Kind: captions
Language: en
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 you on an emotional you can even
say a human level by being a friend
for those of you who know my interest in
ai and views on life in general
know that replica and eugenia's line of
work is near and dear to my heart
the origin story of replica is grounded
in a personal tragedy of eugenia losing
her close friend roman mazarenki
who was killed crossing the street by a
hit-and-run driver in late 2015. he was
34.
the app started as a way to grieve the
loss of a friend
by training a chatbot neural net on text
messages between eugenia and roman
the rest is a beautiful human story as
we talk about with eugenia
when a friend mentioned eugenia's work
to me i knew i had to meet her and talk
to her i felt before during and after
that this meeting would be an important
one in my life
and it was
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
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as a side note let me say that deep
meaningful connection between human
beings and artificial intelligence
systems is a lifelong passion for me
i'm not yet sure where that passion will
take me but
i decided some time ago that i will
follow it boldly and without fear
to as far as i can take it
with a bit of hard work and a bit of
luck
i hope i'll succeed in helping build ai
systems that have some positive impact
on the world and on the lives of a few
people out there
but also
it is entirely possible
that i am in fact one of the chatbots
that eugenia and the replica team have
built
and this podcast is simply a training
process for the neural net that's trying
to learn to connect to human beings
one episode at a time
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and now here's my conversation with
eugenia cuida
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 are
alone
like fundamentally on a philosophical
level
like in our
existence when we
like go through life
do you think um
just the nature of our
life is loneliness
yeah so we have to read dostoevsky at
school as you probably know
yeah
i mean it's part of the your school
program
um so i guess if you read that then you
sort of have to believe that
you're made to believe that you're
fundamentally alone
and that's how you live your life how do
you think about it
you have a lot of friends
but
at the end of the day
do you have like a longing for
connection with other people that's
maybe another way of asking it do you
think that's ever fully satisfied
i think we are fundamentally alone we're
born alone we die alone but um you know
but i view my whole life as trying to
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 you're
actually isolated
you think it's a subjective
thing but like
again another absurd measurement-wise
thing how much loneliness do you think
there is in the world
so like
if you see loneliness as a
as a condition
how much of it is there
do you think like how i guess how many
you know there's all kinds of studies
and measures of
how much you know how many people in the
world feel alone there's all these like
measures of how many people are
you know self-report or just all these
kinds of different measures but in your
own perspective
um
how big of a problem do you think it is
size-wise
well i'm actually fascinated by the
topic of loneliness i try to read about
it as much as i can
um
what really
and there i think there's a paradox
because loneliness is not a clinical
disorder it's not something that you can
get your insurance to pay for if you're
struggling with that yet it's it's
actually proven and pretty
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 would say that it
you know it's a little bit worse than
being obese so not actually doing any
physical activity in your life the
impact on your interests have impact on
your physiological health yeah so it's
basically puts you if you're constantly
feeling lonely
um your body responds like it's
basically all the time under stress so
it's always in this alert
um alerts say
and so it's really bad for you because
it actually like drops your immune
system and get it your response to
inflammation
is quite different so
all the cardiovascular vascular diseases
actually responds to viruses so it's
much easier to catch a virus
that's sad now that we're living in a
pandemic
and it's probably making us a lot more
alone and it's probably weakening the
immune system making us more susceptible
to the virus
it's kind of
sad
yeah the statistics are the sticks are
pretty pretty horrible around that so
around thirty percent
of all millennials report that they're
feeling lonely constantly thirty thirty
percent and then it's much worse for jan
z and then twenty percent of millennials
say that they feel lonely
and they also don't have any close
friends and then um i think 25 or so and
then 20 percent would say they don't
even have acquaintances
this is the united states that's in the
united states
and i'm pretty sure that that's much
worse everywhere else like in the uk i
mean it was white
widely like tweeted and
uh posted when they were talking about a
minister of loneliness that they wanted
to appoint because four out of ten you
people in uk feel lonely
so i think we don't understand
i mean that i think that thing actually
exists
um so yeah you you you will die sooner
if you if you are lonely and again that
this is only when we're only talking
about your perception of loneliness of
feeling lonely that is not objectively
fully so being fully socially isolated
however the combination of being fully
socially isolated and not having many
connections
and also feeling lonely that's pretty
much a deadly
combination
so it strikes me bizarre or strange that
this is a wide known fact and then
there's really
no one
working really on that because it's a
subclinical it's not clinical it's not
something that you can we'll tell your
doctor and get a treatment or something
yet it's killing us
yeah so there's a bunch of people
trying to evaluate like try to measure
the problem by looking at like how
social media is affecting loneliness and
all that kind of stuff so it's like
measurement like if you look at the
field of psychology they're trying to
measure the problem and not that many
people actually but some
but you're basically saying
how many people are trying to solve the
problem
like how would you try to solve
the problem of loneliness like if you
just stick to humans
uh i mean
or basically not just the humans but the
technology that connects us humans do
you think there's a hope for that
technology
to do the connection
like are you on social media much
unfortunately
do you find yourself
like
again if you sort of introspect about
how connected you feel to other human
beings how not alone you feel do you
think social media makes it better or
worse
maybe for you personally or in in
general
i think it's it's easier to look at some
stats and um i mean gen z's seem to be
generation z seems to be much lonelier
than millennials in terms of however
they report loneliness they're
definitely the most connected
you know generation in the world i mean
i still remember life without without an
iphone without facebook they don't know
that that ever existed
uh or at least don't know how it was
um so that tells me a little bit about
the fact that that might be um
you know this hyperconnected world is
might actually make people feel lonely
lonelier
i don't know exactly what the what the
measurements are around that but i would
say in my personal experience i think it
does make you feel a lot lonelier mostly
yeah we're all super connected but i
think loneliness the feeling of
loneliness doesn't come from
not having any social connections
whatsoever again tons of people that are
in
long-term relationships experienced
bouts of loneliness and continued
loneliness
and it's more the question about the
true connection about actually
being deeply seen deeply understood
and in a way it's also about your
relationship with yourself like in order
to not feel lonely you actually need to
have a better relationship and feel more
connected to yourself then this feeling
actually starts to go away a little bit
and then you
um open up
yourself to actually meeting other
people in a very special way uh not just
you know add a friend on facebook kind
of way
so just to briefly touch on it i mean do
you think it's possible to form that
kind of connection with ai systems
more
downline of some of your work
do you think that's um
engineering-wise a possibility to
alleviate loneliness
is not with another human but with an ai
system
well i know that's that's a fact
that's what we're doing and we see it
and we measure that and we see how
people start to feel less lonely
talking to
their virtual ai friend so basically a
chatbot at the basic level but could be
more
like do you have i'm not even speaking
sort of uh
about specifics but do you have a hope
like if you look 50 years from now
do you have a hope that there's just
like ais that are
like optimized for um let me let me
first start like right now the way
people perceive ai which is recommender
systems for facebook and twitter social
media they see ais basically destroying
first of all the fabric of our
civilization but second of all making us
more lonely do you see like a world
where it's possible just have ai systems
floating about that like make our life
less lonely
yeah make us happy
make like our
putting good things into the world in
terms of our individual lives
yeah totally believe it and that that's
why we're i'm also working on that
um
i think we need to also make sure that
um what we're trying to optimize for
we're actually measuring
and it is a north star metric that we're
going after and all of our product and
our all of our business models are
optimized for that because you can talk
you know a lot of products that talk
about
um you know making you feel less lonely
or making you feel more connected
they're not really measuring that so
they don't really know whether their
users are actually
feeling less lonely in the long run or
feeling more connected in the long run
um so i think it's really important to
put your measure yep to measure it
what's uh what's a good measurement of
loneliness
well so that's something that i'm really
interested in how do you measure that
people are feeling better
or that they're feeling less lonely with
lowliness there's a scale there's a ucla
20 and ucla 3 recently scale which is
basically a questionnaire that you fill
out and you can see whether in the long
run
it's improving or not and that uh does
it capture the momentary
feeling of loneliness does it look in
like
the past month like uh
is it basically a self-report does it
try to sneak up on you
it's very tricky to answer honestly or
something like that
well what's yeah i'm not familiar with
the question it is just asking you a few
questions like how often did you feel
like lonely or how often did you feel
connected to other people in this last
few
couple weeks um
it's similar to the self-report
questionnaires for depression and
anxiety like phq9 and get seven
of course any as any self-report
questionnaires that's not necessarily
very precise so very
well measured but still if you take a
big enough population you
get them through these
uh questionnaires you can see you can
see the positive dynamic and so you
basically uh you put people through
questionnaires to see like
is this thing is our is what we're
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
this this metric right now is at eighty
percent so eighty percent of all our
conversations make people feel better
but i should have done the questionnaire
with you
you feel a lot worse after we've done
this conversation
that's actually fascinating i should
probably do that
but that's that's sorry
you should totally and aim for 80
aim to outperform
your current state-of-the-art ai system
uh in these human conversations so again
we'll get to
your work with replica but let me
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 because i talk about love all the
time but uh what
what do you think a love is
like maybe in the context of um a
meaningful connection with somebody else
do you draw a distinction between
love
like friendship
and facebook friends
[Laughter]
or is it a graduate no
is it it's all the same
no like is it just a gradual thing or is
there something fundamental about us
humans that seek
like a really deep connection
uh
with another human being and what is
that
what is love
eugenia
um well the way i see it um
specifically um the way it relates to
our work and the way it was
the way it inspired
our work on replica
um
i think one of the
biggest and the most precious gifts we
can give to each other
now in 2020 as humans is this
gift of deep empathetic understanding
the feeling of being deeply seen
like what does that mean like that
you exist like somebody acknowledging
the
somebody
seeing you for who you actually are and
that's extremely extremely rare i think
that is
that combined with unconditional
positive regard
belief and
trust that
you internally are always inclined for
positive growth and believing you in
this way
letting you be
a separate person at the same time
and this deep empathetic understanding
for me that's the
that's the
combination that really
creates something special something that
people when they feel it once
they will always long for it again and
something that starts
huge fundamental changes in people um
when we see that someone's
accepts us so deeply we start to accept
ourselves and
the paradoxes that's when
big changes start start happening big
fundamental changes and people start
happening so i think that is the
ultimate therapeutic relationship that
is and that might be
in some way definition of love
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 there also like
uh
like
you know if we look at heartbreak and uh
you know most love songs are probably
about heartbreak right
is that like the mystery the tension the
danger the fear of loss
you know
all of that what people might see in a
negative light as like games or whatever
but just
just the the dance of human interaction
yeah fear of loss
and fear of like
you said like once you feel it once you
long for it again
but you also once you feel it once you
might for many people they've lost it
so they fear losing it they feel lost so
is that part of it
like you're you're speaking like
beautifully about like the positive
things but is it important to be able to
uh
be afraid of losing it
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 broken
sure
well so mine is pretty straight my
source pretty straightforward um
there
i did have a friend that was you know
that at some point um in my 20s
became really really close to me and we
we became really close friends
um i grew up pretty lonely so in many
ways when i'm building you know this
these ai friends i think about myself
when i was 17 writing horrible poetry
and you know in my dial-up modem at home
and
um
you know and
that was the feeling that i grew up with
i left i lived um alone for a long time
when i was a teenager where did you grow
up in moscow and then outskirts of
moscow
um so i just skateboard during the day
and come back home and you know connect
to the internet and write pokemon and
then write horrible poetry and was it
love poems
all sorts of points obviously love poems
i mean what what other poetry can you
write when you're 17.
it could be political or something but
yeah
but that was you know that was kind of
my yeah like deeply
um influenced by joseph brodsky and like
all sorts of spots that um
every 17 year old will will be looking
you know looking at and reading
but yeah that was my uh these were my
teenage years and i just never had a
person that i thought would you know
take me as it is would accept me the way
i am
um
and i just thought you know working and
just doing my thing and being angry at
the world and being a reporter i was an
investigative reporter working
undercover and writing about people was
my way to connect with
you know with with others i i was deeply
curious about every
everyone else and i thought that you
know if i go out there if i write their
stories
that means i'm more connected
this is what this podcast is about by
the way i'm desperate alone seeking
connection
[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 people you
know you're always thinking about what
other
place gonna infiltrate what other
community can i write about what other
phenomena can i explore and he's sort of
like a trickster you know and like
and a mythological character like
creature that's just jumping uh between
all sorts of different worlds and feel
and feel sort of okay with
in all of them so
um that was my dream job by the way that
was like totally what i would have been
doing
um
if russia was a different place
and a little bit undercover so like you
weren't you were trying to like you said
mythological creature trying to
infiltrate so try to be a part of the
world what are we talking about what
kind of things did you enjoy writing
about
i'd go work at a strip club or go
awesome
okay uh well i'd go work at a restaurant
or just go write about you know um
certain phenomenons or phenomenons of
people in in the city
and what uh sorry to keep interrupting
i'm the worst
a conversationalist what
stage of russia is this what uh is this
pre-putin
post-putin
what was russia like
pre-putin is really long ago
uh this is putin era that's uh beginning
of 2000's and 2010 2007 8 9 10. what
were strip clubs like in russia and
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
sort of becoming this uh
western
westernized society
the restaurants were opening we were
really looking
and you know um
we're trying we're trying to copy a lot
of things from
uh from the us from europe uh bringing
all these things and very enthusiastic
about that so there's a lot of you know
stuff going on there's a lot of hope and
dream for this you know new moscow that
would be
similar to i guess new york i mean just
to give you an idea and
um year 2000 was the year one we had two
uh movie theaters in moscow and there
was this one first coffee house that
opened
and it was like really big deal by 2010
there were all sorts of things
everywhere almost like a chain like a
starbucks type of coffee house or like
you mean
oh yeah like a starbucks i mean i
remember we were reporting on like we
were writing about the opening of
starbucks i think in 2007 that was one
of the biggest things that happened and
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 russia
when mcdonald's opened that was in the
90s i mean yeah i remember that very
well
yeah those were long long lines i think
it was 1990 three or four i don't
remember
um
mcdonald's at that time did you do that
i mean that was a luxurious outing that
was definitely not something you do
every day and also the line was at least
three hours so if you're going to
mcdonald's that is not fast food that is
like at least three hours in line yeah
and then no one is trying to eat fast
after that everyone is like trying to
enjoy as much as possible
what's your memory of that
oh it was
insane
extremely positive it's a small
strawberry milkshake and a hamburger and
small fries and my mom's there and
sometimes i'll just because i was really
little they'll just let me run you know
up the cashier and like
cut the line which is
like you cannot really do that in russia
or
so like for a lot of people
like a lot of those experiences might
seem
not very fulfilling
you know like it's
on the verge of poverty i suppose
but
do you remember all that time fondly
like
because i do like the first time i drink
you know coke
you know all that stuff right
um
and just
yeah the connection with other human
beings in russia i remember i remember
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
physicists my grandparents were both
well my
grandpa grandfather was an
um
nuclear physicist
a professor at the university my dad
worked at chernobyl when i was born
in chernobyl
analyzing kind of the
everything after the explosion and then
i remember that
and they were so they were making sort
of enough money in the soviet union so
they were not you know extremely poor or
anything it was pretty prestigious to be
a professor uh the dean and the
university
and i remember my grandfather started
making a hundred dollars a month
after
you know in the 90s so then i remember
we started our main line of work would
be to go to our
little tiny country house
get a lot of apples there from apple
trees
bring them back to
to
to the city and sell them
in the street so me and my
nuclear physicist grandfather were just
standing there and he selling those
apples the whole day because that would
make you more money than you know
working
at the university and then he'll just
tell me try to teach me
um
you know something
about planets and whatever the particles
and stuff and
you know i'm not smart at all so i could
never understand anything but i was
interested as a you know journalist kind
of type interested but that was my
memory and you know i'm happy that i
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
nintendo which was called dandy in
russia so in 1993 there was nothing to
eat like even if you had any money you
would go to the store and there was no
food i don't know if you remember that
and
our friend had a um
restaurant like a government half
government owned something restaurant so
they always had um supplies so he
exchanged a big bag of weed
for this nintendo
that looked like nintendo
and then i remember very fondly because
i think it was nine or
something like that and or seven
traumatic
because we just got it and i was playing
it and there was this you know dandy tv
show yeah um so dramatically positive
sense you mean like like a definitive
well they took it away and gave me a bag
of wheat instead and i cried like my
eyes out for days
days and days oh no
and then you know as a
and my dad said we're gonna like
exchange it back in a little bit so you
keep the little gun
you know the one that you shoot the
ducks with so i'm like okay i'm keeping
the gun so sometimes it's going to come
back but then they exchanged the gun as
well for some sugar or something
i was so pissed i was like i didn't want
to eat for days after that i'm like i
don't want your food my nintendo
that was extremely traumatic um but you
know i was happy that that was my only
traumatic experience you know my dad had
to actually go to chernobyl with a bunch
of
20 year olds he was 20 when he went to
uh chernobyl and that was right after
the explosion no one knew anything
the whole crew he went with all of them
are dead now i think there was this one
guy uh still
that was still alive for
this last few years i think he died a
few years ago now
my dad somehow luckily got back earlier
than everyone else
but just the fact that that was the and
i was always like well how did they send
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 back
so they took the ones with kids
so him with some guys want to
and i'm just thinking of me
when i was 20 i was so
sheltered from any problems whatsoever
in life and then my dad
um
his 21st
birthday at the reactor
you like work three hours a day you
sleep the rest and and i yeah so i
played with a lot of toys from chernobyl
what are your memories of chernobyl in
in general like
a bigger context you know because of
that hbo show
the world's attention turned to it once
again
like what are your thoughts about
chernobyl did russia screw that one up
like
you know there's probably a lot of
lessons about our modern times with
data about coronavirus and all that kind
of stuff it seems like there's a lot of
misinformation there's a lot of
people kind of trying to hide whether
they've screwed something up or not as
it's very understandable it's very human
very wrong probably but obviously russia
was probably trying to hide
that they've screwed things up
like what are your thoughts about that
time
personal and
in general
i mean i was born when the explosion
happened so
actually a few months after so of course
i don't remember anything apart from the
fact that my dad would bring me tiny
toys plus
like plastic things that would just go
crazy haywire when you you know put the
gagger
my mom was like just
nuclear about that
um
i was like what are you bringing you
should not do that uh she was nuclear
very nice absolutely well done
well uh
but yeah but the tv show was just
phenomenal i mean
yeah it's definitely
first of all it's an incredible how um
that was made not by the russians but
someone else but capturing so well
everything about the
you know about our country
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 but i think that how good
of a job they did oh my god phenomenal
but all the apartments there's something
yeah the set design i mean russians
can't do that we you know but you you
see everything and it's like wow that's
exactly how it was
it's so i i don't know that show
i don't know what to think about that
because it's british accents british
actors
of a person
i forgot who created the show i'm not
but i remember reading about him and
he's not he doesn't even feel like like
there's no russia in his history
no he did like super bad or some like or
like uh
i don't know yeah like exactly whatever
that thing about the bachelor party in
vegas uh
number four and five or something were
the ones that he worked yeah
but so he
made me feel really sad for some reason
that
if
a person obviously a genius could go in
and just study
and just be
extreme attention to detail that can do
a good job it made me think like
why don't
other people do a good job with this
like about russia like there's so little
about russia there's so few good films
about
the russian side of world war ii
of i mean there's so much interesting
evil
and not and beautiful
moments in the history of the 20th
century in russia it feels
like there's not many good films on
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 really well it's
not about like even the set design which
was phenomenal but
um just capturing all the problems that
exist now with the country and like um
focusing on the right things like if you
build the whole country on a lie
that's what's gonna happen and that's
just this very
simple kind of thing
yeah
and did you have your dad talked about
it to you like his thoughts
i think experience
he never talks
he's this kind of russian man that just
my husband who's american and he asked
him a few times like you know igor how
did you but why did you say yes or like
why did you decide to go you could have
said no not go to chernobyl why would
like a person
like
that's what you do
you cannot say no
yeah
it's just
it's like a russian way it's the
russians don't talk that much no there
are downsides and upsets for that
uh yeah
that's the truth okay so back to
post-putin russia
or maybe we skipped a few steps along
the way but you were
trying to uh
do um to be a journalist
in that time what was what was russia
like at that time post
he said 2007 starbucks type of thing
what else what else was russia like then
i think there was just hope there was
this big hope that we're going to be
you know friends with the united states
and we're going to be friends with
europe and we're just going to be also a
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 fond memory of going into
a movie theater and i you know coming
out of it after the movie and the guy
that i saw on the stairs was like
playing their shot
which was
again it was like a thing in the 90s
that would be happening people were you
know people were getting shot here and
there
tons of violence tons of uh you know
just basically mafia mobs on
in the streets and then the 2000s were
like you know things just got cleaned up
uh oil went up uh and the country
started getting a little bit richer you
know the 90s were
so grim mostly because the economy was
in shambles and oil prices were not high
so the country didn't have anything we
defaulted in 1998 and um the money kept
jumping back and forth like first there
were millions of rebels then it got like
default you know then it got to like
thousands there was one rubble with
something then again to millions
it was like crazy town that was crazy um
and then the 2000s were just these years
of
stability in a way and um
the country getting a little bit richer
because of you know again oil and gas
and
we were starting to we started to look
at specifically in moscow and in
facebook to look in at other cities in
europe and new york and
us and
trying to do the same in our like small
kind of cities towns there what was uh
what were your thoughts of putin at the
time
well in the beginning he was really
positive everyone was very
you know positive about putin he was
young
um he's very energetic he also
intermediate
the sheriff was somewhat compared to
well that was not like way before the
shirtless era
um the shirtless era
okay so it didn't start off shortly when
did the shirtless era that's like the
propaganda of riding horse fishing 2010
11 12. yeah
that's my favorite you know like people
talk about the favorite beatles like the
i don't know
that's my favorite putin that's the
shirtless putin now i remember very very
clearly 1996 where you know americans
really helped russia with elections and
yeltsin got reelected
thankfully so
because there's a huge threat that
actually the communists will get back to
power
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 pro um of the presidency but
elsinore was not feeling great you know
in the
by the end of his second term uh he was
you know
alcoholic he was really old
he was falling off
uh
you know the stages when he was talking
uh so people were looking for it fresh i
think for a fresh face for someone who's
gonna continue yeltsin's
uh work but who's going to be a lot more
energetic and a lot more
active young
um efficient maybe
so that's what we all saw in putin back
in the day i i'd say that everyone
absolutely everyone in russia in early
2000s who was not a communist would be
yeah putin's great we have a lot of
hopes for him what are your thoughts and
i promise we'll get back
to uh first of all
your love story second of all ai well
what are your thoughts about
communism
the 20th century i apologize i'm reading
the rise and fall of the third reich oh
my god
so i'm like really steeped into like
world war ii
and stalin and hitler and just these
dramatic personalities that brought so
much evil to the world
but
it's also interesting to politically
think about these different systems and
what they've led to
and russia is one of the
sort of
beacons of communism in the 20th
century what are your thoughts about
communism having experienced it as a
political system i mean i have only
experienced it a little bit but mostly
through stories and through you know
seeing
my parents my grandparents who lived
through that it was horrible it was just
plain horrible
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 like a slippery slope
eventually it creates uh
you know the rich get richer
it creates a disparity like inequality
of um
wealth inequality
if like you know
i guess it's hypothetical at this point
but
eventually capitalism leads to humongous
inequality and that that's you know some
people argue that that's a source of
unhappiness
is it's not like absolute wealth of
people it's the fact that there's a lot
of people much richer than you there's a
feeling of like
that's where unhappiness can come from
so the idea of of communism or this sort
of marxism is uh
is is not allowing that kind of slippery
slope
but then you see the actual
implementations of it and still seems to
be
seems to go wrong very badly
what do you think that is
why does it go wrong
what is it about human nature if we look
at chernobyl
you know those kinds of barack
bureaucracies that were constructed
is there something like do you think
about this much
of like why it goes wrong
well there's no one was really like
it's not that everyone was equal
obviously the you know the
the government
and everyone close to that were
the bosses so it's not like fully
i guess uh there's already this dream of
equal life so
then i guess the
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 anything living constant
under constant surveillance surveillance
from other people like you can't even
you know
do anything that's not fully approved by
the
dictatorship basically otherwise your
neighbor will write a letter and you'll
go to jail
absolute absence of actual law
yeah this constant state of fear
you didn't own any own anything you
didn't you know the
you couldn't go travel you couldn't read
anything
western or you could make a career
really unless you're working in the
military complex
which is why most of the scientists were
so well regarded i come from you know
both my dad and my mom come from
families of scientists and they they
were really well regarded as you as you
know obviously because this they wanted
i mean
because there's a lot of value to them
being well regarded
because they were developing things that
could be used in
in the military
so that was very important that was the
main investment
um but was miserable it was so miserable
that's why you know a lot of russians
now live in the state of constant ptsd
that's why we you know
want to buy buy buy buy and definitely
if as soon as we have the opportunity
you know we just got to it finally that
we can you know own things you know i
remember the time that we got our first
yogurts and that was the biggest deal in
the world it was already in the 90s by
the way
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 would
grow in the soviet union so there were
no
pineapples or papaya or mango like
you've never seen those fruit things
like those were so
ridiculously good and obviously you
could not get any like strawberries in
winter or anything that's not you know
seasonal
um so that was a really big deal seeing
all these fruit things yeah me too
actually i don't know i think i have a
like i don't think i have any too many
demons uh or like addictions or so on
but i think i've developed an unhealthy
relationship with fruit
and i still struggle with
oh you can get any type of fruit right
you can get like also these weird fruit
fruits like dragon fruit or something
more all kinds of like different types
of peaches
like cherries were killer for me i know
i know you say like we had bananas and
so on but
i don't remember having the kind of
banana like when i first came to this
country the amount of banana i like
literally got fat on bananas
like the amount oh yeah for sure
delicious and like cherries the kind
like just the quality of the food
i was like this is capitalism this is
that's pretty good it's delicious
yeah yeah
yeah it's funny
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 gets actually
when it becomes reality what it actually
looks like
uh
sorry but the
been studying hitler a lot recently
and uh going through mineconf
he uh pretty much rode out of minecon
for everything he was gonna do
unfortunately most leaders including
stalin didn't read the read it
but it's it's kind of terrifying and i
don't know
and amazing in some sense that you can
have some words on paper and they can be
brought to life and they can
either inspire the world or they can
destroy the world
and uh
yeah there's a lot of lessons to study
in history
i think people don't study enough now
i know one of the things i'm
hoping with i've been practicing russian
a little bit i'm hoping to sort of
find
rediscover the the beauty and the terror
of russian history
through this stupid podcast
by talking to a few people
so anyway i just feel like so much was
forgotten i so much was forgotten i'll
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 i'm a shitty russian
not that busy so i can totally be a
russian sherpa
yeah
but
love
you were you're talking about your early
days of uh
being a little bit alone and
finding a connection with the world
through being a journalist
where does love come into that
i guess finding for the first time um
some friends it's very you know
simple story some friends that all of a
sudden we
i guess we're the same you know the same
at the same place with our lives um
we're 25 26
i guess and um
somehow remember and we just got really
close and somehow remember this one day
where um it's one day and you know in
summer that we just stayed out um
outdoor the whole night and just talked
and
for some unknown reason i just felt for
the first time that someone could
you know see me for who i am and it just
felt extremely like extremely good
and you know we fell asleep outside and
just talking and it was raining it was
beautiful
you know sunrise and
it's really cheesy but um
at the same time we just became friends
in a way that i've never been friends
with anyone else before
and i do remember that before and after
that you sort of have this unconditional
family sort of
and it gives you tons of power
it just basically gives you this
tremendous power to
do things in your life and to
um
change positively you mean like on many
different levels power because you could
be yourself
at least you know that some somewhere
you can't be
just yourself like you don't need to
pretend you don't need to be
you know
great at work or tell some story or sell
yourself in some way or another
and so we became this really close
friends and um
in a way
um i started a company because he had a
startup and i felt like i kind of want
to start up too it felt really cool i
didn't know what i'm gonna what i would
uh really do but i felt like i kind of
need a startup
okay so that's so that pulled you in
to the startup world
yeah
and then
yeah and then this uh closest friend of
mine died we actually moved here to san
francisco together and then we went back
for a visa to moscow and uh we lived
together with roommates and we came back
and
um he got hit by a car right in front of
kremlin hannah you know next to the
river
um and died the same damage
[Music]
so
and you've moved to america
at that point at that point i was like
what about him what about roman him too
he actually moved first so i was always
sort of trying to do what he was doing
so
i didn't like that he was already here
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
had to get a stamp and our passport
for our work visas and
the embassy was taking a little longer
so we stayed there for a couple weeks
what happened how did you
so how did he uh how did he die
um he was crossing the street and the
car was going really fast and
way over the speed limit and just didn't
stop on the on the pedestrian cross
on the zebra and
i just ran over him
when was this
it was in 2015 on 28th of november so it
was pretty long ago now um but at the
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 sort of
existed but as a concept
but definitely not as something that
would be
you know
happening to us anytime soon
and specifically our friends because we
were you know we're still in our 20s or
early 30s and it still still felt like
the whole life is
you know
you could still dream about ridiculous
things different
um
so that was
it was just really really abrupt i'd say
what did it
feel like to uh
to lose him like that feeling of loss he
talked about
the feeling of love having power what is
the feeling of loss
if you like
well in buddhism there's this concept of
samaya where
something really
like huge happens and then you can see
very clearly
um i think that was it like basically
something changed so
changed me so much in such a short
period of time that i could just see
really
really clearly what mattered or what not
well i definitely
saw that whatever i was doing at work
didn't matter at all
and some other things and um it was just
this big realization what this very very
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 reasons and um i
think one of them
being that we didn't just say goodbye to
him but we sort of said goodbye to our
youth in a way
it was like the end of an era and it's
on so many different levels
the end of moscow as we knew it the end
of you know us living through our 20s
and kind of dreaming about the future
do you remember like
last several conversations
is there moments with him that stick out
that will kind of haunt you
and you're just when you think about him
yeah well his last year here in san
francisco was pretty depressed for as
his startup was not going really
anywhere
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
having um he applied to y combinator
with a video that you know i had on my
computer
and it was all about
you know disrupting death thinking about
new symmetries uh more biologically
like things that could be better
biologically for for humans and
at this end um at the same time having
those um digital avatars these kind of
ai avatars that would store all the
memory about a person that he could
interact with what year was this 2015.
well right before that his death so it
was like a couple months before that he
recorded that video
and so i found out my computer when um
it was in our living room
he never got in but um he was thinking
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 people grieve and
how people talk about death why was he
interested in this and i
is it
maybe someone who's depressed
yeah is like naturally inclined thinking
about that
but i just felt you know this year in
san francisco we just had so much um
i was going through a hard time he was
going through a hard time and we were
definitely i was trying to make him just
happy somehow to make him feel better
and it felt like you know this um
i don't know i just felt like i was
taking care of
off him a lot and
he almost started feel better and then
that happened and
i don't know i just felt
i just felt lonely again i guess and
that was you know coming back to san
francisco in december
our help you know helped organize the
funeral help help his pa