Dan Kokotov: Speech Recognition with AI and Humans | Lex Fridman Podcast #151

the following is a conversation with dan. kokodav. vp of engineering at rev.ai which is. by many metrics the best speech-to-text. ai engine. in the world rev in general is a company. that does captioning and transcription. of audio by humans. and by ai i've been using their services. for a couple years now and. planning to use rev to add both captions. and transcripts. to some of the previous and future. episodes of this podcast.

to make it easier for people to read. through the conversation or reference. various parts of the episode. since that's something that quite a few. people requested. i'll probably do a separate video on. that with links on the. podcast website so. people can provide suggestions and. improvements there quick mention of our. sponsors. athletic greens all in one nutrition. drink. blinkist app that summarizes books. business wars podcast and cash app.

so the choice is health wisdom or money. choose wisely my friends and if you wish. click the sponsor links below to get a. discount and to support this podcast. as a side note let me say that i reached. out to dan and the rev team for a. conversation. because i've been using and genuinely. loving. their service and really curious about. how it works. i previously talked to the head of adobe. research for the same reason. for me there's a bunch of products. usually software.

that comes along and just makes my life. way easier examples are adobe premiere. for video editing. isotope rx for cleaning up audio auto. hotkey on windows for automating. keyboard. mouse tasks emacs as an. ide for everything including the. universe itself. i can keep on going but you get the idea. i just like talking to people who create. things i'm a big fan of. that said after doing this conversation. the folks at rev.i. offered to sponsor this podcast in the.

coming months. this conversation is not sponsored by. the guest. it probably goes without saying but i. should say it anyway. that you cannot buy your way onto this. podcast. i don't know why you would want to i. wanted to bring this up. to make a specific point that no sponsor. will ever. influence what i do on this podcast or. to the best of my ability influence what. i think. i wasn't really thinking about this for. example when i interviewed jack dorsey.

who is the ceo of square that happens to. be sponsoring this podcast. but i should really make it explicit i. will never take. money for bringing a guest on every. guest on this podcast is. someone i genuinely am curious to talk. to or just. genuinely loves something they've. created as i sometimes get criticized. for. i'm just a fan of people and that's what. i talk to. as i also talk about way too much money. is really never a consideration. in general no amount of money can buy my.

integrity. that's true for this podcast and that's. true for anything else i do. if you enjoy this thing subscribe on. youtube review. on apple podcast follow on spotify. support on patreon. or connect with me on twitter alex. friedman and now. here's my conversation with dan kokodov. you mentioned science fiction on the. phone so let's. go with the ridiculous first what's the. greatest sci-fi. novel of all time in your view and maybe.

what ideas do you do you find. philosophically fascinating about it. the greatest sci-fi novel of all time is. dune. and the second greatest is the children. of dune and. the third greatest is the god emperor of. doom so i'm. i'm a huge fan of the whole uh series i. mean it's just. an incredible world that he created and. i don't know if you've read the book or. not no i have not it's one of my biggest. regrets. especially because the new movie is.

coming out right everyone's super. excited about it i used to. it's ridiculous to say and sorry to. interrupt. is that i used to play the video game. used to be. dune that's i guess you would call that. real-time strategy. right right i think i remember that game. yeah it's kind of awesome 90s or. something i think i played it actually. when i was in russia. i definitely remember it i was not in. russia anymore i think. at the time that i used to live in. russia i think video games were about. like. the suspicion of pong i think pong was.

pretty much like the greatest. game i ever got to play in russia which. was still a privilege right in that age. so you didn't get color you didn't get. like uh so i left russia in 1991 right. 191 okay so. i always wanted to feel like a kiss. because my mom was a programmer so i. would go to her work. right i would take the the metro i've. got to work and play like on. i guess the equivalent of like a 286 pc. you know. nice with floppy disks yes. okay but back to you back to dune and by.

the way. the new movie i'm pretty interested in. but. they're skeptical i'm a little skeptical. i'm a little skeptical i saw the trailer. uh. i don't know so there's there's a david. lynch movie dune as you may know. i'm a huge david lynch fan by the way so. the movie is somewhat controversial. uh but it's a little confusing but it. captures kind of the mood of the. book better than i would say like most. any adaptation. and like do you know so much about kind. of mood in the world right. but back to the philosophical point so.

in the fourth book. god emperor of dune there's a sort of. setting where. lito one of the characters he's become. this weird sort of. god emperor he's turned into a gigantic. worm and you kind of have to read the. book to understand what that means. so the worms are involved worms are. involved you probably saw the worms in. the trailer right yeah. and in the video so it kind of like. merges with the swarm. um and becomes this tyrant of the world. and like oppresses the people for a long. time right but he has a purpose. and the purpose is to kind of uh break.

through. kind of a stagnation period in. civilization right. um but people have gotten too. comfortable right and so it kind of. oppresses them so that they explode and. like. go on to colonize new worlds and kind of. renew the. forward momentum of humanity right and. so to me that's kind of like fascinating. right you need a little bit of. pressure and suffering right to kind of. like make progress. not not not get too comfortable. okay maybe that's a bit of a philosophy.

to take away but. that seems to be the case unfortunately. obviously i'm a huge fan of uh suffering. so one of the reasons we're talking. today is that a bunch of people. requested that i do transcripts. for this podcast and do captioning i. used to make all kinds of youtube videos. and i would go on upwork i think. i would hire folks to do transcription.

and it was always a pain in the ass if. i'm being honest. and then i don't know how i discovered. rev. but when i did it was this feeling of. like. holy somebody figured out how to do. it just. really easily i i'm i'm such a fan. of just. when people take a problem and they just. make it easy. right you know like just um.

there's so many it's like there's so. many things. in life that you might not even be aware. of that are painful. then rev you just like give the audio. give the video you can actually give a. youtube link. and then it comes back like a day later. or uh two days later whatever the hell. it is. with the captions you know all in a. standardized format. it was i don't know it was it was it was. it was truly a joy so.

i thought i had you know just for the. hell of it uh. talk to you that one other product it. just made my soul feel good. one other product i've used like that is. uh for people who might be familiar is. called izotope. rx it's for audio editing and like. and that's another one where it was like. you just drop it. i i dropped into the audio and it just. cleans everything up. really nicely all the stupid like the.

mouth sounds. and sometimes there's uh background. like sounds due to the malfunction the. equipment it can clean that stuff. up it can it has like general voice to. noise and it has. like automation capabilities where you. can do batch processing. and you can put a bunch of effects i. mean it just. i don't know everything else sucked for. like voice based cleanup that i've ever. used i've used audition adobe audition. i've used all kinds of other things with.

plugins you have to kind of. figure it all out you have to do it. manually here's just it just worked. so that that's another one in this whole. pipeline that just brought joy to my. to my heart anyway all that to say is uh. uh rev put a smile to my face so can you. maybe. take a step back and say what is rev and. how does it work. and rev or rev.com rap.com. same thing i guess uh though we do have.

rev.a.i now as well which we can. talk about later like do you have the. actual domain or is it just. uh the actual domain but we also use it. kind of as a as a sub brand. and so we so we use ram.ai to denote our. asr services right and rev.com is kind. of our more. human and to the end user services so. it's like wordpress.com and. wordpress.org. they actually have separate brands that. like i don't know if you're familiar. with what those are. yeah yeah they provide almost like a. separate branch of.

uh hello but i think with that it's like. wordpress.org is kind of their open. source right and. wordpress.com is sort of their hosted. commercial offering. yes um and what else the differentiation. is a little bit different but. maybe similar idea yeah okay so what is. rev before i launch into uh. what is rav i was gonna say you know. like you you're talking about like. rebels music to your ears yeah. your spiel was music to my ears yeah to. us. the founders of rev because um rev was. kind of founded. to improve on the model of upwork that.

was kind of the original. um or part of their original impetus. like our ceo. jason was a early employee of uh upwork. so he's very familiar with their work. the company upwork the company. um and so he was very familiar with that. model and. he wanted to make the whole experience. better because he knew like. when you go at that time upwork was. primarily programmers so. the main thing they offered is if you. want to hire you know. someone to help you code a little site. right um you could go on upwork.

um you could like browse through a list. of freelancers pick a program or website. you know have a contract with them and. have them do some work but it was kind. of a difficult experience because. uh for the for you you would kind of. have to browse. through all these people right and you. have to decide okay like well is this. guy good. um or somebody else better and. naturally you know you're going to. upwork because you're not an expert. right. if you're an expert you probably. wouldn't be like getting a programmer. from upwork. so so how can you really tell so this is.

kind of like a lot of. potential regret right what if i choose. a bad person. they like gonna be late on the work it's. gonna be painful experience. and for the freelancer it was also. painful because you know half the time. they spent not on actually doing the. work but kind of figuring out how can i. make my profile most attractive to the. buyer. right and they're not an expert on that. either so like graham's idea was. let's remove the barrier right like. let's make it simple we'll pick a few. uh verticals that are fairly. standardizable.

you know we actually started with. translation um and then we. added audio transcription a bit later. and we'll just make it. a website you go give us your files. we'll give you back uh. the results you know as soon as possible. you know. originally maybe it was 48 hours then we. made it shorter and shorter and shorter. um yeah there's a rush processing too. there's a rush processing now. and will hide all the details from you. right. yeah and like that's kind of exactly. what you're experiencing right you don't. you don't need to worry about the.

details of how the sausage is made. that's really cool the so you picked. like a vertical. by vertically you mean basically a. service service. category why translation. is rev thinking of potentially going. into other verticals in the future. or is this like the focus now is uh. translation transcription like language. uh the focus now is language or. speech services generally speech-to-text. language services you can kind of. group them however you want um so.

but we originally the categorization was. work from home. also wanted uh work that was done by. people on the computer you know we. weren't. trying to get into you know taskrabbit. type of things. and something that could be relatively. standard not a lot of options so we. could kind of present the simplified. interface right. yeah so programming wasn't like a good. fit because each programming project is. kind of unique. right we're looking for something that. transcription is you know you have five. hours of audio it's five hours of audio.

right translation is somewhat similar. in that you know you can have a five. page document you know. and then you just compress it by that. and then you pick pick the language. you want and that's that's mostly all it. is to it so. those were a few criteria we started. with translation because. we saw the need um and uh. we picked a kind of a specialty of. translation um where we would translate. things like birth certificates. uh illustrations documents.

things like that and so they were fairly. um. even more well defined and easy to kind. of tell if we did a good job. so you can literally charge per type of. document was that was was that the. so what what is it now is it per word or. something like that like how do you. like how do you measure the effort. involved. in a particular thing so now like so for. audio transcription right it's uh per. audio minute. well that that yes for for translation. we don't really. actually focus on that anymore uh but.

you know. back when it was still a main business. of revit was per page. right or per word depending on the kind. of uh because you can also do. translation now on the audio right. like subtitles so it would be both uh. transcription and translation that's. right. i wanted to test the system to see how. good it is to see like how how. uh will is russian supported i think so. yeah it'd be interesting to try it out i. mean one of the. now it's only in like the one direction. right so you start with english and then. you can have subtitles in russian.

not really not really the other way got. it because it's i'm. i'm deeply curious about this i'm one. kovit opens up a little bit when the. economy when the world opens up a little. bit. you want to build your brand in russia. no i don't. first of all i'm allergic to the word. brand. i'm definitely not building uh any. brands in russia nice. but i'm going to paris to talk to the uh. translators of dostoyevsky and tolstoy. there's this famous couple that does. translation. and you know i'm more and more thinking.

of how is it possible to have a. conversation with a russian speaker. because i have just some number of. famous russian speakers that i'm. interested in talking to. and my russian is not strong enough to. be witty and funny i'm already. an idiot in english i'm an extra level. of like. awkward idiot in russian but i can. understand it. right and i also like wonder how can i.

create a compelling. english russian experience for an. english speaker like if i. there's a guy named pearlman who's a. mathematician. who uh obviously doesn't speak any. english. so i would probably incorporate like. a russian translator into the picture. and then it would be like a. not to use a weird term but like a three. like a three. three person thing where it's like a. dance of work.

like i understand it one way they don't. understand the other way. but i'll be asking questions in english. i don't know i don't know the right way. complicated it's complicated but i feel. like it's worth the effort for certain. kinds of. people one of whom i'm confident of. vladimir putin i'm for sure. talking to i really want to make it. happen because i think i could do a good. job with it. but the the right you know understanding. the fundamentals of translation. is something i'm really interested in so. that's why i'm starting with um.

the actual translators of like russian. literature because they understand the. nuance and the beauty of the language. how it goes back and forth but i also. want to see like in speech how can we do. it. in real time so that's that's like a. little bit of a. baby project that i hope to push forward. but anyway it's a challenging thing so. just to share my dad um. actually does translation um not not. professional he's a uh he writes poetry. that was kind of always his.

not a hobby but he's uh he you know he. had a job like a day job but. his passion was always writing poetry. and. when we got to america and like he. started also translating. first he was translating english poetry. to russia now he also. goes the other the other way you kind of. gain some small fame in that world. anyways because uh. recently this poet like lewis clark i. don't know if you. know of some american poet um she was. awarded the nobel prize for literature.

uh and so my dad had translated. uh one of her books of poetry into. russian and he was like one of the few. so. he kind of like they asked him and gave. an intro. to radius vabode if you know that is and. he kind of. talked about some of the intricacies of. translating poetry so that's like an. extra level of difficulty right because. translating poetry is even more. challenging than translating just. you know it's interviews do you remember. any any experiences and challenges to. having to do the translation that that.

stick out to like something he's talked. about. i mean a lot of it i think is word. choice right it's the way russian is. structured is first of all quite. different. than um why english is structured right. just there's inflections in russian and. genders and they don't exist in english. one of the reasons actually why machine. translation is quite difficult for. english to russian and russian to. english because there's such different. languages. but then english has like a huge number. of words um. many more than russian actually i think. so it's often difficult to find the.

right word. to like convey the same emotional. meaning yeah russian language they play. with words much more. so you you're mentioning that uh rev was. kind of born out of um. trying to take a vertical on the upwork. and then. standardize it so we're just trying to. make the. freelancer marketplace idea better right. better for both customers. and better for the freelancers. themselves is there something else. the story of rev finding rev like what.

what did it take to bring it. actually to life was there any pain. points. plenty of plenty of pain points i mean. as as often the case it's with scaling. it up right um. and in this case you know the scaling is. kind of scaling the. the marketplace so to speak right rev is. essentially a two-sided marketplace. right because. you know there's the customers and then. there's the rivers um. if there's not enough reverse rivers. there will call our freelancers. so if there's not enough reverse then.

customers have a bad experience right. you know it takes longer to get your. work done. um things like that you know if there's. too many then. drivers have a bad experience because. they might log on to see like what work. is available and. there's not very much work right so kind. of keeping that balance. um is is a quite challenging problem and. you know that's that's like a problem. we've been working on for many years. we're still like refining our methods. right if you can kind of talk. to this gig economy idea i did a bunch.

of different psychology experiments on. mechanical turk for example. i've asked to do different kinds of very. tricky computer vision annotation on. mechanical turrican it's connecting. connecting people in a more systematized. way. i would say you know between tasks and. and uh what would you call that worker. is what mechanical terror calls it. what do you think about this world of. gig economies. of there being a service that connects.

customers to workers. in a way that's like massively. distributed like potentially scaling to. it could it could be scaled to like tens. of thousands of people right. is there something interesting about. that world that you can speak to. yeah well we we don't think of it as. kind of gig economy like to some degree. i don't like the word gig that much. right because to some degree diminishes. the works being done right it sounds. kind of like almost amateurish.

well yeah maybe in like music and it's. just like. it's a standard term but in work it kind. of. sounds like a it's it's it's frivolous. um to us it's um improving the. nature of working from home on your own. time and on your own terms right and. kind of. taking away geographical limitations and. time limitations right. so you know many of our freelancers are. maybe work from home moms. right and you know they don't want the.

traditional nine-to-five job but. they want to make some income and ref. kind of like allows them to do that. and decide like exactly how much to work. and when to work. or by the same token maybe someone is. you know someone wants to. live the mountaintop you know. life right you know cabin in the woods. but they still want to make some money. and like generally that wouldn't be. compatible before. before this new world you kind of had to. choose. but like with rev like you feel like you.

don't have to choose can you speak to. like. what's the demographics like. distribution. like where do reverse live is it from. all over the world. like what is it do you have a sense of. uh. uh all over the world most of them are. in the u.s. that's the majority um yeah because. most of our work is audio transcription. and so you have to speak pretty good. english yes uh. so the majority of them are from the us. we have people in some other.

english-speaking countries. and as far as like us it's really all. over the place um. you know for some years now we've been. doing these little meetings where the. management team will go to some place. and we'll try to meet. reverse and you know pretty much. wherever we go it's pretty easy to find. you know a large number of rivers you. know the most recent one we did is in. utah. so but but anyway really are they from. all walks of life are these young folks. older folks. yeah all walks of life really like i.

said you know one one category is you. know the work from home mound. students you know who want to make some. extra income. there are some people who may be you. know maybe they're. have some social anxiety so they don't. want to be in the office right and this. is one way for them to make a living so. it's really pretty pretty wide variety. but like on the flip side for example. one. wherever we were talking to was a person. who had a fairly high powered career. before and was kind of like. taking a break and just wanted she was. almost doing this. just to explore and learn about you know.

the gig economy quote unquote. right so it really is a pretty wide. variety of folks. yeah it's kind of interesting through. the captioning process. for me to learn about the the the. reverse because um. like some are clearly like weirdly. knowledgeable about technical concepts. like you can tell by how good they are. at. like capitalizing stuff like like. technical terms like. machine learning and deep learning right.

like i've used rev to annotate. to caption um the deep learning lectures. or machine learning lectures i did. at mit and it's funny like a large. number of them were like i don't know if. they looked it up or. already knowledgeable but they do a. really good job but like. they invest time into these things they. will like do research they will google. things you know so kind of make sure to. they get it right. but to some of them it's like it's. actually part of the.

enjoyment of the work like they'll tell. us you know i love doing this because. i get paid to watch a documentary on. something right and i learn something. while i'm transcribing right. pretty cool yeah so what's that uh. captioning. transcription process look like for the. rever can you maybe speak to that to. give people a sense. like how much is automated how much is. manual. what's the actual interface look like. all that kind of stuff. yeah so you know we've invested a pretty. good amount of time. to give like our reverse um the best.

tools possible you know so typical day. forever. they might log into their workspace. they'll see. a list of audios that need to be. transcribed and. we try to give them tools to pick. specifically the ones they want to do. you know so. maybe some people like to do longer. audios or shorter audios. people have their preferences some. people like to do audios in a particular. subject or from a particular country so. we try to give people. you know the tools to control things. like that.

and then when they pick what they want. to do. we'll launch a specialized editor that. we build to make transcription. as efficient as possible they'll start. with a speech rag draft so you know we. have our. machine learning model for automated. speech recognition they'll start with. that. and then our tools are optimized to help. them correct that. so it's basically a process of. correction um. yeah it depends on you know i would say. the audio. if audio itself is pretty good like.

probably like our podcast right now. would be quite good. so dsr would do a fairly good job. but if you imagine someone recorded a. lecture. you know in the back of a auditorium. right where like the speaker is really. far away and there's maybe a lot of. crosstalk and things like that. then maybe the sr wouldn't do a good job. so the person might say like you know. what i'm just going to do it from. scratch. yeah so it kind of really depends what. would you say is the speed that you. could possibly get.

like what's the fastest can you get is. it possible to get real time or no. as you're like listening can you write. as fast as. uh real time would be pretty difficult. it's actually a pretty. it's not an easy job you know we. actually encourage. everyone at the company to try to be a. transcriber for their descriptions where. they. um and it's way harder than you might. think it. it is right because people talk fast and. people have accents. and all this kind of stuff so real time. is pretty difficult is it possible.

like there's somebody we're probably. going to use rev. to caption this they're they're. listening to this right now. what's what's uh what do you think is. the fastest you could possibly get on. this right now. i think on a good audio maybe two to. three x i would say. uh real time meaning it takes two to. three times longer than the actual audio. of the. of the podcast this is this is so meta i. can just imagine. the whoever's working on this right now. like you're way wrong.

you're way wrong this takes way longer. but yeah. you doubted me i could do real time. yeah okay so you mentioned asr. can you speak to what is asr automatic. speech recognition. how much like what is the gap. between perfect human performance and uh. perfect or pretty damn good asr. yeah so is our automatic speech. recognition it's a.

class of machine learning problem right. to take you know speech like. we were talking and transform it into a. sequence of words essentially. audio of people talking audio audio to. words. and you know there's a variety of. different approaches and techniques. which we could talk about later if you. want. so you know we think we have pretty much. the world's best asr for this kind of. um speech right so there's there's. different kinds of domains right for asr. like one domain might be. voice assistance right so siri um.

very different than what we're doing. right because siri there's fairly. limited vocabulary. you know you know you might ask siri to. play a song or you know order pizza or. whatever and it's very good at doing. that. very different from when we're start. talking in a very unstructured way. and siri will also generally like adapt. to your voice and stuff like this. so for this kind of audio we think we. have the best and. our accuracy right now it's i think it's. maybe 14 word error rate on on um.

our test test suite that we generally. use to measure so word error rate is. like one way to measure. uh accuracy for asr right so what's. fourteen percent. what fourteen percent means across this. test suite. of a variety of different audios um. it would be um it would get. in some way fourteen percent of the. words wrong. uh 14 of the words wrong yeah so. the way you kind of calculate it is you.

might add up. insertions deletions and substitutions. right so. insertions is like extra words deletions. are words that. we said but um weren't in the transcript. right substitutions just. use that apple but i said but the sr. thought was able something like this. human accuracy most people think. realistically it's like. three percent two percent word error. rate would be like the max achievable. so there's still quite a gap right would.

you say that. so youtube when i upload videos often. generates automatic captions. are you sort of from a company. perspective from a. tech perspective are you trying to beat. youtube. google it's a hell of a so google i mean. i don't know how seriously they take. this task but i imagine it's quite. serious. and they you know google is probably. up there in terms of their teams on.

on asr just nlp natural language. processing different technologies. so do you think you can be google on. this kind of stuff yeah we think so. um google just woke up on my phone this. is hilarious okay now google is. listening. sending it back to headquarters for. these rough people. but that's the goal yeah i mean we. measure ourselves against like google. amazon microsoft you know. some of the some smaller competitors um. and we use like our internal tests we.

try to compose it of. a pretty representative set of ideas. maybe it's some podcasts. some videos some intro some interviews. some lectures things like that right. and we beat them in our own testing. and uh actually rev offers automated. like you can actually just do the. automated. uh captioning so like i guess it's like. way cheaper. whatever it is whatever the rates are. yeah. yeah so by the way it used to be a. dollar per minute. for captioning and transcription i think.

it's like a dollar fifteen or something. like that. twenty-five dollar twenty-five uh. dollar twenty-five no yeah it's pr it's. pretty cool that was the other thing. that was surprising to me it was. actually. like the cheapest thing you could one of. th i mean i i don't remember it being. cheaper. you could on upwork get cheaper but it. was clear to me that this that's gonna. be really shitty. yeah so like you're also competing on. price i think there were services. that you can get like similar to rev.

kind of. um feel to it but it wasn't as automated. like the drag and drop the entirety of. the interface it's like the thing we're. talking about. i'm such a huge fan of like frictionless. like uh. amazon's single uh. buy button whatever yeah that one click. the one click that's genius right there. like that is so. important for services yeah that's. simplicity. and i mean rev is uh almost there.

i mean there's like some i'm trying to. think. so i i think i've uh. i stopped using um this pipeline but rev. offers it and that i like it but it was. causing me some. issues uh on my side which is um. you can connect it to like dropbox and. it generates the files and dropbox. so like it it it closes the loop to. where i don't have to go to rev at all. and i can download it uh um sorry i.

don't have to go. to rev at all and to download the files. it could just like. automatically copy them all right you. put in your dropbox and you know. a day later or maybe a few hours later. yeah eventually. it just shows up yeah yeah i was trying. to do it programmatically too. is there an api interface you can i was. trying to. through like through python to download. stuff automatically. but then i realized this is the. programmer in me like. dude you don't need to automate. everything like in life just like.

flawlessly because i wasn't doing enough. captions to. justify to myself the time investment. into automating everything perfectly. yeah i would say if you're doing so many. interviews that your biggest. roadblock is uh clicking on the rough. download button. now you're talking about elon musk. levels of business. but for sure we have like a variety of. ways to make it easy you know there's. the integration you mentioned i think. it's a story company called sapir which. kind of can connect um dropbox to revan. uh vice versa we have an api if you want.

to really like customize it you know. if you want to create the lux friedman. you know. uh cms or or whatever. but this whole thing okay cool so can. you speak to the. the asr a little bit more like what is. it uh. what does it take like approach wise. machine learning wise how hard is this. problem. how do you get to the three percent. error rate like what's your vision of. all of this. yeah well the three percent ratio error.

rate is definitely. that's that's the grand vision um. we'll see what it takes to get there um. but we believe you know in in asr. the biggest thing is the data right like. that's true of like a lot of machine. learning problems today right. the more data you have and the higher. quality the data the. better label the data um. yeah that doesn't get good results and. we at rev have kind of like the best. data like we have. i think you're literally your literal.

model is annotating the data. our business model is being paid to. annotate. the data so it's kind of like a pretty. magical flywheel. yeah and so we've kind of like ridden. this flywheel to. to this point um and we think we're. still. kind of in the early stages of figuring. out all the parts of the flywheel to use. you know because. we have the final transcripts and we. have. the um the audios and we train on that.

but we in principle also have all the. edits that the reverse make right um. oh that's interesting how can you use. that as they'd done. that's that's something for us to figure. out in the future but you know. we feel like we're only in the early. stages right so the data but the data is. there. that'd be interesting like uh almost. like a recurrent neural net for fixing. for fixing transcripts i i always. remember. we did uh segmentation annotation for uh. for driving data so.

segmenting the scene like visual data. and you could. you can get all so it was drawing people. drawing polygons. around different objects and so on and. it feels like. it always felt like there was a lot of. information. in the clicking the sequence of clicking. that people do the kind of fixing of the. pod guns that they do. now there's a few papers written about. how to. draw polygons like with uh recurrent. neural nets. to try to learn from the human clicking.

but it was just like experimental. you know it was one of those like cvpr. type papers that people do like a really. tiny data set it didn't feel like people. really tried to do it seriously. yeah i wonder i wonder if there's. information in the fixing. that's hot that that provides. deeper set of signal than just like the. raw. uh data the intuition is for sure there. must be right it must be. in in in all kinds of signals and how. long it took to you know make that edit.

and stuff like that. uh you know it's gonna be like up to us. that's why like. the next couple years is like super. exciting for us right so that's what. like the focus is now. is you mentioned rev.a.i that's where. you want to. yeah so wrap the ai is kind of um. our way of bringing this asr to. you know the rest of the world right so. when we started um. we were human only and you know then we. kind of created this. uh temi service i think you might have. used it which was kind of asr for the.

consumer. right so if you don't want to pay a. dollar 25 but you want to paid. now it's 25 cents a minute i think and. you gather um. the transcript the machine generated. transcript you get an editor. and you can kind of fix it up yourself. right. then we started using tsr for our own. human transcriptionists. and then the kind of ai is the final. step of the journey which is you know we. have this amazing. engine what can people build with it. right what kind of. new applications could be enabled.

if you have speed track that's that. accurate do you have ideas for this or. is it just providing it as a service and. seeing what people come up with. it's providing it as a service and. seeing what people come up with and kind. of learning from what people do with it. and we have ideas of our own as well of. course but it's a little bit like. you know when aws provided the building. blocks right um. and they saw what people built with it. and they try to make it easier to build. those things. right and we kind of hope to do the same. thing although aws kind of does a shitty.

job of like. i'm continually surprised like. mechanical turk for example how. shitty the interface is we're talking. about like rev making me feel good. like when i first discovered mechanical. turk. the initial idea of it was like it made. me feel like ref does but then the. interface is like. come on yeah it's horrible why. why is that so painful does nobody at. amazon want to like seriously invest in.

it felt like you could make so much. money if you took this. effort seriously and it feels like they. have a committee of like two people just. sitting back. like like a meeting they meet once a. month like what are we gonna do with. mechanical turk. if it's like uh two websites making me. feel like this that. and craiglist.org whatever the hell it. is. yeah it feels like it's designed in the. 90s well craigslist. basically hasn't been updated pretty. much since the game do you seriously.

think there's a team. like how big is the team working on a. mechanical turk i don't know their thumb. team right. i feel like there isn't i'm skeptical. yeah. well if it's not possible they benefit. from you know the other teams. like moving things forward right in a. small way. possible but no i know you mean we do we. use mechanical turk for a couple of. things. as well and yeah it's painfully nice. it's painful but yeah it works. actually i think most people the thing. is most people don't really use the ui. right. like so right like we for example we.

that's right use it through the api. right so yeah but even the api. documentation and so on. like it's super outdated like yeah it's. it i don't i don't even know what to. i mean the same like same criticism as. long as we're ranting. my same criticism goes to the apis of. most of these companies like google for. example the api for. the different services it's just the. documentation. is so shitty like it's not.

so shady i should i should actually be. uh. i should exhibit some gratitude. okay let's practice some great gratitude. the. the you know the documentation is pretty. good like. most of the things that the api makes. available is pretty good. it's just that in the sense that it's. accurate. sometimes outdated but like the degree. of explanations with examples. is only covering i would say like 50.

of what's possible and it just feels a. little bit like there's a lot of. natural questions that people would want. to ask that doesn't. uh doesn't get covered and it feels like. it's almost there like it's such a. magical thing like. the maps api youtube api. i there's a bunch i got to imagine it's. like you know there's probably some. team at google right responsible for. writing this documentation it's probably. not. the engineers right and exactly this.

team. is not you know where you want to be. what it's a it's a weird thing i i. sometimes think about this. for somebody who wants to also uh build. the company i think about this. a lot you know youtube the. you know the service is one of the most. magical. like i'm so grateful that youtube exists. and yet. they seem to be quite clueless on. so many things like that everybody is.

screaming them at. like it feels like whatever the. mechanism. that you use to listen to your. quote-unquote customers which is like. the creators. is not very good like there's literally. people that are like screaming why. like uh their new youtube studio for. example there's like features. that that were like begged for for a. really long time. like being able to upload multiple. videos at the same time.

that was missing for a really really. long time. now like there's probably things that i. don't know which is. maybe for that kind of huge. infrastructure it's actually very. difficult to build some of these. features. but the fact that that wasn't. communicated and it felt like. you're not being heard like i remember. this experience for me. and it's not a pleasant experience and. it feels like the company doesn't give a. damn about you. and that's something to think about i'm. not sure what that is. that might have to do with just like.

small groups working on these small. features on these specific features and. there's no. overarching like dictator type of human. that says like why the hell are we. neglecting like steve jobs type of. character there's like. there's people that we need to we need. to speak to the people that. like want to love our product and they. don't let's maybe at some point you just. get so fixated on the numbers right and. it's like well the numbers are pretty. great right. like people are watching you know it. doesn't seem to be a problem right.

and you're not like the person that like. built this thing right so you really. care about it. yeah you know you're just there you came. in as a product manager right you got. hired sometime later. your mandate is like increase the number. like you know. ten percent right and that's brilliantly. put like if you. this is okay if there's a lesson in this. is don't reduce your company into a. metric. of like how much uh like you said how. much. how much people watching the videos and.

so on and and. and like convince yourself that. everything is working just because the. numbers are going up yeah there's. something you have to have a vision you. have to uh. you have to want people to love your. stuff because love. is ultimately the beginning of like a. successful. long-term company companies they always. should love your product you have to be. like a creator and have that like. creator's love for your own thing right. like. and you paint by you know these these. comments right. and probably like now apple i think did.

this generally like really well. you know they're they're well known for. kind of keeping teams small. even when they were big right and you. know you as an engineer like there's. that book. uh creative selection i don't know if. you read it by a. apple engineer named ken cocienda it's. kind of a great book actually because. unlike most of these business books. where it's you know. here's how steve job ran the company. it's more like here's how life was like. for me you know an engineer here the. projects i worked on and hear what it. was like to pitch steve jobs you know on.

like. you know i think it was in charge of. like the keyboard and the audit. correction right. and at apple like steve jobs reviewed. everything and so he was like this is. what it was like to show my demos to. steve jobs and you know. to change them because like steve jobs. didn't like how you know the shape of. the little key. was off because the rounding of the. corner was like not quite right or. something like this but he was famously. a stickler for this kind of stuff but. because the teams were small you really. owned the stuff right so you really. cared. yeah elon musk does that similar kind of.

thing with tesla which is really. interesting. there's another lesson in leadership in. that is to be obsessed with the details. and like. he talks to like the lowest level. engineers okay so. we're talking about asr and. so this is basically we're saying we're. gonna take this like ultra seriously. and then what's the mission to try to. keep pushing towards the three percent. um yeah and kind of try to um. try to build this platform where all of.

your. you know audits all of your meetings you. know um. they're as easily accessible as your. notes right like so. like imagine all the meetings the. company might have right. you know i'm now that i'm like no longer. a programmer. right then i'm a quote-unquote manager. uh. that's less like my day is in meetings. right yeah and. you know pretty often i want to like see. what what was said right who said it you. know. what's the context but it's generally. not really something that you can easily. retrieve right like imagine.

if all of those meetings were indexed. archived you know you could go back you. could share a clip like really easily. right so that might change completely. like everything that's. said converted to text might change. completely the dynamics of what we do in. this world. especially now with remote work right. exactly exactly. it was with zoom and so on that's that's. fascinating to think about i mean for me. i care about podcasts. right and one of the things that was.

you know i'm torn i know a lot of the. engineers at spotify. so i i love them very much because. they uh they dream big in terms of like. they want to empower creators so one of. my hopes was with spotify that they. would use a technology like rev or. something like that to. to start converting everything. into uh into text and make it indexable. like one of the things that that sucks. with podcasts is like.

it's hard to find stuff like the the. model is basically subscription like. you find uh it's similar use. is similar to what youtube used to be. like which is. you basically find a creator that you. enjoy and you subscribe to them and like. you just. yeah uh you just kind of follow what. they're doing but the search and. discovery. wasn't a big part of youtube like in the. early days. but and that's what currently with. podcasts. like is the search and discovery is uh.

like non-existent you're basically. searching for like the dumbest possible. thing which is like keywords. in the titles of episodes yeah even. aside from searching discover like all. the time so i listen to. like a number of podcasts and um you. know there's something said and i want. to like. go back to that later because i was. trying to i'm trying to remember what do. you say like maybe like recommended some. cool product that i want to try out. and like it's basically impossible maybe. like some people have pretty good show. notes. so maybe you'll get lucky and you can. find it right but i mean if.

everyone had transcripts and it was all. searchable it was a game-changer maybe. it's so much better. i mean that's one of the things that i i. wanted to i mean one of the reasons. we're talking. today is i wanted to take this quite. seriously the. the rough thing i just been lazy. so uh because i'm very fortunate that a. lot of people support this podcast that. there's enough money now to do. uh transcription and so on it. it seemed clear to me especially like. ceos and.

sort of uh like phds like people. write to me who are like graduate. students in computer science or graduate. students or whatever the heck field. it's clear that their mind like they. enjoy podcasts when they're doing. laundry whatever. but they want to re-visit the. conversation in a much more rigorous way. and they really want a transcript like. it's clear that they want to like. analyze conversations like. so many people wrote to me about a. transcript for your shabbat conversation.

i had. just a bunch of conversations and then. on the elon musk side. like reporters want like they want to. write a blog post about your. conversation. so they want to be able to pull stuff. and it's like. they're essentially doing on your. conversation transcription. privately they're doing it for. themselves and then starting to pick. but so much easier when you can actually. do it as a reporter just look at the. transcript yeah and you can like. embed a little thing you know like into. your article right here's what you said.

you can go listen to like this clip from. the section. i'm actually trying to trying to figure. out i'll probably on the website. create like a place where the transcript. goes like as a web page so that people. can. reference it like reporters can. reference and so on. i mean most of the reporters probably. have uh want to write clickbait articles. that are complete falsifying. which i'm fine with it's the way of. journalism i don't. care like i've had this conversation. with.

a friend of mine a mixed martial artist. the ryan hall. and we we talked about you know as i've. been reading. the rise and fall of the reich and a. bunch of books on hitler. and we brought up hitler and he made. some kind of. comment where like we should be able to. forgive hitler. and uh you know like we were talking. about forgiveness and we're bringing. that up as like the worst case. possible thing is like even you know for. people. who are holocaust survivors one of the.

ways to let go of the suffering they've. been through is. to is to forgive and he brought up like. hitler is somebody that would would. potentially. be the the hardest thing to possibly. forgive but it might be a worthwhile. pursuit psychologically so on blah blah. blah it doesn't matter it was very. eloquent very powerful words i think. people should go back and listen to it. it's powerful and then. all these journalists there's all these. articles written about like. mma fight ufc fighter loves hitler.

no like well no they didn't they were. somewhat accurate. they didn't say like loves hitler they. said um. thinks that uh if hitler came back to. life. we should forgive him like they kind of. it's kind of. accurate-ish but it. it the headline makes it sound a lot. worse than. than uh than it was but i'm fine with it. that's the way that. that's the way the world i wanna i wanna.

almost make it easier for those. journalists. and make it easier for people who. actually care about the conversation to. go and look and see right they can see. it for themselves for themselves. there's something about podcasts like. the audio that makes it difficult to to. go. to jump to a spot and to look for that. for that particular information i think. some of it. you know i'm interested in creating. like myself experimenting with stuff so.

like. taking rev and creating a transcript and. then people can go to it. i do dream that like i'm not in the loop. anymore. that like you know spotify does it. right like automatically for everybody. because ultimately that one-click. purchase. needs to be there like you know like you. kind of want support from the entire. ecosystem. exactly from the tool makers and the. podcast creators even clients right i. mean. imagine if like uh most podcast.

apps you know if it was a standard right. here's how you include a transcript. into a podcast right like it's just an. rss feed ultimately. and actually just yesterday i saw this. company called. bus sprout i think they're called uh so. they're. trying to do this they propose to spec. um an extension to their. uh rss format to reference podcast. uh reference transcripts in a standard. way yeah and they're talking about like. there's one. uh client dimension that will support it.

but imagine like more clients support it. right so any podcast you could go um. and see the transcripts right in your. like normal podcast app yeah i mean. somebody so i have somebody who works. with me. uh his works helps with advertis with. advertising. uh matt this awesome guy he mentioned. bus brought to me but he says. it's really annoying because they want. exclusive uh they want to host the. podcast. right this is the problem with spotify. too uh this is where i'd like to say.

like f spotify there's a magic to rss. with podcasts this it can be made. available to everyone and then there's. all there's this ecosystem of different. podcast players that emerge and they. compete. freely and that that's a that's a. beautiful thing that that's why going. exclusive like joe rogan one exclusive. um i'm not sure if you're familiar with. you want just just spotify. as a huge fan of joe rogan i've been. kind of nervous about the whole thing.

but. let's see let's i hope the spotify steps. up they've added video which is very. surprising that they were so so. exclusive meaning you can't subscribe to. this rss feed anymore. only in spotify for now you can until. december 1st and december 1st. it all everything disappears and it's. spotify only. i uh you know and spotify gave him a. hundred million dollars for that. so it's it's uh it's an interesting deal. but. i i you know i did some soul searching.

and. i'm glad he's doing it but if spotify. came to me with 100 million dollars. i wouldn't do it i wouldn't do well i. have a very different relationship with. money i hate money but. i just think i believe in the pirate. radio aspect of podcasting the freedom. and that there's something about the. source spirit the open source spirit it. just doesn't seem right it doesn't feel. right. that said you know because so many. people care about joe rogan's program.

they're gonna hold spotify's feet to the. fire like. one of the cool things what joe told me. is the reason. he likes working with spotify is. that they. they're like ride or die together right. so they they want him to succeed. so that's why they're not actually. telling him what to do despite what. people think they they don't tell they. don't give him any notes on anything. they want him to succeed. and that's the cool thing about.

exclusivity with a platform. is like you kind of want each other to. succeed. and that process can actually be very. fruitful like youtube. it goes back to my criticism youtube. generally no matter how big the creator. may be for pewdiepie something like that. they want you to succeed. but for the most part from all the big. creators i've spoken with. veritasium all those folks you know they. get some basic assistance but it's not. like youtube doesn't care if you succeed.

or not they have so. many creative there's like a hundred. other data they don't care so. and especially with um with somebody. like joe rogan. who youtube sees joe rogan not as a. person who might revolutionize the. nature of news. and idea space and nuanced conversations. they see him as a potential person who. uh. who uh has racist guests on or like.

you know they see him as like a headache. potentially. so you know a lot of people talk talk. about this it's a hard place to be for. youtube actually. is figuring out. with the search and discovery process of. how do you filter out conspiracy. theories. and which conspiracy theories represent. dangerous. untruths and wish conspiracy theories. are. like vanilla untruths and then even when. you have start having meetings and.

discussions about what is true or not. it starts getting weird yeah it's that's. difficult these days right. i worry more about the other side right. of too much you know. too much censorship well maybe. censorship is the right word i mean. uh censorship is usually government. censorship but still. uh yeah putting yourself in the position. of arbiter for these kinds of things. it's very difficult and people think. it's so easy right like it's like well. you know like no nazis right what a. simple principle uh.

but you know yes i mean no one likes. nazis yeah but there's like. many shades of grey yeah like very soon. after that. yeah and then you know of course. everybody you know there's some people. that call our current president a nazi. and then there's like so. you start getting uh sam harris i don't. know if you know that is. wasted i in my opinion his conversation. with jack dorsey. and i lost i spoke with jack before in. this podcast and we'll talk again. but sam brought up uh sam harris does. not like donald trump.

and i i i do listen to his podcast i'm. familiar with his views on the matter. and he uh he has jack dorsey's like how. can you not. ban donald trump from twitter and so you. know there's a set. you have that conversation you have a. conversation where. some number some significant number of. people. think that the current president of the. united states should not be on your. platform. and it's like okay so if that's even on. the table as a conversation. then everything's on the table for.

conversation. and yeah it's it's tough i'm not sure. where i. land on it i i'm with you i think that. censorship is bad but. i also think ultimately i just also. think you know. if you're the kind of person that's. going to be convinced you know by some. youtube video you know that i don't know. our government's been taken over by. aliens it's unlikely that like. you know you'll be returned to sanity. simply because you know that video is. not available.

on on youtube right yeah i'm with you i. tend to believe in the intelligence of. people and we should we should trust. them. but i also do think it's the. responsibility of platforms. to encourage more love in the world more. kindness to each other. and i don't always think that they're. great at doing that particular thing. so that that um. there's a nice balance there and i think. philosophically i think about that a lot. where's the balance between free speech.

and like encouraging people even though. they have the freedom. of speech to not be an yeah. right. that's not a constitutional like uh. so you have the right for to first free. speech. but like just don't be an like. you can't really put that in the. constitution. the supreme court can't be like just. don't be a dick. but i feel like platforms have a role to. be like. just be nicer maybe do the carrot like.

encourage people to be nicer. as opposed to the stake of censorship. but. i think it's it's an interesting machine. learning. problem just be nicer machine yeah. machine learning for niceness. it is i mean responsible ai i mean it is. it is a thing. um for sure jack dorsey kind of talks. about it. as a vision for twitter is how do we. increase the health of conversations. i don't know how seriously they're. actually trying to do that though.

uh which is one of the reasons i am. in part considering uh entering that. space a little bit. it's difficult for them right because. you know it's kind of like well known. that. you know people are kind of driven by. you know rage and you know uh outrage. maybe. is a better word right outrage drives. engagement and. well these companies are judged by. engagement right so. in the short term but this goes to the. metrics thing that we were talking about. earlier i do believe.

i have a fundamental belief that if you. have a metric of long-term happiness. of your users like not short-term. engagement but long-term happiness and. growth and. both like intellectual emotional health. of your users. you're going to make a lot more money. you're going to have long-term like. you should be able to optimize for that. you don't need to necessarily optimize. for engagement. yeah and that'll be good for society too. yeah no i mean. i i generally agree with you but it. requires a.

patient person with you know trust from. wall street to to be able to carry out. such a strategy this is the was what i. believe the steve jobs character and. elon musk's character is like. you basically have to be so good at your. job. right you got to pass for anything that. you can hold the board. and every all the investors hostage by. saying like. either we do it my way or i leave. and everyone is too afraid of you to. leave right because they believe in your. vision.

so that but that requires being really. good at uh really good at what you do. requires being steve jobs and elon musk. there's kind of a reason why like a. third name doesn't come immediately to. mine right like there is maybe a handful. of other people but. it's not that many it's not many i mean. people say like why like. people say that i'm like a fan of elon. musk i'm not i'm a fan of anybody. who's like steve jobs and elon musk and. there's just not many of those folks. it's a guy that made us believe that. like we can get to mars you know in 10. years right yeah.

i mean that's kind of awesome and it's. kind of making it happen. which is like it's it's great. it's kind of gotten like that kind of. like spirit right like from a lot of our. society right. yeah like we can get to the moon in 10. years and like we did it right yeah. especially in this time of uh so much. kind of existential dread that people. are going through because of. covid like having rockets that just keep. going out there now with humans i don't.

know. that uh it just like you said i mean it. gives you a reason to wake up in the. morning and and dream. the forest engineers too uh. it uh this is inspiring as hell man. i wha well let me ask you this the the. worst possible question which is uh. so you're like at the core you're a. programmer. you're um an engineer. but now he made the unfortunate choice. uh or maybe that's the way life goes of.

basically moving away from the low level. work and becoming a manager becoming an. executive. having meetings is what's what's that. transition been like. it's been interesting it's been a. journey maybe a couple of things to say. about that. i mean i got into this right because. as a kid i just remember this like. incredible. amazement at being able to write a. program right and. something comes to life that kind of. didn't exist before yeah.

i don't think you have that in like many. other fields like. you have that with some other kinds of. engineering but you may be a little bit. more limited with what you can do like. right but. with a computer you can literally. imagine any kind of program right. so it's a little bit god-like uh what. you do like when you create it. and so i mean that's why i got into it. do you remember like first program you. wrote or maybe the first program that. like made you fall in love with com. with computer science uh i don't know. what was the first program it's probably. like trying to write one of those.

uh games in basic you know like emulate. the snake game or whatever. um i don't remember to be honest but i. enjoyed like that's why i always loved. about. you know being a program is just the. creation process and um. it's a little bit different when you're. not the one doing the creating. uh and you know another aspect to it i. would say. is you know when you're a programmer. when you're a. individual contributor it's kind of very. easy to. know when you're doing a good job when. you're not doing a good job when you're. being productive when you're not being. productive right you can kind of see.

like you. trying to make something and it's like. slowly coming together right. and when you're a manager you know it's. more diffuse. right like well you hope you know you're. motivating your team. and making them more productive and. inspiring them right but it's not like. you get some kind of like dopamine. signal because you like completed x. lines of code you know today. so kind of like you missed that dopamine. rush a little bit uh. when you first become but then you know. slowly you kind of see.

yes your teams are doing amazing work. right and you you can take pride in that. um you you can get like uh uh what is it. like a ripple effect of a dope or. somebody else's opinion. yeah yeah you live off other people's. dopamine. so is there pain points and challenges. you have to overcome. from becoming from going to a programmer. to becoming a programmer of humans. programmer of humans i don't know humans. are uh difficult to understand you know.

it's like one of those things like. trying to understand other people's. motivations. and what really drives them it's. difficult maybe you like never really. know. right do you find that people are. different yeah. like i i one of the things. like i had a group at mit that. you know i found that like. some people i i could like. scream at and criticize like hard.

and that made them do like much better. work and really push them to. their limit and there's some people that. i had to non-stop. compliment because like they're so. already. self-critical like about everything they. do that i have to be constantly like. like i cannot criticize them at all. because they're already criticizing. themselves and you have to kind of. encourage and like celebrate their. little victories. and it's kind of fascinating like how.

that the complete difference. in people definitely people respond to. different motivations and different. loads of feedback and you kind of. have to figure it out it's like a pretty. good. book which some reason not the name. escapes me um about management. first break all the rules uh first break. all the rules first break all the rules. it's a. book that we kind of like ask a lot of. like first-time managers to read a rev. like one of the uh kind of philosophies. is managed by exception.

right which is you know don't like have. some standard template like you know. here's how i. you know tell this person to do this or. the other thing here's how i get. feedback like manage by exception right. every person. is a little bit different you have to. try to understand what drives them. and tailor it to them since you. mentioned books. i don't know if you can uh answer this. question but people love it when i ask. it which is uh. are there books technical fiction or. philosophical that. you enjoyed or had an impact on your. life that you would recommend.

you already mentioned dune like all of. all of the dunes all of the dune. the second one was probably the weakest. but anyway so yeah all of the doing is. good. um i mean yeah can you just slow little. tangent on that. is uh how many dune books are there like. do you recommend people start with the. first one if you. if that was yeah you kind of have to. read them all i mean it is. a complete story right so um you start. with the first one you got to read all. of them. um so it's not like a tree like that. like a creation of like the universe you.

just should go in sequence you should go. on sequence yeah. it's a it's kind of a chronological. storyline um there are six books in all. uh then there was like many um. kind of option books that were written. by um. frank herbert's son uh but those are not. as good so you don't have to bother with. those. shots fired up she got fired uh okay but. the main. uh sequences is good so what are some. other books. uh maybe there's a few so i don't know.

that like i would say there's a book. that. kind of i don't know turned my life. around or anything like that but. here's a couple that i really love so. one is brave new world. by aldous huxley um and it's. kind of incredible how prescient he was. about like. what this what what a brave new world. might be like right you know you kind of. see a. genetic sorting in this book right where. there's like this alphas and epsilons.

and. uh from like the earliest time of. society like they're starting like you. can kind of see it. in a slightly similar way today where. well one of the problems with society is. people are kind of. genetically sorting a little bit right. like there's much less. like most marriages right are between. people of similar kind of. um intellectual level or socioeconomic. status. more so these days than in the past and. you kind of see some effects of it and. stratifying society and kind of.

he illustrated what that could be like. in the extreme. different versions of it on social media. as well it's not just like marriages and. so on like. it's genetic sorting in terms of what. dawkins called memes as ideas. right being put into these bins of these. little echo chambers and so on. yeah i know so that's the book that's i. think a worthwhile read for everyone i. mean 1984 is good of course as well like. if you're talking about you know. dystopian novels of the future yeah it's. a slightly different view of the future.

right. but i kind of like identify with the. world but more. uh speaking of uh. not a book but my favorite kind of uh. dystopian science fiction. is a movie called brazil which i don't. know if you've heard of i've heard of. and i know i need to watch it. but yeah because it's in is is it in. english you know. it's an english movie yeah and it's a. sort of like. dystopian movie of authoritarian. incompetence right. and it's like like uh nothing really.

works very well. you know the system is creaky you know. but no one is kind of like willing to. challenge it you know. and just things kind of amble along it. kind of strikes me as like. a very plausible future of like you know. what authoritarianism might look like. it's not like this you know. super efficient evil dictatorship of. 1984 it's just kind of like this. badly functioning you know but. it's status quo so it just goes on yeah.

that's uh one funny thing that. stands out to me is in um whether it's. authoritarian. dystopian stuff or just basic like. you know if you look at the movie. contagion. it seems that in movies government is. almost. always exceptionally competent. like uh it's like used as a storytelling. tool. of like extreme competence like you know. you use it whether it's good or evil but. it's competent. it's very interesting to think about.

word much more realistically. is its incompetence and that. incompetence. is in itself has uh consequences that. are difficult to uh to predict like. bureaucracy. has a very boring way of being evil. of just you know if you look at the the. show hbo show chernobyl. it's a really good story of how. bureaucracy. you know uh leads to catastrophic events.

but not through any kind of evil in any. one particular place but more just like. the. it's just the system kind of system. distorting information as it travels up. the chain. that people unwilling to take. responsibility for things and just kind. of like this. laziness resulting in evil. there's a comedic version of this i. don't know if you've seen this movie. it's called the death of stalin. yeah i i like that. i wish it wasn't so there's a movie.

called in glorious bastards. about uh you know hitler and you know so. on. for some reason those movies pissed me. off i know a lot of people love them. but like i just feel like uh there's not. enough good. movies even about hitler there's good. movies about the holocaust. but even hitler there's a movie called. downfall that people should watch i. think it's the last few days of hitler. that's a good movie. turned into a meme but it's good but on.

stalin i feel like i may be wrong on. this. but at least in the english-speaking. world there's not good movies about the. evil of stalin. that's true let's try to see that i. actually so i i agree with you on the. glorious password i didn't love the. movie. um because i felt like kind of the. the stylizing of it right the whole like. tarantino kind of. um tarantinoism yeah if you will kind of. detracted from it it made it seem like. unserious a little bit um.

but death of stalin i felt differently. maybe it's because of the comedy to. begin with it's just like i'm expecting. you know seriousness but it kind of. depicted. the absurdity of the whole situation in. a way right. i mean it was funny so maybe it does. make light of it but it. something gross probably like this right. like a bunch of kind of. people they're like oh right like. you're right. but like the thing is it was so. close to. like what probably was reality it was.

caricaturing reality. to where i think an observer might think. that this is not. like they might think it's a comedy in. when in reality. this is that's the absurdity of uh. how people act with dictators i mean. that's. i guess it was too close to reality for. me yeah. the kind of banality of like what were. eventually like fairly evil acts right. but like yeah they're they're just a.

bunch of people trying to survive. and like because i think there's a good. i haven't watched yet the good movie on. uh the movie on churchill um. with uh gary oldman i think is gary. oldman i might be making that up. i think he won like he was nominated for. an oscar something so i like. i love these movies about these humans. and stalin. like chernobyl made me realize the the. hbo show that there's not enough movies. about russia. that capture that.

spirit i'm sure it might be in in. russian there is. but the fact that some british dude that. like did. comedy i feel like he did like hang over. some like that. i don't know if you're familiar with the. person who created chernobyl but he was. just like some guy that doesn't know. anything about russia. and he just went in and just studied it. like did a good job of creating. and then got it so accurate like. poetically. and the facts that you need to get. accurate he got accurate.

just the spirit of it down to like the. bowls that pets use. just the whole feel of it it's nice it's. good yeah i saw this here. yeah it's it's incredible she made me. made me wish that somebody did a good. like um. 1930s uh like. starvationist stalin led to like leading. up to world war ii. and in world war ii itself like. stalingrad and so on like. i feel like that story needs to be told. millions of people died it.

and it's it's to me it's so much more. fascinating than hitler because. hitler is like a caricature of evil. almost. that it's so especially with the. holocaust. it's so difficult to imagine that. something like that. is possible ever again stalin to me. represents something that is possible. like. the so interesting like the bureaucracy. of it. it's so fascinating that it potentially.

might be happening. in the world now like they were not. aware of like with north korea. another one that like there should be a. good film on. and like the possible things that could. be happening in china with overreach of. government. i don't know there's there's a lot of. possibilities there i suppose. yeah i i wonder how much you know i. guess the archives should be maybe more. open nowadays right i mean for a long. time they just. we didn't know right like or anyways no. one in the west knew for sure well. there's a i don't know if you know. there's a guy named stephen codkin he's. a historian of stalin that.

i spoke to on his podcast i'll speak to. him again the guy. knows his on stalin he like. read everything and it's cool. it's so fascinating to. to to talk to somebody like he knows. stalin better than stalin. himself it's crazy like you have seen. i think he's a princeton he he is. basically his whole life. is stalin stalin yeah it's great and.

in that context he also talks about and. writes about putin a little bit. i've also read at this point i think. every biography of putin. english uh english biography putin i. need to read some russians. obviously i'm mentally preparing for a. possible conversation with putin so. what what is your first question to. putin when you have them on your. on on the podcast i. it's interesting you bring that up first. of all i wouldn't tell you but. you can't give it away now uh but i.

actually haven't even. thought about that so my current. approach and i do this with interviews. often that's but obviously that's a. special one but. i try not to think about questions until. last minute. i'm trying to sort of get into the. mindset. but and so that's why i'm soaking in a. lot of stuff not thinking about. questions. just learning about the man but. in terms of like human to human it's. like.

i would say it's i don't know if you're. a fan of mob movies. but like the mafia which i am like. goodfellas and so on. he's much closer to like mob morality. which is like maybe i could see that. but i like your approach anyways of this. um the extreme empathy right. it's uh a little bit like you know. hannibal right like if you ever watch. the show hannibal right they had that. guy. um um well you know hannibal of course. like uh. yeah uh yeah sounds like the lamb but.

there were those tv shows well. you know focused on this guy will durant. uh who's a character like. extreme empath right so in the way he. like catches all these killers is he. pretty much. uh he can empathize with them right like. you can understand why they're doing. things they're doing right yes it's a. pretty uh excruciating. thing right like because you're pretty. much like spending half your time in the. head of. evil people right like uh but i mean i. definitely try to do that with uh. with other so you you should do that in. moderation but yeah.

uh i i think it's it's a pretty safe. place. safe place to be like one of the cool. things with this podcast. and i i know you didn't sign up to hear. me listen to this but. uh that was interesting i uh and. uh what's his name chris latner who's a. google uh. oh he's not google anymore sci-fi he's. legit he's one of the most legit. engineers i talked with. i talked to him again on this podcast. and one of the he gives me private. advice a lot. and he said for this podcast i should. like interview.

like i should widen the range of people. because that gives you much more freedom. to do stuff like. so his idea which i think i agree with. with chris is that. you go to the extremes you just like. cover every extreme base and then it. gives you freedom to then. go to the more nuanced conversations. it's kind of. i think there's a safe place for that. there's certainly a hunger for that. nuanced conversation i think. amongst people where like on social. media you get canceled.

for anything slightly tense that there's. a hunger to go. full right you go so far to the opposite. side. and it's like there is. a person behind all of these things yeah. and that's the cool thing about. podcasting like three four hour. conversations that. that it's very different than the. clickbait journalism. it's like the opposite that there's a. hunger for that there's a willingness. for that. yeah especially now i mean how many. people do you even see face to face.

anymore. right like this you know it's like not. that many people like in my day to day. aside from my own family that like i. said across. it it's sad but it's also beautiful like. i've gotten the chance to. like like our conversation now. there's somebody i guarantee you there's. somebody in russia. listening to this now like jogging and. there's somebody who is. just smoke some weeds sit back on a. couch and just like. enjoying like i guarantee you they will. write in the comments right now that yes.

i'm in saint petersburg i'm in moscow. whatever. and and we're in their head and. they have a friendship with us and i'm. the same way i'm a huge fan of. podcasting. it's a beautiful thing i mean it's a. it's a weird one-way human connection. like yeah before i went on joe rogan. uh and still i'm just a huge fan of his. so it was like so. we had i've been a friend with joe rogan. for 10 years but one way. yeah from this way from the from the.

same petersburg way yeah the san. francisco. it's a real friendship i mean now it's. like. two-way but it's still surreal it's yeah. and that's the magic of podcasting i'm. not sure what to make of it. that voice it's not even the video part. it's the audio that's magical that i. don't know what to do with it. but it's people listen to three four. hours yeah. we evolved over you know millions of. years right to be very fine-tuned. things like that right yeah well.

expressions as well of course right but. uh. you know back back in the day on the you. know on the savannah you have to be very. attuned to you know whether. you had a good relationship with the. with the rest of your tribe or a very. bad relationship right because you know. if you had a very bad relationship. you're probably. going to be left behind and eaten by the. lions yeah but it's weird that the tribe. is different now like you could have a. connect one-way connection with joe. rogan. as opposed to the tribe of your physical. vicinity but that's all but that's why.

like you know it works with the. podcasting right but. it's the opposite of what happens on. twitter right because all those nuances. are removed right you're. not connecting with the person yeah. because you don't hear the voice. you're connecting with like an. abstraction right it's like some. some stream of tweets right and it's. very easy. to assign to them any kind of like evil. intent. you know or dehumanize them which you. it's much harder to do when it's a real. voice right because. like you realize it's a real person.

behind the voice. let me uh try this out on you i. sometimes ask about the meaning of life. do you uh your your father now. uh an engineer you're building up a. company do you ever. zoom out and think like what the hell. is this whole thing for like why. why are we descending to vapes even on. this planet what's what's the meaning of. it all. that's a pretty big question. i think i don't allow myself to think.

about it too often or maybe like. life doesn't allow me to think about it. too often um. but in some ways i guess the meaning of. life is kind of. uh contributing to this kind of weird. thing. we call humanity right like it's in a. way you can think of humanity as like a. living and evolving. organism right that like we're all. contributing as wayward but just by. existing by having our own. unique set of desires and drives right. um. and maybe that means like creating. something uh great.

and it's bringing up kids who you know. are unique and different and seeing like. you know taking joy in what they do. um but i mean that to me that's pretty. much it i mean if you're not a religious. person right which i guess i'm not. um that's that's the meaning of life. it's in the living and then the. in creation and the creation yeah. there's something magical. about that engine of creation like you. said programming. i would say i mean it's even just. actually what you said with even just. programs i don't care if it's like some.

javascript thing on. a button on the website it's like. magical that you brought that to life. i don't know what that is in there but. that seems that's probably. some version of recreation of uh. like reproduction and sex whatever. that's in evolution. but like creating that html button. has already has echoes of that feeling. and it's magical. uh right there if you're a religious.

person maybe you could even say right. like we were. created in god's image right well i mean. i guess part of that. is the drive to create something. ourselves right. i mean that's that's that's part of it. uh yeah that html button is the creation. in god's. yeah so maybe hopefully it'll be. something a little more. uh dynamic maybe bigger sometimes yeah. maybe some uh some javascript some react. uh and so on but no i mean i think. that's what differentiates us from you. know the apes so to speak.

yeah we did a pretty good job then it. was uh. honor to talk to you thank you so much. for being part of creating one of my. favorite services and products this is. actually a little bit of an experiment. allow me to sort of uh fanboy over some. of the things i love. um so thanks for wasting your time with. me today. that was awesome thanks for having me on. giving me a chance to try this out. awesome thanks for listening to this.

conversation with dan kokodov. and thank you to our sponsors athletic. greens all-in-one nutrition drink. blinkist app that summarizes books. business wars podcast. and cash app so the choice is health. wisdom or money choose wisely my friends. and if you wish click the sponsor links. below. to get a discount and to support this. podcast. and now let me leave you with some words. from ludwig wittgenstein. the limits of my language means the.

limits of my world. thank you for listening and hope to see. you next time. you.