Kind: captions
Language: en
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
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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
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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
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i'm just a fan of people and that's what
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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
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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