The Tim Ferriss Show - #423: Rana el Kaliouby — AI, Emotional Intelligence, and The Journey of Finding Oneself

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

Rana el Kaliouby — AI, Emotional Intelligence, and The Journey of Finding Oneself | Brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs and "5-Bullet Friday""Embrace your emotions." — Rana el KalioubyA pioneer in Emotion AI, Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D. (@Kaliouby), is co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, and author of the new book Girl Decoded: A Scientist's Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology.A passionate advocate for humanizing technology, ethics in AI, and diversity, Rana has been recognized on Fortune's 40 Under 40 list and as one of Forbes' Top 50 Women in Tech. Rana is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a newly minted Young Presidents' Organization member, and co-hosted PBS series NOVA Wonders, in addition to appearing on the YouTube Originals Series The Age of A.I., hosted by Robert Downey Jr.Rana holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and a Post Doctorate from MIT.Please enjoy!This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Whether you are looking to hire now for a critical role or thinking about needs that you may have in the future, LinkedIn Jobs can help. LinkedIn is an active community with more than 675 million members worldwide. LinkedIn's platform screens candidates for the hard and soft skills you’re looking for, and puts your job in front of candidates looking for job opportunities that match what you have to offer.With LinkedIn, you can hire the right person quickly when you need them. And if you need to hire for healthcare or essential services, you can post your jobs for free. When it’s time to find and hire that right person, LinkedIn is here to help. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim to get started! Terms and conditions apply.This episode is also brought to you by “5-Bullet Friday,” my very own email newsletter, which every Friday features five bullet points of cool things I’ve found that week, including apps, books, documentaries, gadgets, albums, articles, TV shows, new hacks or tricks, and — of course — all sorts of weird stuff I’ve dug up from around the world. It’s free, it’s always going to be free, and you can subscribe now at tim.blog/friday.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests.For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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now. When it's time to find and hire that right person, LinkedIn is here to help. Just visit linkedin.com slash Tim. Again, that's linkedin.com slash Tim to post a job now. Terms and conditions apply. 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, 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. 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 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 anytime. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. 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,

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That's drinkag1, the number one. 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, 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. 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 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 anytime. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. This episode has video if you want to check it out on youtube.com forward slash Tim Ferriss, but audio only will still work. And I'll keep this intro short. I'm going to jump straight to the guest. My guest today is a pioneer in emotion AI, we'll define what that means, Rana El-Khalioubi, PhD, who's also co-founder and CEO of Affectiva and author of the new book, Girl Decoded, subtitled A Scientist's Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence

to Technology. A passionate advocate for humanizing technology, ethics, and AI, and diversity, Rana has been recognized on Fortune's 40 Under 40 list and as one of Forbes' Top 50 Women in Tech. Rana is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and co-hosted a PBS Nova series called Wonders. And she's also appeared on and appears in the YouTube original series, The Age of AI, hosted by Robert Downey Jr. Rana holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and a postdoc, it's a postdoctorate from MIT. You can find her on LinkedIn, Kaliubi, Twitter at Kaliubi, K-A-L-I-O-U-B-Y, by the way. Instagram at Rana L. Kaliubi, website, ranalkaliubi.com. Rana, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited. I am excited to have you on, and we have so much ground to cover. And I thought I would begin with a question that will hopefully open up a whole different doors, a whole different set of doors, I think, is the proper English expression that we could potentially walk through. And it's related to a book. This is Affective Computing, correct me if I'm getting any of the pronunciation wrong, by Rosalind Picard, P-I-C-A-R-D. How did this book come into your life? So I am Egyptian.

So I grew up in Cairo and around the Middle East. But at the time, this is like 1998, I had just graduated from computer science from the American University in Cairo. And my career plan at the time was to become faculty, like I wanted to teach. And so I knew to teach, I had to do my master's and PhD. It was all very calculated. And so I was looking for a thesis topic, and my fiancé at the time went on Amazon, and he said, oh, you know, there's this really interesting book by this MIT professor

called Rosalind Picard called Affective Computing, and we ordered it through Amazon. It took about three months to ship to Cairo. It got held in customs for reasons I don't really understand. But eventually, I got hold of the book and I read it. And, you know, I think it's safe to say that it changed my life because so the thesis in the book is that computers need to understand human emotions just the way people do. And I read the book, and I was just fascinated by this idea. And I made that my research topic, and it became my obsession, and it just really changed the trajectory of my life. What besides the thesis in the book had such an impact on you?

Or was it just that worldview, that perspective? Or was there more to the book or such an impact on you or was it just that that worldview that perspective or was there more to the book or more to the author yeah that's a great question um so let's talk about the author first so Roz is one of the few and I mean this was true back then it's still true today she's one of the few kind of female, you know, computer science, machine learning engineers, professors in the space. And, you know, I kind of learned about her over the years. I've eventually actually, so she ended up being my co-founder many years later, but there's a story around that. But essentially, I was just fascinated by her. And she, you know, she's a mom, she's's three boys I just thought she was like a rock star so that was kind of one part

of it but just the way she wrote the book and how she you know I'm very expressive as a human being and I just really like I think emotions really matter and are and the way we communicate non-verbally is very important and and it struck me that when we think of technology, that piece of how we communicate is completely missing. And I was like, oh yeah, like it seems so obvious. So I just got fascinated by the thesis. I got fascinated by the implications, like what happens when technology becomes kind of clued into how we communicate. That's going to open up a whole new world of possibilities. And I was intrigued by that.

So let's travel back to that point in time. You were with your then fiance. And this book is ordered. At the time, you're planning on becoming a teacher, right, a professor. Why were you on that track to begin with? I mean, take us back to Egypt at that time. Were there many women striving to be faculty members in similar departments? I'm assuming computer science or perhaps it was a different department. Maybe you could tell us more. Yeah. So I went to the American University in Cairo and I studied computer science as an undergrad. At the time, most of the faculty were guys, except for one female faculty, Dr. Hoda Hosni, which became my role model and my mentor.

And I just wanted to be like her. Like, she was awesome. She was, you know, very smart, very approachable, very fashionable. And I was like, ooh, I like that. Right. And, and I just wanted to be like her. And, and so I devised the plan. I was also, I mean, I'm a geek, I'm a geek and I'm proud of it. So I, I, I kind of devised the plan. I was like, okay, so I'll graduate top of my class, which I did. And then I was like, okay, I'll go get a master's and PhD abroad because that's what you do. And then I was like, okay, I'll go get a master's and PhD abroad

because that's what you do. And then I'll come back and, you know, I'll join, I'll join the faculty. Um, and so at the time, because I was getting married to my fiance and he had a company based in Cairo, coming to the U S was not an option cause it was way too far. So he was like, I'll let you go study in the UK cause it's kind of close enough. So I applied to Cambridge and got in. And that was kind of the impetus for going abroad and doing this, like focusing on this research. So when did you then end up going to the US? Was that a difficult conversation with your family or your then-fiancee? Walk us through how that happened. Because it doesn't sound like that would have been just a hop, skip, and a jump, two-second conversation.

So, walk us through that experience. Yeah. So, okay. So, then I moved to Cambridge, right? Cambridge University in the uk not not cambridge massachusetts uh um and i the real cambridge the real cambridge the original cambridge um and we i got married so basically i got married and then got the scholarship to go study at cambridge and my husband so he's now my husband, right? Well, he's my ex now, but at the time he was my husband. He was very supportive. He was like, you got to go.

This is your dream. I'll support you. We'll have a long distance relationship. Now my family, my parents and his parents were like horrified. They were like, what? You can't do that. So, so I do like to give him credit for, for, for making this happen and being supportive. So I do like to give him credit for making this happen and being supportive. So I ended up in Cambridge and he was in Cairo. And we did that for five years. And towards the end of my PhD, Roz Picard was visiting Cambridge, UK to give a talk there. And I ended up meeting her in person. And we totally hit it off.

And she said, why don't you come work with me at MIT as a postdoc? And I was like, oh my God, this is like a dream come true. I've been following you like forever. And this is why, you know, like I told her my story and, but then I caveated. I said that just, you know, you know, I've, I've been married for the last five years and have had a long distance relationship. So I have to go back to Cairo. Otherwise, and I actually really said that I said, otherwise, you know, in Islam, because I'm Muslim, my husband can marry up to four women. And if I don't show up, eventually he'll just like marry more women. So I said it half jokingly, right? So she was like, that's fine. Just commute from Cairo.

And so I commuted from Cairo to Boston for a good three or four years, going back and forth between MIT and Cairo. How often did you go back and forth? Or how often did you go back to Cairo, maybe is a better way to ask it? So initially, I would spend a couple of months in Cairo and then go spend like a few weeks in Boston. And then I would move with my kids to Boston over the summer. So the summer break, we just all go there. And so initially, that was okay. So this was between 2006 to 2009, it was okay. Things began to kind of really fall apart when I decided to start the company. So at MIT, we started to get a lot of interest in the technology. And just being at

MIT, they really encourage you to spin out, right? So in 2009, she and I started Affectiva. And I was literally spending two weeks in car to in boston two weeks or two weeks in boston it was insane and that was when like just it was out of balance everything was out of balance it was tough it was tough and and and you know i'm divorced now so you know you can imagine how that didn't go very well. It was just, it was, I think in retrospect, it was just not a very healthy lifestyle. And I, and I, and I, yeah, I wouldn't want to be in that place again. I wouldn't want others to be in that, like, talk to you publicly about that time. Yeah.

Well, let's, let's hop around chronologically a little bit. We're going to come back, of course, to starting the company in that decision. But for people who don't have any real firsthand exposure to the Middle East, much less Egypt, for instance, what was it like growing up in Egypt? And based on at least some of my reading, you, for instance, wore a hijab for quite some time, and we're not talking a short period of time. Maybe you could also speak to that. Yeah. Yeah. And it sounds like you've spent some time in the, you've been to Jordan, it sounds like you've spent a little bit of time. In Jordan, I've spent some time in a few places in the Middle East, but not in Egypt.

Not in Egypt. And when I was, we chatted a little bit before we started recording, and I only have a few words here and there in Arabic, but it's Levantine Arabic, right? It's what you would run across in Jordan or Lebanon. And I remember, though, having many people recommend that I not study the sort of standard Arabic, textbook Arabic, but that I study Egyptian Arabic, because all of the, as they put all the entertainment and movies that I might want to consume would be in Egyptian Arabic. Needless to say, I didn't get that far. But I haven't spent any time in Egypt.

Well, your Arabic's pretty good. And you're right about the Egyptian accent. That's kind of the most common. But I think the key thing is, like, there's no one Middle East and there's no one, you know, form. I grew up in a family that's kind of in an interesting way, quite conservative, but also quite liberal. So, my parents were very pro-education they sent us to the you know they put all their money towards our schooling and they made a point during the summers that we travel abroad and experience kind of other cultures and i think that's why like i was so comfortable moving from one country to another and ending up in the united states um what did your parents do sorry to interject but what did your parents do? Sorry to interject, but what did your parents do professionally?

Okay, so my parents met So my dad taught computer programming in the 70s And my mom was probably the first female programmer in the Middle East She attended his class and he hit on her And they ended up getting married So I guess I should give them a little bit of credit For ending up being a computer scientist. I'm sure they had something to do with that. So, they both, my mom was a computer programmer at the National Bank of Kuwait. So, we were in Kuwait for a while.

And my dad, he's always worked in technology. And culturally, what was it like where you grew up? Or within the family, you said that they were, for instance, on one hand, very, I'm not sure what the right, cosmopolitan, perhaps, in their perspective and drive related to education. And what were the other ingredients in the household? There's definitely clear gender roles. So even though my mom worked her entire life, she was not allowed to ever talk about her job post. She would leave work at 3 p.m., be home at whatever, 4 p.m.

when we got back from school, and that was it. She was never allowed to take a conference call at home in the evening, never allowed to travel for work. And I didn't realize that until I was an adult. Like I just assumed this was the way it was. But it did hamper her, you know, career progression. And it was this implicit understanding that this is your role, this is my role, and we all stick in our lanes. So that was interesting.

We were, for example, I have two younger sisters. So we're three daughters. And I was not allowed to date until after college. So very, very strict. And I basically married the first guy I met, right? So that's interesting. I have a debate with my 16-year-old daughter right now who's a junior in high school about, she's like, but mom, we're in the US now. Can you adopt a different set of rules so um anyway so so there's that too right um so it's kind of interesting

right very strict very conservative but also like like go kick ass kind of thing so how did you relate to for instance the not dating until college i think that's what you just said, if I'm remembering correctly. At the time, were you accepting of that, resistant to that, embrace? Did you embrace that? How did you relate to it at the time? I was like, I called myself a nice Egyptian girl. I never challenged my parents. It's like the weirdest thing. I just like, you know, lots of trust. And, you know, they trusted me. I trusted them. I never challenged the rules. I just was super obedient. And I was always looking for like the gold star, right? Like I was the gold star daughter. Yeah. And so now I'm kind of trying to like redefine what that really means.

And for people who are maybe thinking to themselves, I can't believe Tim asked about a hijab. That's so stereotypical. How dare he? First of all, it's based on my own research and reading in preparation for this conversation. Could you speak to, as I understand it, your decision to wear a hijab and when you wore it? And why you stopped? Yes. Yeah. So this is this is actually like, I am glad you asked that because a lot of people just assume that I was forced to wear it. I was actually one of the first women in my family to decide to put it on. And so, even my family were like, really? You're going to wear a hijab? And I did that because it was a time in my life where I became very religious and very spiritual, and I wanted to do it, and I asked my husband.

How old were you at the time? I was probably like in my 20s. Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, this was 22 or 23. Just gotten married, was just about to move to Cambridge. And I decided actually what happened is one of my dad's really close friends got a heart attack and just died all you know, unexpectedly. And I don't know, it just really hit me. And so I decided to put it on and I wore it for 12 years, you know, through Cambridge, through MIT. And then in 2012, a whole host of factors, right? And so when I wore it, like, you you know when I first wore it actually and moved to Cambridge that was during September 11th and so my parents thought I was like you know this Muslim in in the UK they were concerned for my safety and so I actually switched the hijab for a hat so I wore a hat for like a you know a few months in Cambridge because you you're supposed to wear it like everywhere so I would show up to class in a hat and just like it was like really awkward and then

i just decided to like go back to my hijab and and i think people were often always respectful i never felt discriminated against and um and i just felt like people were curious right like i'd get all sorts of like interesting questions but yeah 2012 i had to take it off what was the host of factors if you don't mind me prying a little bit like what what suddenly or not so suddenly maybe it was over a period of time but what what were the things that prompted you taking it off i think so at the time i was doing the commute between boston and cairo, right? And I just, I don't know, I realized that the closest people, my closest friends and my closest contacts in the US were not Muslims, but they were awesome people. And we shared the same core values, right? Like,

yeah, maybe they didn't pray five times a day, but they were very honest, high integrity, hardworking, like all the things I cared about. And so I just started thinking like all the assumptions around religion and acceptance of the other, I don't know, I just had a ton of questions. So that was one factor. And then the political situation in Egypt was quite challenging. That was at the time where the Muslim Brotherhood were taking over and they were like rolling back all of like the women's rights and all of that and so i was like oh that's not my islam like that's not what i subscribe to and i was going through the divorce and um it just felt like i need a rana 2.0 it just didn't feel like me anymore you know i just wanted to like look cool you know feel and. And, and it's quite actually controversial to take it off.

And so I was really, really scared what people, you know, what people around me would think. So there was a lot of fear. It took a lot of courage to take that step. But yeah, I did it. And I would just tell people, it's the same me, right? I didn't really fundamentally change at the core. Sure. Thank you for answering that. I think it's so important. We're going to get, of course, to, I mean, very quickly, in fact, we're going to jump around a bit stochastically here. I'm sure I'm using that word incorrectly, but nonetheless, here we go. But I really find that at least these types of conversations with longer format allow you to begin to understand the connective tissue and sort of subcurrents that have formed people as they then turn into these

people on the marquee who are doing these incredible things professionally. So I appreciate you sharing. I think it's important to have that background. And let's talk about one of many things that jumped out at me as I was prepping for this, and I know that this is not in order, but using, if I'm getting this correct, emotion, AI, or affective, affective, let's see if I can do this correctly, computing to help those with autism or who are on the spectrum of, I guess it would be, this is going to sound redundant, but autistic spectrum disorder. I'm not sure what the proper kind of DSM terminology is right now. I would love to get there. And on the way there, could you just define what artificial intelligence is for those who may be confused because it's used so frequently,

often misused, in the context of what you do, and then what we're going to be talking about is one example of that, what is artificial intelligence? So artificial intelligence is this, I guess, field of study that is trying to replicate human intelligence, right? But if you look at human intelligence, and then there's ways to affect that. So, for example, machine learning is a subcategory within the field of computer science, which allows you to implement artificial intelligence. So it's kind of a mechanism to get you to artificial intelligence. Now, there's all sorts of forms of artificial intelligence. So it's kind of a mechanism to get you to artificial intelligence. Now, there's all sorts of forms of artificial intelligence. The part that I find, you know,

the most exciting is this idea that, okay, if you look at human intelligence, we have IQ, which is your cognitive intelligence. And of course, it's really important. But we also know from years and years of research that your emotional intelligence is equally important. People who have higher EQs or emotion quotients, they're just like more likable people. They're more persuasive. You can get them to, you know, follow you and get inspired. And actually people with higher EQs are just like better partners and they're better, you know, better leaders and everything. So, so I think that this is true for technology that interacts with people as well.

So it's not just, so I think technology that's like interacting with us on a day-to-day basis, like your device or social robot or Siri or whatever, Alexa, need to have both IQ and EQ. And the conversation has always focused very heavily on the IQ. And I'm like an advocate for bringing EQ into the equation. Let's use that as a segue. So the technology that you ended up working on as it relates to autism and many other things, But how did that come about? In what form did it take? So, you know, when I first got to Cambridge, so here was, you know, I was like a new new bride, you know, just like my first experience living away from my family. And I get to Cambridge, and I just like focus on work, right on coding. And so I had this like,

aha moment that, oh, my god, I was spending more time on my laptop than I was with any other person. But this laptop was completely oblivious to how I was feeling, right? But I think even worse, I had this realization that a lot of our communication is mediated through technology. Often, the most kind of ubiquitous form of communication is actually through text, which if you look at how humans communicate, less than 10% of how we communicate is text, is the words we use. 90% is nonverbal. Facial expressions, hand gestures, vocal intonations, and all of that I felt like just got lost

in how I communicated, particularly with my husband at the time. And I just felt like I wanted to change that. So I wanted to build emotion AI to make human computer interfaces better, but ultimately, it's all about human connection. I want to make sure that as we move to a more digital universe, we're not losing our EQ, right? We still can reserve and even maybe augment our emotional intelligence. And this is where autism came in because it was a clear example. It's almost an extreme example of people who struggle with EQ and where technology could be like a hearing aid, like people who wear hearing aids to augment their hearing.

And I was like, what if you could build an emotional prosthetic that could help augment your EQ? What did it look like? Well, it looked like Google Glass. This was before Google Glass existed. So say I have autism. I would put on these glasses. They had little cameras.

The camera would point outward at whoever I was interacting with. So say I'm talking to you and it would say, Oh, Tim looks really interested in what you're saying. He's nodding his head or Tim looks bored to death. Maybe you should stop talking and like ask a question or something. You don't look like you're bored to death. I hope not.

That sort of thousand yard stare, like dumb deer look is just my standard, so don't take it personally. reinforcement every time they even looked at a face because individuals on the autism spectrum like find it really really hard to even engage in a face-to-face conversation because it's so overwhelming and this would be visual feedback on the the lens of the glasses that they would see like it or was it audio feedback what type of feedback did they receive um we did this was back in 2006 so it was even like before smart you know it was like really early on so we had the feedback ought to be auditory through a bluetooth kind of like headset whatever earpods yeah and um but now we work company called brainpower and they actually use Google Glass and our technology, and the feedback is visual through the Google Glass heads-up display.

So this is fascinating to me on so many levels. And one expression that jumped to mind as you were describing autism, and just for simplicity, we'll use the the term autism being an extreme case to study it comes from i want to think a documentary called objectified about design and industrial design and there's an expression that i want to say someone from frog design used and that is the extremes inform the mean but not vice versa in the sense that by starting with the extreme cases so in this case in the in the doc it was designing i think hedge clippers or something for say the paraplegic and the morbidly obese if you if you solve for those edge cases then you'll find applications for the people in the middle so this use of technology with people with an autism diagnosis is interesting to me.

First for that, just that like corollary. And then second, I'd love to know if you observed any learning curve that carried over to non-augmented reality. augmented reality in the sense that were, did you observe anyone with autism after being given positive feedback for certain behaviors, right? If we're looking at sort of shaping of behavior, did you see that carry over or were they much like someone with a hearing aid dependent on the hearing aid? That is like the key question. So we totally saw improvement in the kids we were working with while they wore the device. We didn't get round to testing through this particular grant, whether this learning generalized right beyond the device. brainpower this company is totally focused on. So they've now deployed about 400 of these Google Glass devices. And the key question is, is this an augmentation device or is it a learning device? And can you get off of it? And I don't know the answer to that. It's still very early days. I would, I mean, this is pure speculation on my part, which is maybe irresponsible,

because obviously the studies need to be done. But I would imagine, I would imagine, I would be very surprised if there isn't some degree of carryover. I mean, assuming that, you know, working memory and memory consolidation and these various things are functioning in these subjects. I would be astonished if there weren't some degree of carryover. I mean, if they can understand the feedback loop, it would sort of imply to me. I mean, if they can understand the feedback loop, it would sort of imply to me. Right, right. Once you get that feedback loop working,

I think you're right. I mean, there are like, I'll never forget this. One of the kids who we worked with at the school in Providence, he would never make any face eye contact with me. And this one particular day, like after six months of this training program, he lowers, he had this iPad between me and him. And then he lowered it and he made direct icons.

And it was just this powerful moment of human connection. And I don't think you can unlearn that or undo that. Do you know what I mean? I'm sure for him, I hope for him, he can build on that. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. I hope for him, he, you know, he can build on that. Yeah. Amazing. I can't wait to see what comes of that as they deploy more units and gather more data. When did you... Oh, sorry, go ahead. Well, I was going to ask you, because it's kind of an adjacent area, but I don't know if you were planning to go there at some point, the applications generally to mental health, right? Like depression and... Sure. Yeah, because that's an area that I'm very passionate about. And I feel like

this technology can really help. Well, let's jump right into it. I think that's a great place to go. So where could this or where is this being deployed? Where could it be deployed? And we could focus on the mental health if you want to focus on that first, we could certainly touch on that first. Just because I mean, it's not directly related to autism, but it was this realization that, oh, my goodness, in the mental health space, the gold standard and, you know, when you go to a doctor today, they don't they don't ask you like, Tim, what's your temperature or blood pressure? They just measure it, right? But in mental health, the gold standard is still, like, a survey, you know, on a scale from 1 to 10.

Like, how depressed are you? Are you 6 or 8, right? Or, like, how suicidal are you? And that's, like, how accurate that could be. How do you answer that, right? Right. And also, like, you see a doctor, like, what, once a week? Like, what happens in all the instances when you're not with that person?

And that's really powerful data, right? So I feel like this kind of technology, I mean, and then the other piece of it is we're always on our devices. So that's an opportunity to collect your baseline and then know if you deviate from it, because we know that there are very strong facial and vocal biomarkers of things like depression and suicidal intent and Parkinson's. So I feel very strongly that there are applications where this technology can just bring objective data to quantifying these things.

That strikes me as so important, as you noted, because we're really still in the stone ages when it comes to psychiatric diagnostics related to most of what we would consider mental health or mental health disorders, right? And what you're describing allows you to gather a baseline over time, right? Longitudinally, you can gather a tremendous amount of data because my baseline is going to be different from half the people I met in Silicon Valley who were bordering on the spectrum or on the spectrum. I mean, the facial expression baseline is going to be, and the tonality baseline is going to be very different. So you need, much like you would with blood tests and biomarkers, you need to know what your baseline range is. And as you mentioned, the surveys are so problematic. I remember recently I did a number of experiments.

These were with sort of biochemical interventions. It's a long story that I won't get into right now. But in the first session, they said, well, from zero to 10, how anxious are you feeling? And I said, I have literally no idea how to answer that. Right, because that's a five, right? Yeah, but I know I'm going to be coming in for five sessions, so I'm going to give you a five now, and then the next time I come in,

at least we can figure out if I'm feeling more or less. But if I start at a two, then where am I going to go if I'm feeling less anxious? So let me start with a five. But it becomes very muddy. And cognitive. You thought through. It's not really how anxious, it's you kind of.

Yeah. I'm verbalizing this. I'm sort of, yeah, I'm verbalizing the whole thing. So that's exciting. What other applications are you most excited about? And is it mostly focused on recognition of facial characteristics at this point? The focus, I mean, our main product is basically mapping your, like using computer vision to understand what your face is saying. We've also added voice, like vocal intonations as well.

And it's a quite complex problem, as I'm sure you'd imagine right like you know i'm sure we can think of situations where you've misread people's facial expressions right so it's i it's not just about like detecting a smile it's like what type of smile like what else is happening on the face are you like furrowing your eyebrows are you squinting are you smirking? All of that. So the idea is to take all of that information and infer how's the person feeling or what are they thinking? And the applications, I mean, we're focused as a company, we're focused on two particular industries.

One is market research. So just kind of trying to understand how do consumers emotionally engage with products and services and content? So when they listen to your podcast, are they like rolling their eyes or are they like? That's 50% for sure. But how are they emotionally engaging with content? So that's a key question. And that, of course, drives a lot of consumer behavior like word of mouth or you know purchase decisions and things like that

and then so that's one area um and then the other area where we're very focused on is is the automotive industry so detecting things like driver fatigue if you're texting while driving or you know distraction um and then there's applications in the robo-taxi world when we get there. Robo-taxi meaning autonomous vehicles? Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, we're gonna come back to autonomous in a minute. But Have you had companies or people reach out to you for instance, analysis of micro expressions, if that's even a real term, I've heard it used, related to truth versus lying? And the reason I ask is that I have a friend who I went to school with, so a classmate, who has ended up working with former people from the intelligence community at a firm,

and their sole job is to watch political announcements, earnings announcements, et cetera, to try to parse, as humans, what they believe is true and what they believe is untrue. And there are companies that pay, and I'm sure governments that pay, lots of money for their interpretation. But you might say to yourself, well, that's interesting also because at one point in time, humans were the best chess players in the world, and now computers are. Have you had

people reach out to you for those types of applications? The answer is yes. So first of all, microexpressions is a real term and it represents, so when you are lying, basically there's this leak, like a facial expression leak. It's usually like a very short-lived, subtle, like fleeting facial expression, like an eye twitch or a lip twitch. And with the right frame rate, like if you're using a high-speed camera, you can actually detect that, right? Like, so our technology can totally do that today. Now, that doesn't mean that we do that.

So we have a very, we're very values-driven. You know, our first use case was autism. And I think the whole thesis of the company and my mission is to just bridge the connection gap between people. And so we have very clear values around opt in and privacy. of potential funding and business basically from the government that wanted us to pivot towards this lie detection and surveillance universe. And it was, sometimes it was hard. Like there was a time when we almost run out of money as a company and we had this opportunity to take almost $40 million from an intelligence agency. And we had to think hard about it because we didn't know if we had an alternative.

So it could have meant the end of this whole Affectiva journey. But it just didn't, it's not at all why we started the company and it did not match our, like our North Star, you know? And it just, I just, so anyway, so we veered away from that and

we were able to raise less money but from investors who we felt like shared our vision for where we could take this well i commend you for that and that's hard as hell to do especially when you might face an existential financial threat as a startup. Exactly. And I suspect we'll probably come back to the sort of light versus dark, utopian versus dystopian later. We might not. But I think this is a good time to hop back to autonomous vehicles, self-driving cars.

And that is in part because from my understanding, and I'm not a computer scientist, but speaking to people in Silicon Valley when I was there, and certainly speaking to technologists now, that many of the questions that used to be thought exercises and say, philosophy classes, epistemology 101, etc., or ethics 101, the trolley scenario, right, where you have to choose between killing one person of one type or five people of another type. Let's just say one elderly person or five elderly versus one school child, et cetera. These types of decisions are now decisions that on some level need to actually be thought about and coded into how a vehicle behaves. And I bring that up because in some respects, I suppose many people would think of emotions as not necessarily the final frontier, but something that seems innately human, difficult for computers to understand. And so I wonder, what have you learned in trying to teach computers how to understand emotions or view emotions about your own emotions? How has that impacted, if at all, how you relate to your own emotions or expression?

Yeah, a lot. By the way, I was not expecting that to be the question. I thought it was going to be an autonomous vehicles question. It was a bit of a left turn. So it's not the perfect segue, but we'll work with it. Yeah. Yeah. It's been tough because I just shut out my emotions for the long. I mean, it's really ironic, but I just grew up in a very like we work hard. We like no nonsense. And so, you know, I just shut out my emotions and I didn't acknowledge it to others. So I always looked like I was strong and like always like bubbly and happy and just never, ever shared or showed my true emotions. But I also think it's even worse than that. I think I never acknowledged my own emotions to myself until quite recently, actually.

When I was going through a divorce and moving to the United States with my kids as a single mom and starting the company, there was just a lot going on. And I took on journaling. And I journal a lot. And that's where I just started like, just like really embrace embracing my emotions, like the good and the bad and the ugly, right? And just getting it all out there um and i just learned a lot about you know what what it looks like and what it feels like to have these emotions um and so and so in a in a really interesting way this journey of figuring out how to teach machines kind of a range of emotions is also like a journey for a personal journey for me to learn about my own emotions and and accept them and and even share them with others like i've you know i've i've

kind of made like a 360 way or 180 whatever like where i started as being this kind of very like there's always walls and barriers around me and i and now I'm like taking those down and I feel like it's been amazing because when you share with people, people reciprocate and what I've often felt like, oh, nobody else in the universe feels the same way. I'm wrong. When I, when I share people are like, oh my God, like this resonates so much with me. I've been through something similar. And just this builds this amazing connection.

So, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question. No, it does. It does. Are there any, what do you think are, and we're going to come back to the journaling for sure. What are any misconceptions that people have about emotion? I don't know if there are, I don't know if there are any, but how would you respond to that? Yeah. So when, yeah, so when we first started Affectiva, Roz and I were out raising money for the company, right? And so we were these two women scientists raising money

from a male-dominated Silicon Valley, which is where we did most of our pitching. And we were pitching an emotion company. Yeah, Sand Hill Road, lots of blue button downs. Exactly. And so we would avoid using the word emotion at any cost. That's why we actually called the company Affectiva, because affect is a synonym for emotion, but it doesn't have the same kind of feministic connotations of emotion, like who needs emotions. And so we would avoid talking about it like ever. It's the E word. You never bring up the E word. But I think the universe, I think the world has moved from that point.

I mean, this was 20 years ago. Well, I started researching in the space 20 years ago. We pitched, you know, we started Affectiva 10 years ago. I think now there's more realization that emotions matter. Emotions drive our decisions in good ways and in sometimes irrational ways. Emotions are at the center of how we empathize and connect and learn and memory, right? Like, I think I do actually realize like businesses, but also just the average Joe, like has more respect for emotions. So that's been good.

Well, let's talk about Sand Hill Road for a second. And I'll describe Sand Hill Road for folks who might not know it. And they're kind of like the Iron Bank in Game of Thrones. If you want money, chances are, at least this was certainly true in the 90s and the early 2000s, it spread out more. There are more financial options. But if you want the highest density of people who can write big checks and who have prestigious firm names, then Sand Hill Road is this one spot where you have just office next to office next to office next to office next to office. Based on some of my reading, you also, I don't know at what point, but had your son, Adam, with you, right? Right. And so I would love for you to speak to what that experience was like number one and then number two what worked in the pitch or like what what did you find

actually grabbed people what what was it in the pitch or in the deck whatever you you might remember from the presentation that worked i remember yeah okay so so this is 2009 and we decide we we were getting so much commercial interest in the technology and so i originally thought the solution was to just hire more phd students in the lab and the lab director at the time frank moss Moss, said, no, no, no, no, this is not research. You got to leave the lab, like start a company. So we put together a pitch deck and we had a lot of, like, we were very lucky. We had a lot of mentors at MIT who would like poke at it and say, no, no, no, this doesn't work, like iterate. Anyways, we were eventually ready. And in the fall of 2009 we headed to the bay area and to do our sandhill road show and we just i mean we were able to get all the meetings we wanted so that was great um but i showed up with

my six-year-old six-month-old son adam and um we had lined up a babysitter to take him on during the day when we were presenting. But this one particular day, she bailed on me. She called me in the morning. She's like, I'm not feeling well, can't take him. I'm like, what? And so you're not going to ditch an investor meeting. So I show up with him in the car seat, and I walk in, and there was this very nice-looking, of kind looking assistant at the front desk.

And I said, hey, can you keep an eye on him? He's a really good baby. We're just going to go have the meeting inside. And and, you know, I was I was and she didn't have an option, really. Like I wasn't asking her for permission. I was here you go like take him um it was good it worked it worked out he was he was well behaved i mean so you just make it work right um and actually we hired our first ceo that way too we had dinner with with this guy who again in the bay same trip bay area he was an introduction through one of our investor potential investors and i showed up with adam and i was like do you mind like i don't have anything i don't know where to leave him and he was like no it's fine i have three boys it's okay and so i was like okay he's a good guy we're gonna hire you um so that was that was that that was that i just had to like make it work. Right. And then on the pitch, like what worked for the pitch, we had live demos of the technology. So we would show up with an actual live device that could measure your emotions. It would track your expressions in real time. So you'd see a real time kind of read out of your facial expressions. And we always,

always, I mean, people were just fascinated by the technology. They didn't know it existed. It would always open up people's minds to potential applications. Like people would say, oh, if you thought about using it in retail or like, you know, you know, automotive or dating, like they would just like, it would just get people's creative juices flowing um so i think that worked um but i don't think that it was enough to get people over the oh my god like you are so different everything's so different right like women scientists i wore the hijab at the time um emotions like it was just it was like too alien i think um so it was tough who who got a lot of no's yeah so you got you got a lot of no's who if you're comfortable saying i have no idea but i would imagine it's somewhere in the

in the public record who ended up who ended up saying yes and why do you think they said yes instead of all the contrast all the no's um so our first very first check came from uh the vollenberg family of sweden very wealthy family very philanthropic and and just had a lot of active investments the the the main person there peter vollenberg knew roz from before and had basically told her anytime you need money just call me up so she did that he invested um but we were able to raise money from kleiner perkins so mary meeker was on our board for a while she was awesome um so we did we did end up you know raising money from from silicon valley essentially um well not just silicon valley but for people who don't know uh youiner Perkins is considered one of the blue chips. And I mean, that's top tier.

Yeah. Yeah. And at the time, they had just made their investment in Spotify, and they could really see how your emotions and understanding your emotions could drive music selection and just user experience in general. So they saw that potential. And Mary specifically, I think she still does this every year, puts out her sort of annual,

I don't know how to properly describe it, what would be like trend forecast. I don't know the proper descriptor to use. Clearly, I'm not fully on top of it. But if people look up Mary Meeker, M-E-E-K-E-R, very, very impressive woman. And why do you think, well, I guess you've already in part answered this. Was it a fast yes for Kleiner Perkins or did it take a while to court them? Actually, that was an inbound from Selena Chow, who is uh she heads up the horizons um invest venture fund

which is the venture fund for lika shang who's this like super you know top billionaire in china and she emailed us out of the blue and said i want to invest in you guys and we were like but we're not raising we had just raised you know we had just raised a round of funding she was like i don't care i'm just going to invest in you. Okay. She's awesome. She sounds awesome. So we met her, and she co-invests with Mary often. So we met both of them in the Spotify offices.

I think it was in New York. And they were just amazing. Like, you know, like aside from everything, I was like, wow, these two women are just powerhouses. So they were really, you know, they just made it happen. It was amazing. That's excellent. I will say this is not my typical experience raising money. That was an outlier.

Yeah. Well, I think they're really, really good investors who can see where the puck is going are outliers to begin with, right? So you're just not going to run into that many. And one of the common traits I've seen, particularly with really, I don't want to call it pure technology play, but something that is deeply technical, the investors who are best at that will often reach out to authors of white papers and say, hey, I know you haven't built a company, but you should, and I want to give you all the money. Right. You shouldn't probably listen to them, right? Yeah. A lot of them are really, really good. You mentioned dating. Could you speak to that

for a second? Because putting aside the truth, not truth application, that was one that did jump to mind, partially because I want to say I at some point read a report of some psychologist, maybe it was a behavioral psychologist who could look at video footage of couples and predict with some unbelievable high percentage hit rate, like 95% accuracy, whether they would still be together a year later or 10 years later or whatever it was. I can't recall the exact specs on that. What do you think the applications are for dating or could be or do you think that's is that a fool's errand i i think there's definitely a play there so the guy you're you're talking about is john gottman and he focuses on a couple's therapy and you're right

so he was just from like watching you know a few seconds of video of a couple kind of interacting with each other he'll look for expressions like an upper lip razor, which is an expression of contempt. And he's able to predict, like, if they're getting divorced, or will they be able to work through that? But let's like, back up, right? Like dating, right? I think there's huge potential there. I mean, I think maybe that's like, maybe that's the killer app or whatever. Because when you're seeing people's profiles, you subconsciously, like per cop, if somebody looks interesting, or you're like, right, you have all these like subconscious expressions. And if you are able to capture those, I think that could be really fascinating.

But I think the real killer feature would be if you're able to take all of my nonverbals as I'm going through all these profiles or even like as you start engaging with somebody online and turn it into a, will we have chemistry when we meet in the real world? Because that's the key question, right? And so if you can use all of that information and turn it into a predictor of, yeah, level of chemistry, like butterfly effect when you meet a person in the real IRL, I think that's really interesting. So I haven't figured out how to do that, but I think there's a lot of application. No, I want to talk. I don't know.

I do agree, yeah. I mean, I think it could be a huge application and I don't know what form it would take precisely, but if you imagine something like a, showing my age here maybe, but you have effectively a Tinder or Pandora where you're summing up summing down and then over time based on the emotion ai analysis of those profile pics or better yet video if there

were short video clips maybe exactly then you could you could effectively create a signature of attraction right or a signature of excitement or a signature of fill in the blank that is read by the camera on your laptop or on your phone and yeah i think people would pay for that certainly i mean let's just say you had a dating app and there was a five dollar pro feature per month that added that capability on top of your normally static non-interactive kind of personal you as user do all the heavy lifting version right that's that's i think that's something a lot of people would pay for uh so i find that personally very, very interesting. I mean, I'm very happy with my girlfriend.

Or maybe somebody, somebody in your audience is going to take it on. Yeah, exactly. I pay for it. So there you go. We have two, two, two. A proven market of two is larger than a lot, a lot of more than a lot of startups have when they, when they get going. Uh, let's's let's talk about the journaling you mentioned the journaling uh i'd love to hear about the journaling and

anything else that you do to ground yourself or keep yourself centered when things are difficult because you've and we may come back to this, but you've, you've had tough times. You've had challenging times. You've had a lot on your plate at once. Could you speak to the journaling and any other practices that you have that have helped you? I think you journal too, right? I'm pretty sure I've heard you talk about that. Yeah. So I use an app called day one and um i started i've now been journaling i would say eight or nine years pretty consistently

i find that it first of all it's a way of just letting it all out right so i journal very openly i just like you know hopefully this my journal will never get hacked because if it does i'm in trouble all my secrets are in this journal um and i can't just hide it under my bed um it's out there in the cloud so anyway so so i just i just journal very openly interestingly a while ago i went back back and looked at the most frequently occurring word that I use, and lonely was up there. Fear was another one. So a lot of fear, a lot of loneliness. So it's a way of getting it out there.

But what I also find interesting is I often log celebrations. So I'll say, you know, I am grateful for my kids. I'm grateful for like, everything's falling apart, but you know what? I'm in good health. I'm grateful for that. I always something like however big or small that I, and I just acknowledge, I try to celebrate something. So that helps. So I guess the third way the journal is very powerful in my experience is I look back at all these times when it was really challenging. And when I felt like, oh, my God, I might not get through this. And I look back and I was like, it worked out. Like when we were moving to the U.S. with my two kids and newly divorced, like life's falling apart.

My parents are like, you can't do this. You're going to fail. The kids are going to be miserable. And I write all of that, like a lot of fear, a lot of fear, a lot of fear. And then we moved over here and we love it. It's amazing. And so I can look back at these times and actually when it's challenging right now, it's challenging for a lot of us. And and i just it just helps me have this conviction that this will pass it'll pass it'll be fine um yeah i don't know is that is that it does ring true and it's very helpful what do you like about day one and do you journal three times a week five times a week uh if it's kind of when you feel the need, what are the indicators that you need to do it? But what is the actual practice look like? Is it in the morning?

Any specifics that you could share would be super helpful. So what I love the most about day one is it's just super easy. And it's it allows for multimedia, right? So sometimes I'll just take a screenshot of a cute text chat. And that will go into my journal, right? So there's that. Or sometimes if I'm on a flight back, you know, from wherever, and I just have a few moments, I'll just get on and say, oh, flying back from Austin. Like, you know, I just finished it and it felt really good, or it didn't feel really good. Or I just finished a call with an investor. It sucks, whatever, right? So there's no, there's, it's not like I have a fixed time because I find that very hard to do. It's usually very impetus driven, right? Like, you know, I want to make sure that I log an event or log a thought or log a feeling.

Sometimes I'll write essays, like some of my entries are super long and sometimes it's just like two sentences. You know, I try to keep it yeah i i try to not super make it super structured because then it's hard to implement yeah i think that uh complexity is not your friend when it comes to implementation uh are there any books uh that you've turned to often or reread often or gifted often, any of those things that come to mind? So I've recently been gifting, I must have given this book to at least like three or four people because I recently read it, The Obstacle is the Way. Yes. Right.

Yeah. Um, I just, this idea that we all run into obstacles and we have a choice, we can just like call it the end of the road or we just like find a way to work through it or around it or on top of it or whatever. That's just like really resonating with me right now. And I've, I've been gifting the, you know, even though I think the book's like a few years old now, but, um, that's fine. Yeah the book's like a few years old now, but. That's fine. Yeah, it's written by Ryan Holiday, who lives about 30 to 40 minutes from where I'm sitting right now. Okay.

I know you're, I could kind of infer that you guys are good friends. Yeah. Yeah. Believe it or not, I don't think you know this, but I actually was the publisher of his audio book version because I enjoyed, I saw a preprint version of the book and I said, if you want to do something with audio, let me help you. And so we published the audio version together. That is so cool. Yeah. I did not know that.

Yeah. Small world, super small world. What about fiction? Do you read fiction or do you not read fiction? Or do you not read fiction? I do. I do. My favorite book, which I've now read a few times also is Jhumpala Hari's The Namesake. Have you read it? I have not read it. Why is it so good for you? So it tells the story of this Indian young man who moves to Boston to study, do his PhD.

So he does that. And then he brings over a wife, he gets married and brings over his Indian wife, and they settle in Massachusetts. And they, you know, they start off in Cambridge in this small apartment, which I did too. And then they move to the suburbs and they have kids and then their kids grow up with this internal conflict of whether, you know, they are American, are they Indian? Are they both? What does that mean? And it follows the journey of this family. And I first read it in 2008, and, uh, eight, 2008, when I was between Cairo and MIT, and it was becoming clear that my life is gravitating towards Boston with every trip. And I just read it on this flight back to Cairo. I'll never forget this. And I was just like bawling. I was just like, I just hit home in such a weird

way. Because I think I was at this fork fork fork road yeah fork or crossroads crossroad crossroad and and I and I and I just like it really hit home and then I reread it a few months ago and I was I cried just the same just really because I feel like oh my god I'm like I've progressed right like I'm in the suburbs. My kids are in school here. I think my kids are grappling with, and all of us, like me and my kids are grappling with, okay, how Egyptian are we? How American are we? And how do you bring the two together in a way that's true to who we are?

So I love that book. I highly recommend it. It's amazing. You know, it also strikes me that in the last few weeks, I've been reading more fiction. And I was a nonfiction purist for decades. Like all the self-help books? Yeah, I mean, you name it. I mean, self-help, I mean, if we want to go all the way back to Ben Franklin, then yes. So self-help biography, in some respects, all books are self-help, if that, are causing a lot of self-quarantine, isolation, et cetera. So the words that you mentioned, loneliness, lonely, fear, I think those are going to become,

those feelings are going to become more and more present for more people. And that fiction, really good fiction, at least for me, has the effect of lessening both of those feelings, even if it's just for the period of time that you're reading. Particularly the books that can elicit or paint a picture, really a motive landscape of feelings that you're having, just in the way that you've shared your emotions, thinking you're the only person in the world having them, and people say, oh my god, that really resonates with me, and you feel less alone in doing so, both of you, I would imagine. So I've been reading more fiction.

So this will go on my list. Do you have a recommendation? I do, actually. I hesitate to recommend books that I'm only partially through. But I feel quite confident in this one. And bear with me two seconds because literally two feet for me i'm gonna grab it we got it okay all right so it's this book here which is i'll read it little big so little comma big by john crowley like alistair Crowley. So Little Big by John Crowley. This is, I suppose you could consider it

a fantasy novel. It's a bit difficult in the beginning. I'm going to warn people that you really need to give it at least 30 pages. I tried this book two or three times. It was gifted to me by my brother, who has a very, very high bar for all books. He's a math and stats whiz, also can read very, very dense comp type stuff, and just has a very high bar for any books that he'll read start to finish. And I couldn't get into it because I quit within the first 20 pages. And now that I'm 50 or 60 pages in, I'm 60 pages in, I'm just loving it. And to give you an idea, I mean, this is, I've never seen, amazing blurbs from people listen to a few of these so this is for a little little big so here's the cover quote quote i always regularly reread a book that i wish more people would read little big it is literally the most enchanting 20th century book i know harold bloom and then you've

got you know los angeles herald examiner says the kind of book around which cults are formed, and rightly so. There's magic here. It just goes on and on. Ursula K. Le Guin, I believe I'm getting that name pronounced correctly, says, this book is indescribable, a splendid madness or a delightful sanity or both. Persons who enter this book are advised that they will leave it a different size than when they came in. It is a fucking weird book. I'm going to warn you in advance it's very strange and that's part of

the reason that i like it so much it's very weird and it's got that kind of uh you know gabrielle garcia marquez sort of like colombian surrealism it's uh very odd but so far I'm finding it enjoyable. I'll add it to my list. I will make sure I stick through the first 30 pages. Yeah, and I would recommend getting it on Kindle because John Crowley's vocabulary is impressively broad. And it's kind of like when i read his dark materials and the golden compass which are categorized as young adult novels but then contain extremely niche uh nautical terminology so you'll want to be able to look words up is what i'm saying

because i'm underlining words every page or two that I don't actually know the meaning to. And that's my dog barking. If you hear it, that's Molly because we're in quarantine verite on this audio. Let's talk about your book. Why with all the things you have going on why a book i i of all people know books to do well take a lot of focus to take a lot of energy uh why a book why now first of all if i knew how much work it would have been it's pretty much like a startup right if you knew really how much work it would take maybe i wouldn't have done it so um but but but the reason the initial reason i decided to write the book so this has been almost three years in the making was um it was originally going to be like an ai book right like ai needs empathy it

needs emotion it's all about emotion ai and why do we need emotion ai and how do you build emotion ai and what are the applications? And what are the ethics and moral implications of all of that? And then I had a meeting with an editor that was interested in the book, Roger Scholl at Penguin Random House. And it was a lunch meeting. And he was like, oh, tell me your story. And I was like, well, I grew up in Cairo. And then I wore the hijab.

And then I moved to Cambridge. And he was like, that's the book. I was like, well, I grew up in Cairo and then I, you know, wore the hijab and then I moved to Cambridge. And he was like, that's the book. I was like, what? And he was like, well, your story of your story of becoming, you know, moving from this nice Egyptian, obedient young woman to like CEO of an AI venture backed company in the US. That journey of personal transformation could resonate with people. And so the more, and so we pivoted, we pivoted basically, and the book became more of a memoir, which makes me sound like I'm 80 years old, I'm not. And it's just this juxtaposition of my personal journey with why and how I, you know, I built this category of AI called emotion AI.

It's got a lot. And my, I mean, my reality is that both journeys are very intertwined. And so the book kind of puts that forth. What did you learn in the course of writing the book? Was there anything that came out that surprised you, thinking that you were able to clarify in the process of writing? What did you learn or what surprised you about the process? So the biggest thing I learned, so I was like midway, not mid, maybe a third into writing the book when I read Michelle Obama's Becoming. And it was just so vulnerable. I was like, I want to be open in how I write about this. So I went back and kind of not rewrote, but just like rethought how I'm going to approach this. And

the thing that struck me the most was my relationship with dad. Your relationship to your dad. Yeah. And actually, so I narrated the audio book and there's one part. Oh, my God. Yes. Tell me about it. There's one part in the book where I talk about my dad and I just I just totally broke down. I mean, so it's this like very interesting relationship. I love my dad, love my dad. And he's been so supportive of, of my journey and my aspirations. But at the same time, he is very strict. Um, like for the longest time, I just assumed because I broke mold of what is expected of me that he was not proud of me. Like for the longest time.

I just, I still feel that way sometimes that I wonder if he would rather have had me stay in Egypt, be an awesome wife, be an awesome mom, and give up all of that. I don't think so. I mean, he was in the US a few months ago, and he visited the team, and he met, you know, the Affectiva crew. And I think he looked proud in the picture. When you analyze his expressions, it kind of looked proud. But so writing through that, you know, my mom and my sisters read an early version of the book and they were like, you can't publish it like that. Dad's coming out in a very bad light. And I was like, what?

So I had to go back and just like really explore my relationship with him. Yeah. Was that difficult? Was it confusing? How would you describe looking that closely at your relationship with your dad over time? I think a lot of people have complex relationships with at least one parent. What was that like for you? Because I have found it, writing about many subjects extremely difficult uh sort of emotionally impactful uh unsettling sometimes what was that how would you describe the experience of of looking at it so closely for the purposes of writing i just had to really dig deep right i think i it's it's like i had just probably written off or like closed off major chapters in my life where i just wouldn't talk about it i or i talk about it like in one sentence i'd never go like really deep and my relationship with my dad is one of them so i had to like and

i just like look i just broke this pencil oh my god so yeah it's still ongoing as you can um that's interesting okay I'm gonna put this down um I think it's just like super complex and very multi-layered right like um like through the divorce he was very adamant that he he took a very balanced view between my relationship and my, like he, you know, with my ex. And so he almost like, he was an arbitrator, right? He wasn't like exclusively on my side. I felt like he was very balanced, which I, on the one hand, think is great. But part of me was like, dad, you're like my dad, you gotta be on my side. And, but I think he did it for the greater good. So I had to just work through these things. Or

like one, one day he called me up, I was in Boston and he was like, quit Affectiva, like just sell it. I was like, what? It's my company. He was like, you got to come back home, fix your marriage, like done with this company. And, and I know where he's coming from. He's coming from a place of love, but it took me a while to process that, right? So things like that, but he's awesome. What, feel free to not answer this if you don't want to, but what, if anything, do you think has been unsaid to your dad that would be helpful to say to your dad? Is there anything that comes to mind? Or was there anything that came out in the book that you feel strongly about?

I don't mean to dwell on this. I just, I think this is part of what makes you, you. And that's why I'm asking. I guess I just, I do want my dad to know that I love him. And, um, and I guess, you know, he's very close to both my sisters, um, in a way that I, you know, I, I don't think I've let myself, um, be open in that way, but, but I would like to, cause I feel like someday I will regret, you know, I'll regret not, I'll look back and I'll say, bummer, like I should have really taken that step. So I guess I would like him to know that I would love to explore kind of a closer relationship.

I think that would be cool. And I think having written that book, I'm a lot more open. I'm a lot more open to doing that. That's beautiful. Thank you for answering that. Now he has a lot more open. I'm a lot more open to doing that. That's beautiful. Thank you for, thank you for answering that. Now he has to listen to it. Now he has to listen to it. Now he has to give him that. Well, you know, there's, there are a few people who listen to this. It may get, it may get packed

to them. What's shipping a book, publishing a book is much like, as you said, starting a startup. It's difficult. You try to, you hope to have some type of driver behind climbing this mountain that pays off at some point. What impact, and we mentioned it at the top of the episode but girl decoded is the title of the book subtitle a scientist's quest to reclaim our humanity by bringing emotional intelligence to technology what would make this book a home run for you not necessarily in terms of numbers of copies sold bestseller lists and all that. But in terms of impact, and it could just be on a handful of people. It doesn't need to be millions of people.

But what would make this worth it for you? I would want, not just women, actually. I think people assume that this is you know mainly target it's a story that's me it's not at all just mainly targeted women i think it's more about people embracing their own voice and their own path and their own emotions and having faith that it's it's that they can do it right i had i mean i still have so much doubt in my brain, probably because of my cultural upbringing, that it just all feels surreal to me. Like, imposter syndrome, like, plus plus, right? All the time. And I have to work through it, and I have to, you know,

negotiate with that voice. And in a way, like, I'm my biggest obstacle in a sad way right and so I just want people to know that it doesn't have to be that way and you you can you can work through it and and so when people reach out to me and and they're like you know I follow you and I just want you to know that you've inspired me or you've you've kind of propelled me to try x y and z that just makes my day just that's that's what helps get through all of the crap that's out there am i allowed to say crap you're allowed to say crap i dropped an f-bomb earlier you're good with this at least at least that c-word you can say whatever you want you just have to live with the consequences you can use use the E-word as well. We've been doing a good job of using the E-word. Yes, we have. I think that this is really important. I really hope the book does well. And I haven't read the

book, but I think that your story is really compelling. And it also, I think, highlights, for me at least, your story, and also the technology that you're helping to develop that we're all in this together. And it's not meant to sound cliched and kumbaya, but particularly when we're experiencing, say, a scare and possible health crisis as we are right now, it's very easy to feel isolated. And one thing that struck me is, as I was doing reading about the technology and so on, that I think the word diversity has become a hot button in the sense that it's something that a lot of people overuse. It's something that other people avoid using at all costs because they've become oversensitive or I shouldn't say oversensitive, sensitive to it. But just as you were mentioning your cultural background and how expressiveness differs across culture, expressions differ across culture. Expressions differ across culture. If you want to develop good technology for, say, AI deployment,

you need diverse data sets, right? I mean, it's just like you... It's a necessity. It's not a luxury. It's not an option. If you want good technology in certainly this type of technology, you need to have complete data

sets and diverse data sets. And I find that practically and metaphorically reassuring, if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. If you want, you know, if you're going to deploy this technology, which we do in like 90 countries around the world, you can't just train it on people that look like you, Tim, right? Which would be the default kind of default data set. And so we really prioritize the diversity of the data, but you can't get to the diversity of the data unless you have a diverse team of people who are thinking about the data and the algorithm and how robust it is globally and cross-culturally. That's where I think the conversation about diversity and inclusion becomes really real because you want a diverse group of minds and brains thinking about this problem and how to

solve it in a way that works for everybody. And it's not just diversity of like gender or, or ethnicity, which is what people usually gravitate to. I'm, you know, we think diversity of age is very important because we have a high school internship program for, for high school kids where we bring them in. And of course they learn a lot, but we learn a lot from them, too, because their experience growing up with technology is very different than, say, mine. I'm in my, you know, I'm 41. And, you know, and these kids are just a very different experience growing up with devices and technologies. And we want their perspective. And they're going to be the ones who are kind of stuck with this technology, right? So, I think they need to have a voice around the table as well. So all kinds of diversity, not just, and even like, you know, our CMO is an art historian and she, you know, is very involved in product strategy. So we want her around the table too. It's not

just machine learning folks like me. So yeah, I think it's really, really key. And the cultural piece is huge too, right? Because you could have, for those who don't know, I mean, I look like a Danish man, which I am in part, hereditarily, the huge fat head bald now at this point. But you can find people like me in Scandinavia. You can find people like me here in the US who look like me. You can find people who look somewhat like me even in Egypt, right? I have some Egyptian friends who have, they have blue eyes. And in the case of my friends, red hair.

But once you're bald, the hair color matters less. Albania, et cetera. And culturally, they're going to express quite differently where it's possible that they would. So I'm excited to see where the technology goes. I hope that it veers more in an enabling, benevolent, or at least neutral direction as opposed to sort of dystopian police state direction. But I suspect we'll have a bit of both. And at least speaking for one

person, I'm glad that you have the ethical direction and sort of values that you've put in place for making decisions, right? Because you're going to have to, I mean, ultimately, you have to program that decision-making framework into the company in the same way that you'll be programming rules and decision-making possibly into the lines of code that dictate the behaviors of artificial intelligence. But I really think, I mean, one goal of the book is to spark public dialogue around human-centric AI because I really think there is so much amazing potential for this technology. I mean, we've talked about some of it, mental health, autism, safer roads, you name it. And yes, there are lots of potential for abuse, but who's making the decision? It's us. We as a society are the ones who are veering it in whatever direction. We are going to spend mindshare and investment money to steer it in the direction

we want it to. And I really want the public to be part of that conversation, just the same way there is a movement towards greener products or fair trade or whatever. We need the same in AI. I think the consumer can have a voice in prioritizing or really kind of supporting companies that have these strong core values and supporting less of the companies that don't. Vote with your wallet, vote with your voice. Exactly. Is there anything, and this is sometimes a difficult question for folks to answer, but just to tie up here, if you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking, something that you could use to get a message out to billions of people, but limited real estate. So you could put a quote, a word, a sentence, anything non-commercial on

this. What might you, a question, an image, what might you put on that billboard to convey, to share with billions of people? Anything come to mind? That's a tough one because a billboard. Embrace your emotions. That's like the call to action. I love it. I don't know. Yeah.

That works. That works for me. Hashtag embrace your emotions. That's like the call to action. Yeah. I love it. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That works. That works for me. Hashtag embrace your emotions. Hashtag embrace your emotions. Yeah. It's like, you know, you will be with your emotions whether you like it or not, whether you try to silence them or not.

So I think it's more. So just like, yeah. Yeah. Better to embrace. Embrace your emotions. i think it's more right so just like yeah better to embrace embrace your emotions i i think that's perfectly i think power in that i think it's power right there's power in that it's it's it's actually powerful that's what we want to convey yeah absolutely is there anything else that you would like to say before we wrap up here today um no i'm just easy to find if people want to reach out and share their stories or their input or ideas is there any uh on social are you more

active anywhere in particular do you have a preferred social location um linkedin seems to this is pretty new but the i think there's a lot of conversation on LinkedIn. And that's Kaliubi. I would imagine there aren't too many people on LinkedIn with the exact same name. That's my guess. Does your name mean anything? Might not. My name really does not.

It doesn't have much meaning to it. But does yours have any meaning to it? My first name means serenity, serene. Right. And which I have to work on. I'm not that serene. I need to like get into my, yeah, I need to like practice meditation or something. It's been on my New Year's resolutions forever.

And then my last name is, it's a Kalyubi as in from Kalyub or Kalyubeya, which is a governor in Egypt. It's a place in Egypt. Serenity, Rana. Don't we all need a little bit more serenity? So this has been a really fun conversation for me. People can find you on LinkedIn. That's Kaliubi, and we'll link to all this in the show notes, of course, on Twitter, at Kaliubi. And once again, that's K-A-L-I-O-U-B-Y. Instagram, at Rana L. Kaliubi. And the website where you can find all of this is probably the easiest home base, which is ranaelkhalioubi.com. And for everybody listening,

you can find all of the links to everything we've discussed, including the book at tim.blog forward slash podcast. Rana, thank you so much for taking the time today. This has been a lot of fun for me. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And for everybody out there listening or watching, don't be an upper lip razor. Be well, be safe, this is Five Bullet Friday.

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