk to your orthopedic surgeon before you do this. Yes, I have one of those. So you don't, or your PT trainer, whatever. I don't play a doctor on the internet. But generally speaking, women can start with a 35-pound kettlebell, men with a 53, if they're of sort of top of the bell curve weight. And, uh, if you do that, one building up to a total of say 75 reps and doing that Monday, Wednesday, Friday,

Starting point is 02:11:13 or even Monday, Friday, if you don't recover very well, you can get into incredible shape doing that. And it should not take you more than five to 10 minutes to complete the entire exercise. You're done. And the initial, say, 10 to 15 kettlebell swings with two hands serve as your warm-up, assuming you don't have any outstanding injuries. It's just a fantastic exercise. And there are videos online where I demonstrate basic technical pointers and whatnot because you want to do it correctly. But you can absolutely get in great shape. Uh, they're, they're also high with less than 10 minutes per

Starting point is 02:11:50 exercise session. Um, let me ask you another question now that I have you here. Um, what's the best way to get a six pack? Best way to get a six pack is to lose fat that's covering them up. And diet is going to be 99% of that. So really dieting? Dieting, meaning not caloric restriction, although a lot of people would argue this point and say that intermittent fasting or paleo or fill in the blank, any diet is really just caloric restriction in disguise. Even if they realize it. I disagree with that. A thousand calories of lard does not equal a thousand calories of Coca-Cola, does not equal a thousand calories of sugar. I mean, the body metabolizes and treats those substances very differently. And if you were to follow a paleo diet, for instance, I think this,

Starting point is 02:12:43 I mean, I'm biased, but I do think the slow carb diet, which is in the four hour body is designed first and foremost to have a high level of compliance and convenience. And maybe you sacrifice five to 10% of the fat loss you would experience with a strict paleo diet, but it's very easy to follow even if you're traveling. Yeah. This is the problem with diets and traveling. Oh my God. Yeah. So the slow carb diet is very easy. I mean, and there are people who absolutely have six packs and eight packs after following slow carb diet and following a minimal effective dose of exercise like kettlebell swings. You do need a base level of musculature underneath,

Starting point is 02:13:19 but we all have abs. They're just covered. That's kind of just there. Yeah, they're there. I guess it's what the rectus abdominis, that's the six pack, is there. But planks don't hurt, but the exercise is not going to burn the fat. The fat is going to go away through replacing your current default meals with better default meals. And it doesn't have to be difficult at all. And drinking enough water so that your liver is not preoccupied with dehydration is also very important. Oh, really? So drinking a lot of water, that's easy. That's easy. That's easy. I mean, that's not too terribly difficult to do. And if you're following a lower refined carbohydrate, lower starch diet, if you have hypertension, talk to your doctor,

Starting point is 02:14:05 but I will, and this is something I picked up from Kelly Starrett, actually, he was a very famous CrossFit guy. And this does make a lot of sense. It's sprinkling a little bit of salt, just a little pinch of salt into your water when you drink it. You won't notice the taste, but on these lower carbohydrate diets, I think it's for every, let me think about this, for every gram of glycogen, meaning carbohydrate that you store, I think you can hold four grams of water. So when you deplete yourself of glycogen or otherwise don't ingest a lot of carbohydrates, you tend to experience a lot of diuresis. You tend to pee a lot.

Starting point is 02:14:37 The water just goes straight through you. So a little bit of extra sodium will help you retain that, as will, say, potassium from avocados, but even avocados, people think of them as pure fat that they will like an avocado. I'm just guessing here, but probably eight grams of carbohydrates that will knock you out of say ketosis. If that's what you're trying to go for, but the nutshell answer is slow carb diet, kettlebell swings two or three times a week. And I think that you can get to a six pack without too much difficulty. You can definitely get to, uh, you know, 10 to 12% body fat. And for most people

Starting point is 02:15:12 that will show enough abs to make them happy. Although you can go lower if you want, just requires a lot more fine tuning. That that's good. That's great. I'm going to change my, I'm going to change my, my K for a six pack. Uh, last question is, do you have any ask or suggestion request for everybody listening? Oh boy. Um, I don't know if I do.

Starting point is 02:15:43 I don't, you know, there's the shameless plug of using Duolingo, but I, other than that, I don't have anything great. No great, no, no great, no great request for the masses. All right. Well, uh, my request then would be, can you let people know how to find you, uh, on the internet? How could they, how can they follow what you're up to? Of course, Duolingo.com. You can find Duolingo everywhere for people who want to check out the app.

Starting point is 02:16:10 Actually, before we get... ShitDuoSays. Is that the Twitter handle? ShitDuoSays is a pretty awesome Twitter handle. So, at ShitDuoSays for people who want to get a good laugh. Actually, I won't even explain what it is. They can just check it out. But where can people find you on social and on the internet

Starting point is 02:16:28 if they want to follow what you do? Yeah, on Twitter, it's Luis Von Ahn, at L-U-I-S-V-O-N-A-H-N. That's where I am on Twitter. I should tweet more. I just did a Quora thing yesterday. So I'm pretty... They have like their own version of an AMA on Quora now. And I just did a Quora thing yesterday so I'm pretty they have like their own version of an AMA

Starting point is 02:16:46 on Quora now and I just did that yesterday so I'm recently active on Quora you can just search for my name there and I guess on Facebook too slash Luis Von An on Facebook perfect well Luis always a pleasure.

Starting point is 02:17:05 And I look forward to drumming, breakdance, battling, and rock climbing next time we meet. With a six-pack. I will show it to you. With a six-pack. And thanks for making the time. All right. Excellent. Thank you.

Starting point is 02:17:18 And everybody listening, for links to books and so on, podcasts, blogs, and whatnot mentioned, you can go to the show notes, which are available for this episode, every other episode at 4hourworkweek.com, all spelled out, 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that

Starting point is 02:18:10 I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the, uh, the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.