"the following is a conversation with eugenia cuida co-founder of replica which is an app that allows you to make friends with an artificial intelligence system a chatbot that learns to connect with yo..."

"i think in ways that only time will truly show to me and others she's a kind and brilliant person it was an honor and a pleasure to talk to her quick summary of the sponsors doordash dollar shave club..."

"one episode at a time in any case i wouldn't know if i was or wasn't and if i did i wouldn't tell you if you enjoyed this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars on apple podcast follow o..."

"you know about if you're a true fan of the old school podcasting world anyway i just used the razer and the refills but they told me i should really try out the shave butter i did i love it it's trans..."

"order of fifteen dollars or more finally this shows presented by cash app the number one finance app in the app store i can truly say that they're an amazing company one of the first sponsors if not t..."

"okay before we talk about ai and the amazing work you're doing let me ask you ridiculously we're both russian so let me ask you a ridiculously romanticized russian question do you think human beings a..."

"get away from that trying to not feel uh feel lonely and again we're talking about you know subjective kind of way of feeling alone it doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any connections or y..."

"you know tons of papers tons of research around that it has proven um that it's correlated with earlier um life expectancy shorter life span and it is you know in a way like right now what scientists ..."

"creating making people happier yeah we measure so we measure two outcomes one short term right after the conversation we asked people whether this conversation made them feel better worse or same um t..."

"continue on the line of absurd questions so you it talks about um you know deep connection with the humans deep connection with the ai meaningful connection let me ask about love people make fun of me..."

"so so acknowledging that there's a separate person and accepting you for who you are now on a slightly so that and you mentioned therapeutic that sounds very like a very healthy view of love but uh is..."

"from an engineering perspective i mean it's a huge part of it and unfortunately we all you know face it at some points in our lives i mean i did you want to go into details how did you get your heart ..."

"[Laughter] i'm just kidding or am i i don't know so what wait a reporter uh what how did that make you feel more connected i mean you're still fundamentally pretty alone but you're always with other p..."

"restaurants and culture and people's minds like in that early russia that you were covering in those early 2000s was there was still a lot of hope there was still tons of hope that um you know we're s..."

"you know in moscow back back in the time like that was worthy of a magazine cover and uh that was definitely the you know the biggest talk of the time yeah when was mcdonald's because i was still in r..."

"really positively like how do you remember what the 90s and then the rush you were covering just the human connections you had with people and the experiences well my my parents were both both physici..."

"wasn't um i somehow got spared that i was probably too young to remember any of the traumatic stuff so the only thing i really remember had this bootleg that was very traumatic i had this bootleg nint..."

"you i was only i was just born you know you had a newborn talk about paternity leave they're like but that's who they took because they didn't know whether you would be able to have kids when you come..."

"um it felt a lot more genuine that most of the movies and tv shows are made now in russia just so much more genuine and most of my friends in russia were just in complete awe about the with the show b..."

"from the russians you would expect something from the russians well they keep making these propaganda movies now oh no unfortunately but you know chernobyl was such a perfect tv show i think capturing..."

"country like those with you know um bike lanes and parks and everything's going to be urbanized again we're talking about 90s where like people would be shot in the street and it was i sort of have a ..."

"they were a lot more popular and then a lot of american experts political experts and campaign experts descended on moscow and helped yeltsin actually get yeah the presidency the second term for the p..."

"it was just awful um you think it's there's something i mean it sounds nice on paper there's uh so like the drawbacks of capitalism is that uh you know eventually there is it's a it's the point of lik..."

"the situation that we hadn't you know the russia and soviet in the soviet union it was more it's a bunch of really poor people without any way to make any you know significant fortune or build anythin..."

"i mean what was your like favorite food what was like whoa like this is possible oh fruit because we only had apples bananas and whatever and you know whatever watermelons whatever you know people wou..."

"it's funny yeah like it's it's funny to read i don't know what to think of it of um it's funny to think how an idea that's just written on paper when carried out amongst millions of people how that ge..."

"probably i'm gonna try to convince myself to um you're a super busy and super important person well i'm gonna i want to try to befriend you to uh to try to become a better russian because i feel like ..."

"and i was still you know in moscow and we weren't hanging out together all the time so was he in san francisco yeah we were roommates so he just visited moscow for we went back for for our visas we ha..."

"time you know i was 29 so for me it was um the first kind of meaningful death in my life um you know both sets of i had both sets of grandparents at the time i didn't see anyone so close die and death..."

"clear vision of what life's about you still miss him today yeah for sure for sure it was just this constant i think it was he was really important for for me and for our friends for many different rea..."

"and he wanted to do something else he wanted to do build he played with toy with like played with the wrong a bunch of ideas but the last one he had was around um building a startup around death so ha..."

"about a lot somehow does it have the digital avatar idea yeah that's so interesting well he just says well that's in his yeah the fish has this idea and he'll he talks about like i want to rethink how..."

"and i came back here and it was a really lonely apartment a bunch of his clothes everywhere and christmas time and i remember had a board meeting with my investors and i just couldn't talk about like ..."

"year my you know the the person who would explain to me you know what the universe is made off while you're selling apples while selling apples and then i lost another close friend of mine and um and ..."

"like escape death is to try to uh construct an illusion of um that we're somehow immortal it's like everything around us this room your startup your dreams all everything you do is a kind of um creati..."

"william james he's quoting or whoever is like the the thing what is it the core of it all sure there's like love you know jesus might talk about like love is at the core of everything i i don't you kn..."

"of it all that might result in um in the most fulfilling life so that's the that's the duel of what you're saying because you kind of said it's like i unfortunately think about it too much it's a ques..."

"thinking as nietzsche and all these philosophers like thinking deeply about it like uh the very thing that you know um like when you think deeply about something you can dis you can realize that you h..."

"are really hard to grasp and that people spend all their lives meditating on would be anata which is the concept of non not self and kind of thinking that you know if you're not your thoughts which ar..."

"i'm terrified how do you overcome that i don't i'm still trying to have pleasant images well pleasant images get me uh to sleep and then during the day i can distract myself with other things like tal..."

"this universe he's just part of it for a brief moment and just enjoying it well that goes hand in hand i remember i think a day or two after he died we went to finally get his passport out of the emba..."

"that happens um but also if you just you really spend a lot of time meditating looking at the nature doing something that really gets you there but once you're there i think when you uh summit a mount..."

"then that like complete like uh there's a lot of demons i've got demons had to face them funny how running makes you face your demons but at the same time the flip side of that there's a few moments w..."

"watching marathons and you know so boring but you can see them getting there so the other thing i don't know if you know there's a guy named david goggins he's uh he basically uh so he's been either e..."

"and i was yeah great you know but then like i realized that this this journey can't be done together with others this has to be done alone so out of the moment of love out of the moments of loss can w..."

"you know a third of a country wakes up as your bank client um but we couldn't quite figure out what would be the main interface to interact with the bank the problem was that most people didn't have s..."

"uh russian cities to test it out um i went to i remember three different towns with uh um to interview potential users um so people use it for a little bit cool and i want to talk to them um poor town..."

"something so so powerful around about conversational um ai that i saw then that i thought was definitely worth putting in a lot of effort into so in the end of the day we solved the banking project um..."

"the early adopters of google glass might not be overlapping with people who are really lonely and might need some you know someone to talk to um [Music] but then we really just focus on the tech itsel..."

"like people talk about the touring test people like talking about it philosophically journalists like writing about it but it's a technical problem like people don't seem to really want to solve the o..."

"i'm giving myself props for for googling and for [Laughter] becoming a cr for uh for our i guess mutual friend and introducing us but i'm so glad that you exist and what you're working on but i have t..."

"currently of the of the success you're way too humble no so it's hard for me to know but there's something there there's something there and i think you're um you're exploring that and you're discover..."

"charismatic and charming and influential with people all those books yeah pretty much but it was all about like through conversation reprogramming you so getting to some so that was i mean yeah probab..."

"what is that it was what it um what is it exactly that we're getting from talking all day long with other humans i mean we're definitely not just trying to be tricked yeah or it's not just enough to k..."

"styles of conversation i mean uh i'm a fan of the podcast joe rogan he's uh you know people can make fun of him whatever and dismiss him but i think he's an incredibly artful conversationalist he can ..."

"i do think about all the time i think when we were looking so we started the company we just decided to build the conversational attack we thought well there's nothing for us to build this chat bot th..."

"um and we were very perplexed because people started uh coming up with companies that i think we tried most of those chat bots already and there were like no users uh but still people were coming up w..."

"rich applications just how you're thinking about it but they won't just be the interface to everything it'll be its own thing that will create um uh like amazing magical experience in its own right ab..."

"conversations and we'd also try to put like dollar amounts so you know if i was calling comcast i would pay five dollars to not have this one hour talk on the phone i would actually pay straight up li..."

"startup grind and how do we get to you know the next fundraising and you know how can i talk you know talking to the founders and what's who are your investors and how are you doing are you killing it..."

"first of all i never thought that people forget about dead people so fast people pass away people just move on and it was astonishing for me because i thought okay well he was such a mentor for so man..."

"and maybe it was magical thank you or something and so we built that and um i just used it for a little bit and we kept building some crappy chat bots with the company but then a reporter came um came..."

"uh well researched i forget what where i read them but so i'm glad somehow somebody found you to be the good writers were able to connect to the story i just there must be a hunger for this story it d..."

"simple but it was all about that's the way to remember a person in a way and you know we don't have we don't have the culture anymore we don't have you know no one's sitting shiva no one's taking week..."

"which is really um that's cool you're like a young uh you know like a because you see like a steve jobs type of let's see what happens they're sitting on it but you know for me it was so important bec..."

"and i'm like well that's maybe he will be yeah we were always joking that he was like i can't wait for someone to make a movie about us and i hope ryan gosling can play me my god you know i still have..."

"so it's yet to be made they're probably sitting waiting for you to get famous actually like even more famous you should get there but um it felt really special though but at the same time our company ..."

"and so i thought there was time and i remember that i talked to my team and i said guys let's try and my team and some of my engineers are russians um are russian and they're very skeptical they're no..."

"skeptical like actually even on the business side so you were uh because whenever i bring it up to people uh because i've talked for a long time i thought like before i was aware of your work i was li..."

"uh but i think i just saw that again what we just got reminded of that i you know that i saw in back in 2012 or 11 that it's really not that much about the tech capabilities um it can be metropolitan ..."

"that's weirdly i mean i don't really care for nai to turn on my or conversational agent to turn on the lights uh i don't really need any i don't even need that much of a either like or because i can d..."

"biographers and for me and i think we did a really good job of it so far but it's actually also a technical problem like of what would romans say about what's going on now yeah that's the the brought ..."

"in conversation like to really okay well let's take it away from personal but to bring people back to life in college probably down the road i mean if we're talking if phil musk is talking about aji i..."

"for like why something is possible and going to be done well i think it's really far away right now really with conversation it's just a bunch of uh parlor tricks really stuck together um and create g..."

"and you're not aware of them like from where we are right now i don't i don't see anything like in the next year or two that's gonna dramatically change that could look at roman's ten thousand message..."

"so like it's not just about his view of the world it's about what it takes to push your buttons that's also true so like it's not so much about like uh what would einstein say it's about like how do i..."

"because they're helping something yeah there's a cool gamification system too um can you maybe talk about that a little bit like what's the experience of talking to replica like if i've never used rep..."

"a female uh recently and yeah and it's interesting so okay so you get to choose you get to choose a name with romantic this last board meeting we had this whole argument well i have both talked to him..."

"ai girlfriend like was that the one where he was like uh he said that he likes to be alone yeah and then like with her yeah he made it sound so harmless i mean it was kind of like understandable but t..."

"that's a pretty natural course of events so to say do you think i think i've read somewhere at least for now sort of replicas you're not not we don't condone falling in love with your ai system you kn..."

"are they monogamous so let's go i mean sorry [Music] have they have any people is there jealousy well let me ask sort of another way obviously the answer is no at this time but and like in the movie h..."

"have have follow-ups and check in and measure those things okay so the experience of uh uh dating or befriending a replica what's that like what's that entail well right now there are two apps so it's..."

"relationship change over time it's like after the first few conversations it just goes deeper like it starts yeah i will start opening up a little bit again depending on the personality that it choose..."

"memory um and slightly better conversations i would still argue that even right now we could have just kept the text only we still had tons of people in long-term relationships and really invested in ..."

"and so that's uh i guess that's the q that's the question of uh what is the optimal you know what is the optimal medium of communication to form a connection given the current sets of the technologies..."

"will be like can i just show it a photo and it will make me a 3d model and then we'll just animate it i'll show it a few animations of a person that will just start doing that but anyway go and going ..."

"know or show you life around you in a different light and it takes you out of your phone even although weirdly you have to look at it through the phone but it makes you notice things around it and it ..."

"as we imagine in the movie her yeah he's living that life already what do you think i have to ask you about the movie her let's do a movie review what do you uh what do you think they got they did a g..."

"what about the thing where the ai system was like actually hanging out with a lot of others i felt jealous just like hearing that i was like oh i mean uh yeah so she was having i forgot already but sh..."

"real metrics meaningful metrics so success is you know we're happier and more connected yeah i don't know sure it's possible there's a reality that's i i'm deeply optimistic i think are you worried um..."

"and specifically with this very futuristic very romantic technology so that's how i view it uh i think for me it's important to to try to figure out how not how to actually be you know helpful because..."

"probably the the fundamental problem in creating the right ai system right what uh let me ask the sexy hot thing on the presses right now is gpt 3 got released with openai it's a latest language model..."

"is the ratio of conversations that make people feel better and every other metric across across the field got a little boost right now i'd say one out of five responses from replica comes from gpg3 wo..."

"so we can't really get our scripted hard-coded content anymore to be as good as our internet model that's exciting they're much better yeah to your question whether that's the right way to go i'm agai..."

"fine-tuning i guess for specific applications you still want to train on a certain like add a little fine-tune on like a specific use case but um it's an incredibly impressive uh thing from my standpo..."

"from their perspective we're talking about long game i wouldn't torture your ai who knows what happens in five to ten years yeah they'll get you off from that person they'll get you back trying to be ..."

"little bit so these two books and then i would throw in um what we have on our in our in our office when we start a company in russia we put a neon sign in our office because we thought that's that's ..."

"languages are with russian and english is that russian well english is like a piano it's a limited number of a lot of different keys but not too many and russian is like an organ or something it's jus..."

"doesn't have it doesn't you don't need to have anyone to do it to you it's just your state yeah you just feel like that you feel like betrayed by other people basically but it's not that and you can't..."

"it very interesting and what's on 2020 is a very interesting uh do you think uh civilization will collapse see i'm a very practical person we're speaking in english so like you said you're different p..."

"yeah i believe that too or at least i believe that i don't know uh let me ask the most absurd final ridiculous question of um we talked about life a lot what do you think is the meaning of it all what..."