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Jan. 4, 2021 - Lex Fridman Podcast

01:28:33

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

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	The following is a conversation with Dan Kokorov, 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 of 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 it's software, that comes along and just makes my life way easier.
	Examples are Adobe Premiere for video editing, Azotope RX for cleaning up audio, AutoHotKey on Windows for automated keyboard and 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.ai 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 love something they've created.
	As I sometimes get criticized for, I'm just a fan of people, and that's who 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 it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex 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 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 Dune.
	I'm a huge fan of the whole 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.
	Everyone's super excited about it.
	It's ridiculous to say, and sorry to interrupt, is that I used to play the video game.
	It used to be Dune.
	I guess you would call that real-time strategy.
	Right, right. I think I remember that game.
	Yeah, it was 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 the suspicion of Pong.
	I think Pong was pretty much the greatest game I ever got to play in Russia, which was still a privilege in that age.
	So you didn't get color?
	You didn't get like...
	So I left Russia in 1991, right?
	1991, 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 Metro.
	I'd go to her work and play like on, I guess, the equivalent of like a 286 PC, you know?
	Nice. With floppy disks.
	Yes. So, okay, but back to Dune.
	Back to Dune.
	And by the way, the new movie I'm pretty interested in, but...
	Are you skeptical? I'm a little skeptical.
	I saw the trailer.
	So there's a David Lynch movie, as you may know.
	I'm a huge David Lynch fan, by the way.
	So the movie is somewhat controversial, but...
	It's a little confusing, but it captures the mood of the book better than, I would say, most any adaptation.
	And Dune is so much about mood and the world.
	Back to the philosophical point.
	In the fourth book, God Emperor of Dune, there's a sort of setting where Leto...
	One of the characters, he's become this weird sort of god emperor.
	He's turned into a gigantic worm.
	I mean, 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?
	And in the video game. So he kind of like merges with this worm and becomes this tyrant of the world and he like oppresses the people for a long time, right?
	But he has a purpose. And the purpose is to kind of break through kind of a stagnation period in civilization, right?
	But people have gotten too comfortable, right?
	And so you kind of It oppresses them so that they explode and go on to colonize new worlds and renew the forward momentum of humanity.
	To me, that's fascinating.
	You need a little bit of pressure and suffering to make progress, not get too comfortable.
	Maybe that's a bit of a cruel philosophy to take away.
	That seems to be the case, unfortunately.
	Obviously, I'm a huge fan of 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.
	And 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 shit, somebody figured out how to do it just really easily.
	I'm such a fan of just when people take a problem and they just make it easy.
	You know, like just...
	There's so many things in life that you might not even be aware of that are painful.
	Then Rev, you just give the audio, give the video.
	You can actually give a YouTube link.
	And then it comes back like a day later or two days later, whatever the hell it is, with the captions.
	You know, all in a standardized format.
	I don't know. It was truly a joy.
	So I thought I had, you know, just for the hell of a talk to you, that one other product, it just made my soul feel good.
	One other product I've used like that For people who might be familiar, it's called iZotope RX. It's for audio editing.
	And that's another one where it was like, you just drop it.
	I dropped into the audio and it just cleans everything up really nicely.
	All the stupid, like the mouth sounds.
	And sometimes there's background sounds due to the malfunction of the equipment.
	It can clean that stuff up. It has a general voice denoising.
	It has 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, it just worked.
	So that's another one in this whole pipeline that just brought joy to my heart.
	Anyway. All that to say is 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?
	Rev.rev.com. Same thing, I guess.
	We do have Rev.ai now as well, which we can talk about later.
	Do you have the actual domain, or is it just...
	The actual domain, but we also use it as a sub-brand.
	So we use Rev.ai to denote our ASR services.
	And Rev.com is our more human and to-the-end-user services.
	So it's like WordPress.com and WordPress.org.
	They actually have separate brands that...
	I don't know if you're familiar with what those are.
	They provide almost like a separate branch of...
	Oh, 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. And with us, the differentiation is a little bit different, but maybe a similar idea.
	Yeah. Okay, so what is Rev?
	Before I launch into what is Rev, I was going to say, you know, like you were talking about, like, Rev was music to your ears.
	Yeah. Your spiel was music to my ears.
	Yeah. To us, the founders of Rev, because Rev was kind of founded to improve on the model of Upwork.
	That was kind of the original, or part of their original impetus.
	Like, our CEO, Jason, was an early employee of Upwork, so he was very familiar with their...
	Upwork the company. Upwork the company.
	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?
	You could go on Upwork, you could, like, browse through a list of freelancers, pick a programmer, you know, have a contract with them and have them do some work.
	But it was kind of... A difficult experience because for you, you would kind of have to browse through all these people, right?
	And you have to decide, okay, well, is this guy good or is somebody else better?
	Naturally, you're going to Upwork because you're not an expert.
	If you're an expert, you probably wouldn't be getting a programmer from Upwork.
	How can you really tell?
	There's a lot of potential regret.
	What if I choose a bad person?
	They're going to be late on the work.
	It's going to be a painful experience.
	For the freelancer, it was also painful because half the time they spent not on actually doing the work, but figuring out how can I make my profile most attractive to the buyer.
	They're not an expert on that either.
	So Rav's idea was, let's remove the barrier, right?
	Let's make it simple. We'll pick a few verticals that are fairly standardizable.
	We actually started with translation, 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 The results as soon as possible.
	Originally, maybe it was 48 hours, then we made it shorter and shorter and shorter.
	Yeah, there's a rush processing, too.
	There's a rush processing now.
	And we'll hide all the details from you, right?
	Yeah. And that's kind of exactly what you're experiencing, right?
	You don't need to worry about the details of how the sausage is made.
	That's really cool. By vertical, you mean basically a- A service category.
	Why translation?
	Is Rev thinking of potentially going into other verticals in the future?
	Or is this like the focus now is translation, transcription, like language?
	The focus now is language or speech services, generally speech-to-text language services.
	You can kind of group them however you want.
	Originally, the categorization was work from home, so one of the work that was done by people on the computer.
	We weren't trying to get into TaskRabbit type of things.
	And something that could be relatively standard, not a lot of options.
	So we could kind of present this simplified interface, right?
	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 can price it by that.
	And then you pick the language you want, and that's mostly all it is to it.
	So those were a few criteria.
	We started with translation because we saw the need and We picked up kind of a specialty of translation where we would translate things like board certificates, immigration documents, things like that. And so they were fairly 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?
	So what is it now?
	Is it per word or something like that?
	How do you measure the effort involved in a particular thing?
	So now for audio transcription, right, it's per audio minute.
	Well, that, yes.
	For translation, we don't really actually focus on that anymore.
	But back when it was still a main business of Revit, it was per page, right, or per word, depending on the kind of...
	Because you can also do translation now on the audio, right?
	Mm-hmm. Like subtitles. So it would be both transcription and translation.
	That's right. I wanted to test the system to see how good it is.
	Is Russian supported?
	I think so, yeah.
	It'd be interesting to try it out.
	But now it's only in the one direction, right?
	So you start with English, and then you can have subtitles in Russian.
	Not really the other way.
	Got it, because I'm deeply curious about this.
	When COVID 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 any brands in Russia.
	But I'm going to Paris to talk to the translators of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
	There's this famous couple that does translation.
	And 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?
	I also wonder how can I create a compelling English-Russian experience for an English speaker?
	There's a guy named Gregorio Perlman, who's a mathematician, who obviously doesn't speak any English.
	So I would probably incorporate...
	A Russian translator into the picture, and then it would be like a, not to use a weird term, but like a three-person thing where it's like a dance.
	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.
	It's complicated. It's complicated, but I feel like it's worth the effort for certain kinds of people, one of whom I'm confident is Vladimir Putin I'm for sure talking to.
	I really want to make it happen because I think I could do a good job of it.
	But understanding the fundamentals of translation is something I'm really interested in.
	So that's why I'm starting with the actual translators of like Russian literature because they understand the nuance and the beauty of the language and 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 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 actually does translation.
	Not professionally, he writes poetry.
	That was kind of always his.
	Not a hobby, but he had a job, like a date job, but his passion was always writing poetry.
	And then we got to America and he started also translating.
	First he was translating English poetry to Russian, now he also goes the other way.
	He kind of gained some small fame in that world anyways, because Recently, this poet, like Louis Gluck, I don't know if you know of, so an American poet, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
	And so my dad had translated 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 interview to Radio Свободы, if you know what 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 interviews.
	Do you remember any experiences and challenges to having to do the translation that stick out to you, like something he's talked about?
	I mean, a lot of it, I think, is word choice, right?
	The way Russian is structured is, first of all, quite different than the way English is structured, right?
	There's inflections in Russian and genders, and they don't exist in English.
	This is one of the reasons, actually, why machine translation is quite difficult for English to Russian and Russian to English, because they're such different languages.
	But then English has a huge number of words, many more than Russian, actually, I think.
	So it's often difficult to find the right word to convey the same emotional meaning.
	Yeah, Russian language, they play with words much more.
	So you were mentioning that Rev was kind of born out of trying to take a vertical on Upwork and then standardize it.
	We're just trying to make the freelancer marketplace idea better, right?
	Better for both.
	It's better for customers and better for the freelancers themselves.
	Is there something else to the story of Rev, finding Rev?
	What did it take to bring it actually to life?
	Was there any pain points?
	Plenty of pain points.
	As often the case, it's with scaling it up, right?
	And in this case, you know, the scaling is kind of scaling 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 Revvers.
	If there's not enough Revvers, Revvers are what we call our freelancers.
	So if there's not enough Revvers, then customers have a bad experience, right?
	You know, it takes longer to get your work done, things like that.
	You know, if there's too many, then...
	The drivers have a bad experience because they might log on to see what work is available and there's not very much work.
	Keeping that balance is a quite challenging problem.
	That's a problem we've been working on for many years.
	We're still refining our methods.
	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 Turk.
	It's connecting people in a more systematized way.
	I would say between task and what would you call that?
	Worker is what Mechanical Turk 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 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 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, it diminishes the works being done, right?
	It sounds kind of like almost amateurish.
	Well, maybe in like music industry, like gig is the standard term.
	But in work, it kind of sounds like it's frivolous.
	To us, it's...
	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 Rav 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 wants to live the mountaintop life, cabin in the woods, but they still want to make some money.
	Generally, that wouldn't be compatible before this new world.
	You kind of had to choose.
	But with Rev, you feel like you don't have to choose.
	Can you speak to, like, what's the demographics, like distribution, like, where do rivers live?
	Is it from all over the world?
	Like, what is it? Do you have a sense of...
	It's from all over the world.
	Most of them are in the US. That's the majority.
	Because most of our work is audio transcription, and so you have to speak pretty good English.
	The majority of them are from the US. We have people in some other of the English-speaking countries.
	And as far as the US, it's really all over the place.
	For some years now, we've been doing these little meetings where the management team will go to someplace and we'll try to meet Revers.
	Pretty much wherever we go, it's pretty easy to find a large number of Revers.
	The most recent one we did is in Utah.
	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 category is, you know, the work from home on, students, you know, who want to make some extra income.
	There are some people who maybe, you know, maybe they 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 a pretty wide variety.
	But like on the flip side, for example, one wherever we were talking to was a...
	A person who had a fairly high-powered career before and was taking a break.
	She was almost doing this just to explore and learn about the gig economy.
	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 Revers because some are clearly weirdly knowledgeable about technical concepts.
	You can tell by how good they are at capitalizing stuff, like technical terms, like in machine learning or deep learning.
	I used Rev to annotate, to caption the deep learning lectures or machine learning lectures I did at MIT. And it's funny, a large number of them were like, I don't know if they looked it up or were already knowledgeable, but they do a really good job at like, They invest time into these things.
	They will do research, they will Google things to make sure they get it right.
	But to some of them, it's actually part of the enjoyment of the work.
	They'll tell us, I love doing this because I get paid to watch a documentary on something, and I learn something while I'm transcribing, right?
	Pretty cool. What's that captioning transcription process look like for the Revver?
	Can you maybe speak to that to give people a sense?
	How much is automated?
	How much is manual? What's the actual interface look like?
	All that kind of stuff. We've invested a pretty good amount of time to give Revvers the best tools possible.
	It's a typical day for Revver.
	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.
	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 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 track 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.
	Yeah, it depends on, you know, I would say the audio.
	If audio itself is pretty good, probably our podcast right now would be quite good.
	So DSR would do a fairly good job.
	But if you imagine someone recorded a lecture in the back of an auditorium where the speaker is really far away and there's maybe a lot of crosstalk and things like that, Then maybe the ESR wouldn't do a good job, so the person might say, like, you know what, I'm just gonna do it from scratch.
	So it kinda really depends.
	What would you say is the speed that you can 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 not an easy job.
	We actually encourage everyone at the company to try to be a transcriber for a day, descriptions for a day.
	And it's way harder than you might think 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? We're probably going to use Rev to caption this.
	They're listening to this right now.
	What do you think is the fastest you can possibly get on this right now?
	I think on a good audio, maybe 2 to 3x, I would say, real-time.
	Meaning it takes two to three times longer than the actual audio of the...
	Of the podcast. This is so meta.
	I can just imagine the reverse working on this right now.
	You're way wrong. You're way wrong.
	This takes way longer.
	But yeah, it definitely works. Or you doubted me.
	I could do real time. Yeah.
	Okay, so you mentioned ASR. Can you speak to what is ASR, automatic speech recognition?
	What is the gap between perfect human performance and perfect or pretty damn good ASR? Yeah, so ASR, 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 speech, right?
	So there's different kinds of domains, right, for ASR. Like, one domain might be voice assistants, right?
	So Siri. Very different than what we're doing, right?
	Because Siri, there's fairly limited vocabulary.
	You know, you might ask Siri to play a song or, you know, order a pizza or whatever.
	And it's very good at doing that.
	Very different from when we're talking in a very unstructured way.
	And Siri will also generally 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, I think it's maybe 14% word error rate on Siri.
	Our test suite that we generally use to measure.
	Word error rate is one way to measure accuracy for ASR. What's 14% word error rate?
	14% means across this test suite of a variety of different audios, it would get in some way 14% of the words wrong.
	14% of the words wrong.
	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 weren't in the transcript, right?
	Substitutions is you said Apple, but I said, but the ASR thought it was able.
	Something like this. Human accuracy, most people think realistically it's like 3%, 2% 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...
	Google, I mean, I don't know how seriously they take this task, but I imagine it's quite serious.
	And they... 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 beat Google?
	On this kind of stuff, yeah, we think so.
	Google just woke up on my phone.
	This is hilarious. Okay.
	Now Google is listening, sending it back to headquarters.
	Who are these rough people?
	But that's the goal? Yeah, I mean, we measure ourselves against Google, Amazon, Microsoft, some smaller competitors.
	And we use our internal tests with it.
	We try to compose it of a pretty representative set of ideas.
	Maybe it's some podcasts, some videos, some interviews, some lectures, things like that, right?
	And we beat them in our own testing.
	And actually Rev offers automated, like you can actually just do the automated captioning.
	So I guess it's like way cheaper, whatever it is, whatever the rates are.
	By the way, it used to be $1 per minute for captioning and transcription.
	I think it's like $1.15 or something like that.
	$1.25. $1.25 now.
	It's pretty cool.
	That was the other thing that was surprising to me.
	It was actually the cheapest thing you could...
	I don't remember it being cheaper.
	You could on Upward get cheaper, but But it was clear to me that that's going to be really shitty.
	Yeah. So you're also competing on price.
	I think there were services that you can get similar to Rev kind of feel to it, but it wasn't as automated.
	The drag and drop, the entirety of the interface, it's the thing we're talking about.
	I'm such a huge fan of frictionless.
	Amazon's single... Buy button, whatever.
	Yeah, one click.
	The one click. That's genius right there.
	That is so important for services.
	That simplicity.
	Rev is almost there.
	There's some... I'm trying to think.
	I stopped using this pipeline, but Rev offers it, and I like it, but it was causing me some issues on my side, which is you can connect it to Dropbox, and it generates the files in Dropbox.
	It closes the loop to where I don't have to go to Rev at all, and I can download it.
	Sorry, I don't have to go to Rev at all and to download the files.
	It could just, like, automatically copy them.
	Right, you put it in your Dropbox, and, you know, a day later, or maybe a few hours later.
	Yeah, it just shows up. It just shows up, yeah.
	Yeah. I was trying to do it programmatically, too.
	Is there an API interface you can...
	Yeah. I was trying through Python to download stuff automatically, but then I realized this is the programmer in me.
	Dude, you don't need to automate everything in life flawlessly, because I wasn't doing enough captions to justify to myself the time investment into automating everything perfectly.
	I would say if you're doing so many interviews that your biggest roadblock is clicking on the rough download button, now you're talking about Elon Musk levels of business.
	But for sure we have a variety of ways to make it easy.
	You mentioned, I think, a store company called Zapier, which can connect Dropbox to Rev and vice versa.
	We have an API if you want to really customize it, if you want to create the Lex Friedman CMS or whatever.
	Can you speak to the ASR a little bit more?
	What does it take approach-wise, machine learning-wise?
	How hard is this problem?
	How do you get to the 3% error rate?
	What's your vision of all of this?
	Yeah, well, the 3% error rate is definitely, that's the grand vision.
	We'll see what it takes to get there.
	But we believe in ASR, the biggest thing is the data.
	That's true of a lot of machine learning problems today.
	The more data you have and the higher quality of the data, the better labeled the data.
	That does get good results, and we at Rev have the best data.
	You're literally, your business model is annotating the data.
	Our business model is being paid to annotate the data.
	We're being paid to annotate the data.
	So it's kind of like a pretty magical flywheel.
	And so we've kind of like ridden this flywheel to this point.
	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 audios and we train on that.
	But we, in principle, also have all the edits that the revvers make, right?
	Oh, that's interesting.
	How can you use that as data?
	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?
	But the data is there, that'd be interesting, almost like a recurrent neural net for fixing transcripts.
	I always remember we did segmentation annotation for driving data, so segmenting the scene, like visual data.
	And you can get all, so it was drawing, people were 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 polygons that they do.
	There's a few papers written about how to draw polygons with recurrent neural nets to try to learn from the human clicking.
	But it was just experimental.
	It was one of those CVPR type papers that people do a really tiny data set.
	It didn't feel like people really tried to do it seriously.
	Yeah, I wonder if there's information in the fixing that provides a deeper set of signal than just the raw data.
	The intuition is for sure there must be, right?
	There must be. In all kinds of signals and how long it took to make that edit and stuff like that.
	It's going to be up to us.
	That's why the next couple of years is super exciting for us, right?
	So that's what the focus is now.
	You mentioned Rev.ai.
	That's where you want to Yeah, so Rev.ai is kind of our way of bringing this ASR to the rest of the world, right?
	So when we started, we were human only.
	Then we kind of created this 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 $1.25, but you want to pay...
	Now it's 25 cents a minute, I think.
	And you get the transcript, the machine-generated transcript, and 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 kind of 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 SpeedTrack 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?
	And they saw what people built with it, and they tried 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 Rev does.
	But then the interface is like, come on.
	Yeah, it's horrible. Why is it so painful?
	Does nobody at Amazon want to seriously invest in it?
	It felt like you could make so much money if you took this effort seriously.
	And it feels like they have a committee of two people just sitting back like...
	Like, a meeting. They meet once a month.
	Like, what are we going to do with Mechanical Turk?
	It's like two websites make me feel like this.
	That and craiglist.org, whatever the hell it is.
	It feels like it's designed in the 90s.
	Well, Craigslist basically hasn't been updated pretty much since the guy originally built.
	Do you seriously think there's a team, like how big is the team working on a mechanical turn?
	I don't know. There's some team, right?
	I feel like there isn't.
	I'm skeptical. Yeah.
	Well, if nothing else they benefit from.
	You know, the other teams moving things forward in a small way.
	Possibly. But I know what you mean.
	We use Mechanical Turk for a couple of things as well, and it's a painful UI. It's painful.
	But yeah, it works. I think most people, the thing is most people don't really use the UI, right?
	Right. Like we, for example, we...
	That's right. Use it through the API, right?
	But even the API documentation and so on, it's super outdated.
	I don't even know what to...
	I mean, the 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.
	It's not so shady.
	I should exhibit some gratitude.
	Okay, let's practice some gratitude.
	The documentation is pretty good.
	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 the degree of explanations with examples It's 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 get covered.
	And it feels like it's almost there.
	Like, it's such a magical thing.
	Like, the Maps API, YouTube API, there's a bunch of stuff.
	There's probably some team at Google, right, responsible for writing this documentation.
	That's probably not the engineers, right?
	And probably this team is not, you know, where you want to be.
	Well, it's a weird thing.
	I sometimes think about this for somebody who wants to also build the company.
	I think about this a lot.
	YouTube, the service, is one of the most magical...
	I'm so grateful that YouTube exists.
	And yet, they seem to be quite clueless on so many things that everybody's screaming them at.
	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.
	There's literally people that are screaming, like their new YouTube studio, for example.
	There's features that were 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.
	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 small groups working on these small features, on these specific features.
	And there's no overarching dictator type of human that says, why the hell are we neglecting Steve Jobs type of character that's like, There's people that we need to speak to the people that want to love our product and they don't.
	Let's fix this shit. Maybe at some point you just get so fixated on the numbers, right?
	And it's like, well, the numbers are pretty great, right?
	That's right. People are watching, you know?
	Doesn't seem to be a problem, right?
	Doesn't seem to be a problem. And you're not the person that built this thing, right?
	So you really care about it. You're just there.
	You came in as a product manager, right?
	You got hired sometime later.
	Your mandate is like, increase this number, like, you know.
	10%, right? That's brilliantly put.
	If there's a lesson in this, is don't reduce your company into a metric of how much, like you said, how much people watching the videos and so on, and convince yourself that everything's working just because the numbers are going up.
	There's something, you have to have a vision.
	You have to want people to love your stuff.
	Because love is ultimately the beginning of a successful long-term company.
	They always should love your product.
	You have to be like a creator and have that creator's love for your own thing, right?
	And you're pained by these commons, right?
	Apple, I think, did this generally really well.
	They're well known for keeping teams small, even when they were big, right?
	And Hugh, as an engineer, there's that book, Creative Selection, I don't know if you read it, by an Apple engineer named Ken Kosienda.
	It's kind of a great book, actually, because unlike most of these business books where it's You know, here's how Steve Jobs ran the company.
	It's more like, here's how life was like for me, you know, an engineer.
	Here are the projects I worked on and here are 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 autocorrection, 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.
	He was famously a stickler for this kind of stuff.
	But because the teams were small, you really owned this 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 he talks to the lowest-level engineers.
	Okay, so we're talking about ASR, and so this is basically where I was saying we're going to take this ultra-seriously, and then what's the mission?
	To try to keep pushing towards the 3%?
	Yeah, and try to build this platform where all of your audience, all of your meetings, they're as easily accessible as your notes.
	Imagine all the meetings a company might have.
	Now that I'm no longer a programmer, and I'm a quote-unquote manager, that's like my day is in meetings.
	Pretty often I want to see what was said.
	Who said it? What's the context?
	But it's generally not really something they can easily retrieve.
	Imagine if all of those meetings were indexed, archived, you could go back, you could share a clip really easily.
	So that might change completely.
	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. With Zoom and so on, 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 love them very much because they dream big in terms of, like, they want to empower creators.
	So one of my hopes was with Spotify that they would use the technology like Rev or something like that to start converting everything into text and make it indexable.
	Things that sucks with podcasts is it's hard to find stuff.
	The model is basically subscription.
	It's similar to what YouTube used to be like, which is you basically find a creator that you enjoy and you subscribe to them and you just follow what they're doing, but the search and discovery It wasn't a big part of YouTube in the early days, but that's what currently with podcasts, is the search and discovery is non-existent.
	You're basically searching for the dumbest possible thing, which is keywords in the titles of episodes.
	Even aside from search and discovery, all the time, I listen to a number of podcasts.
	There's something said, and I want to go back to that later, because I'm trying to remember, what did you say?
	Maybe recommended some cool product that I want to try out.
	It's basically impossible.
	Maybe some people have pretty good show notes, so maybe you'll get lucky and you can find it, right?
	But if everyone had transcripts and it was all searchable, it would be so much better.
	I mean, that's one of the things that I wanted to, I mean, one of the reasons we're talking today is I wanted to take this quite seriously, the Rev thing.
	I've just been lazy. So, because I'm very fortunate that a lot of people support this podcast, that there's enough money now to do transcription and so on, it seemed clear to me, especially like CEOs and sort of like PhDs, like people, Write to me who are like graduate students of computer science or graduate students of whatever the heck field.
	It's clear that their mind, like they enjoy podcasts when they're doing laundry or whatever, but they want to revisit 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 a Joshua Bach conversation.
	I had just a bunch of And then on the Elon Musk side, reporters 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 it's 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 it said. You can go listen to, like, this clip from this section.
	I'm actually trying to figure out, I'll probably on the website create, like, a place where the transcript goes, like, as a webpage so that people can reference it, like, reporters can reference it and so on.
	I mean, most of the reporters probably want to write clickbait articles that are complete falsifying, which I'm fine with.
	It's the way of journalism.
	I don't care. I've had this conversation with a friend of mine, a mixed martial artist, Ryan Hall.
	And we talked about, as I've been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third 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, you know, like, we were talking about forgiveness, and we were bringing that up as, like, the worst-case possible thing is, like, even...
	For people who are Holocaust survivors, one of the ways to let go of the suffering they've been through is to forgive.
	And he brought up Hitler as somebody that would potentially be 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, all these articles written about MMA fighter, UFC fighter, right?
	MMA fighter loves Hitler. No, like, well, no, they were somewhat accurate.
	They didn't say, like, loves Hitler.
	They said, thinks that if Hitler came back to life, we should forgive him.
	Like, they kind of, it's kind of accurate-ish, but...
	The headline made it sound a lot worse than it was, but I'm fine with it.
	That's the way the world...
	I want to 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 the headline, but...
	There's something about podcasts like the audio that makes it difficult to jump to a spot and to look 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 kind of want support from the entire ecosystem, from the toolmakers and the podcast creators, even clients.
	Imagine if most podcast apps, if it was a standard, here's how you include a transcript into a podcast.
	Podcast is just an RSS feed, ultimately.
	Actually, just yesterday I saw this company called Buzzsprout, I think they're called.
	So they're trying to do this.
	They proposed a spec, an extension to their RSS format to reference podcasts, reference transcripts in a standard way.
	And they're talking about, like, there's one client dimension that will support it, but imagine, like, more clients support it, right?
	So any podcast, you could go and see the transcripts, right, in your, like, normal podcast app.
	Yeah, I mean, somebody, so I have somebody who works with me, works, helps with advertising, Matt is an awesome guy.
	He mentioned Buzzsprout to me, but he says it's really annoying because they want exclusive, they want to host the podcast.
	Right. This is the problem with Spotify, too.
	This is where I'd like to say, like, F Spotify.
	There's a magic to RSS with podcasts.
	It can be made available to everyone.
	And then there's this ecosystem of different Podcast players that emerge and they compete freely.
	And that's a beautiful thing.
	That's why going exclusive, like Joe Rogan went exclusive.
	I'm not sure if you're familiar with, he went to Spotify.
	As a huge fan of Joe Rogan, I've been kind of nervous about the whole thing, but...
	Let's see. I hope that Spotify steps up.
	They've added video, which was very surprising that they were able to put up.
	So, explicit meaning you can't subscribe to ZRSS feed anymore.
	It's only on Spotify. For now, you can until December 1st.
	On December 1st, everything disappears and it's Spotify only.
	And Spotify gave him $100 million for that, so it's an interesting deal.
	But I did some soul searching, and I'm glad he's doing it.
	But if Spotify came to me with $100 million, I wouldn't do it.
	Well, I have a very different relationship with money.
	I hate money. I just think I believe in the pirate radio aspect of podcasting, the freedom, and that there's something about- The open source spirit.
	The open source spirit.
	It just doesn't seem right.
	It doesn't feel right. That said, because so many people care about Joe Rogan's program, they're going to hold Spotify's feet to the fire.
	One of the cool things, what Joe told me, is the reason he likes working with Spotify is that They're like ride or die together, right?
	So they want him to succeed.
	So that's why they're not actually telling him what to do, despite what people think.
	They don't give him any notes on anything.
	They want him to succeed.
	And that's the cool thing about exclusivity with the 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, maybe for PewDiePie, something like that, they want you to succeed.
	But for the most part, from all the big creators I've spoken with, Veritasim, 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 creators.
	They have like a hundred other. They don't care.
	And especially 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 has racist guests on.
	They see him as a headache, potentially.
	A lot of people talk about this.
	It's a hard place to be for YouTube, actually.
	Figuring out with the search and discovery process of how do you filter out conspiracy theories and which conspiracy theories represent dangerous untruths and which conspiracy theories are like vanilla untruths.
	And then even when you start having meetings and discussions about what is true or not, it starts getting weird.
	Yeah, it'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, censorship is usually government censorship.
	But still, 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, no Nazis, right?
	What a simple principle. But, you know, yes, I mean, no one likes Nazis.
	But there's like many shades of gray, 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 a Sam Harris.
	I don't know if you know that is wasted, in my opinion, his conversation with Jack Dorsey.
	I spoke with Jack before on this podcast, and we'll talk again.
	But Sam brought up Sam Harris does not like Donald Trump.
	I do listen to his podcast.
	I'm familiar with his views on the matter.
	And he asked Jack Dorsey, he's like, how can you not ban Donald Trump from Twitter?
	You have that conversation.
	You have a conversation where 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 tough.
	I'm not sure where I land on it.
	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 by some YouTube video that our government's been taken over by aliens, it's unlikely that you'll be returned to sanity simply because that video is not available on YouTube, right? Yeah, I'm with you.
	I tend to believe in the intelligence of people, and 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...
	There's a nice balance there.
	And I think philosophically, I think about that a lot.
	Where's the balance between free speech and encouraging people, even though they have the freedom of speech, to not be an asshole?
	Yeah, right. That's not a constitutional...
	So you have the right for free speech, but just don't be an asshole.
	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 stick of censorship.
	Yeah. But I think it's an interesting machine learning problem.
	Just be nicer. Yeah, machine learning for niceness.
	It is. Responsible AI. I mean, it is a thing 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.
	Which is one of the reasons I am in part considering entering that space a little bit.
	It's difficult for them, right? Because it's kind of well known that people are kind of driven by rage and outrage, maybe, is a better word, right?
	Drives engagement and well, these companies are judged by engagement, right?
	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, You should be able to optimize for that.
	You don't need to necessarily optimize for engagement.
	And that'll be good for society, too.
	Yeah, no, I mean, I generally agree with you, but it requires a patient person with, you know, trust from Wall Street to be able to carry out such a strategy.
	This is what I believe the Steve Jobs character and Elon Musk character is like...
	You basically have to be so good at your job that you can hold the board and 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 because they believe in your vision.
	But that requires being really good at what you do.
	It requires being Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
	There's kind of a reason why a third name doesn't come immediately to mind, right?
	There's maybe a handful of other people, but it's not that many.
	It's not many. I mean, people say that I'm a fan of Elon Musk.
	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?
	I mean, that's kind of awesome.
	And it's kind of making it happen, which is like...
	It's kind of gone like that kind of, like, spirit, right?
	Like, from a lot of our society, right?
	You know, like, we can get to the moon in 10 years, and, like, we did it, right?
	Yeah, especially in this time of 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. Just like you said, I mean, it gives you a reason to wake up in the morning and dream.
	For us engineers too.
	It's inspiring as hell, man.
	Well, let me ask you the worst possible question, which is, so you're like, at the core, you're a programmer.
	An engineer, but now you made the unfortunate choice, 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.
	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 got into this, right, because...
	As a kid, I just remember this incredible amazement at being able to write a program and something comes to life that kind of didn't exist before.
	I don't think you have that in many other fields.
	You have that with some other kinds of engineering, but you're maybe a little bit more limited with what you can do, right?
	With a computer, you can literally imagine any kind of program, right?
	So it's a little bit godlike, what you do when you create it.
	And so, I mean, that's how I got into it.
	Do you remember the first program you wrote, or maybe the first program that made you fall in love with computer science?
	I don't know what was the first program.
	It's probably like trying to write one of those games in basic, you know, like emulate the snake game or whatever.
	I don't remember, to be honest.
	But I enjoyed it. Like, that's why I always loved about, you know, being a program is just the creation process.
	And it's a little bit different when you're not the one doing the creating process.
	And, you know, another aspect to it I would say is, you know, when you're a programmer, when you're an 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're 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 miss that dopamine rush a little bit when you first become.
	But then, you know, slowly you kind of see Yes, your teams are doing amazing work, right?
	And you can take pride in that.
	You can get like a, what is it?
	Like a ripple effect of a dopamine or somebody else's dopamine.
	Yeah, you live off other people's dopamine.
	So is there pain points and challenges you have to overcome from going to a programmer to becoming a programmer of humans?
	A programmer of humans.
	I don't know. Humans are 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, one of the things, like, I had a group at MIT that, you know, I found that, like, Some people I could scream at and criticize hard, and that made them do much better work and really push them to their limit.
	And there's some people that I had to nonstop compliment because they're so already self-critical about everything they do that I have to be constantly 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 how that, the complete difference in people.
	Definitely people respond to different motivations and different modes of feedback and you kind of, I have to figure it out.
	There's a pretty good book, which for some reason now the name escapes me, about management.
	First Break All the Rules. First Break All the Rules?
	First Break All the Rules. It's a book that we generally ask a lot of first-time managers to read a ref.
	One of the philosophies is managed by exception, which is don't have some standard template.
	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 answer this question, but people love it when I ask it, which is, are there books, technical, fiction, or philosophical that you enjoyed or had an impact on your life that you would You already mentioned Dune, like all of the Dune.
	All of the Dune. The second one was probably the weakest, but anyway, so yeah, all of the Dune is good.
	I mean, yeah, can you just slow a little tangent on that?
	How many Dune books are there?
	Like, do you recommend people start with the first one if that was...
	Yeah, you gotta have to read them all.
	I mean, it is a complete story, right?
	So you start with the first one, you gotta read all of them.
	So it's not like a tree, like a creation of the universe that you should go in sequence?
	You should go in sequence, yeah.
	It's kind of a chronological storyline.
	There's six books in all.
	Then there's like many kind of books that were written by...
	Frank Herbert's son, but those are not as good, so you don't have to bother with those.
	Shots fired. Shots fired.
	But the main sequence is good.
	So what are some other books?
	Maybe there's a few. I don't know that 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.
	And it's kind of incredible how prescient he was about what a brave new world might be like.
	You kind of see genetic sorting in this book where there's these alphas and epsilons from the earliest time of society.
	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 intellectual level or socioeconomic status, more so these days than in the past.
	And you kind of see some effects of it in 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.
	It's genetic sorting in terms of what Dawkins called memes, his ideas being put into these bins of these little echo chambers and so on.
	That's the book that's, I think, a worthwhile read for everyone.
	1984 is good, of course, as well, if you're talking about dystopian novels of the future.
	Yes, it's a slightly different view of the future, right?
	But I kind of identify with Brave New World a little bit more.
	Speaking of, not a book, but my favorite kind of dystopian science fiction is a movie called Brazil, which I don't know if you've heard of.
	I've heard of it and I know I need to watch it.
	But yeah, because it's in...
	Is it in English or no?
	It's an English movie, yeah.
	And it's a sort of like dystopian movie of authoritarian incompetence, right?
	It's like... Nothing really works very well.
	The system is creaky, but no one is willing to challenge it.
	Things kind of amble along.
	It strikes me as a very plausible future of what authoritarians might look like.
	It's not this super-efficient evil dictatorship of 1984.
	It's just this badly functioning but It's status quo, so it just goes on.
	Yeah, that's one funny thing that stands out to me is in, whether it's authoritarian, dystopian stuff, or just basic, like, if you look at the movie Contagion, it seems that in movies, government is almost always exceptionally competent.
	It's used as a storytelling tool of extreme competence.
	You use it whether it's good or evil, but it's competent.
	It's very interesting to think about where much more realistically it's incompetence, and that incompetence itself has consequences that are difficult to predict.
	Bureaucracy has a very boring way of being evil.
	If you look at the HBO show at Chernobyl, it's a really good story of how bureaucracy It 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- The 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 like that.
	I wish it wasn't so...
	There's a movie called Inglorious Bastards about Hitler and so on.
	For some reason, those movies piss me off.
	I know a lot of people love them, but...
	I just feel like there's not enough good movies, even about Hitler.
	There's good movies about the Holocaust, but even Hitler, there's a movie called Dawnfall 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 agree with you on Inglourious Passage.
	I didn't love the movie because I felt like kind of the stylizing of it, right?
	The whole Tarantino kind of Tarantinoism, if you will, kind of detracted from it and made it seem like unserious a little bit.
	But Death of Stalin I felt differently.
	Maybe it's because it's a comedy to begin with.
	It's just not like I'm expecting seriousness.
	But It kind of depicted the absurdity of the whole situation, in a way, right?
	I mean, it was funny, so maybe it doesn't make light of it, but to some degree it's probably like this, right?
	Like a bunch of kind of people that are like, oh shit, right?
	You're right, but the thing is, it was so close to 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.
	Well, in reality, that's the absurdity of how people act with dictators.
	I mean, I guess it was too close to reality for me.
	The kind of banality of, like, what were eventually fairly evil acts, right?
	But, like, yeah, they're...
	They're just a bunch of people trying to survive.
	I haven't watched it yet, the movie on Churchill with Gary Oldman.
	I think it's Gary Oldman.
	I might be making that up.
	I think he won. He was nominated for an Oscar or something.
	I love these movies about these humans.
	And Stalin...
	Chernobyl made me realize, the HBO show, that there's not enough movies about Russia that capture...
	That spirit, I'm sure it might be in Russia and there is, but the fact that some British dude that like did comedy, I feel like he did like Hangover or some shit 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.
	Poetically and the fact that you need to get accurate, he got accurate, just the spirit of it down to the bowls that pets use, just the whole feel of it.
	It was good, yeah.
	I saw the series. Yeah, it's incredible.
	It made me wish that somebody did a good 1930s starvation at Stalin leading up to World War II and in World War II itself, like Stalingrad and so on.
	I feel like that story needs to be told.
	Millions of people died.
	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, there's so interesting, like, the bureaucracy of it is so fascinating that it potentially might be happening in the world now, like, that we're 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 a lot of possibilities there, I suppose.
	Yeah, I wonder how much, you know, I guess the archives should be maybe more open nowadays, right?
	I mean, for a long time, they're just...
	We didn't know, right? Anyways, no one in the West knew for sure.
	Well, there's a, I don't know if you know him, there's a guy named Stephen Kotkin.
	He is a historian of Stalin that I spoke to on this podcast.
	I'll speak to him again. The guy knows his shit on Stalin.
	He like read everything.
	It's so fascinating to To talk to somebody, he knows Stalin better than Stalin himself.
	It's crazy. I think he's at Princeton.
	His whole life is Stalin.
	Starting 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 biography of Putin.
	I need to read some Russians.
	Obviously, I'm mentally preparing for a possible conversation with Putin.
	So, what is your first question to Putin when you have him on the podcast?
	It's interesting you bring that up.
	First of all, I wouldn't tell you.
	Can't give it away now.
	But I actually haven't even thought about that.
	So my current approach, and I do this with interviews often, obviously that's a special one, but I try not to think about questions until the last minute.
	I'm trying to sort of get into the mindset.
	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, Mark Morales, maybe. I could see that.
	But I like your approach, anyways, of this extreme empathy, right?
	It's a little bit like Hannibal, right?
	Like, if you ever watched the show Hannibal, right?
	They had that guy...
	Well, you know Hannibal, of course.
	Yeah. Yeah, Silence of the Lambs.
	But there was a TV show as well, and it focused on this guy, Will Durant, who's a character, like, extreme empath, right?
	So in the way he, like, catches all these killers, he pretty much...
	You can empathize with them, right?
	You can understand why they're doing the things they're doing, right?
	It's a pretty excruciating thing, right?
	Because you're pretty much spending half your time in the head of evil people, right?
	I mean, I definitely try to do that with others, so you should do that in moderation, but I think it's a pretty safe place to be.
	One of the cool things with this podcast, and I know you didn't sign up to hear me listen to this bullshit, but...
	That was interesting. What's his name?
	Chris Latner, who's a Google, oh, he's not Google anymore, sci-fi.
	He's one of the most legit engineers I talk with.
	I talk with him again on this podcast, and 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.
	So his idea, which I think I agree with Chris, is that you go to the extremes.
	You just 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, like, demystifies it a little bit, right?
	There is a person behind all of these things.
	And that's the cool thing about podcasting.
	Like, three, four-hour conversations that...
	That it's very different than a 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 in my day-to-day, aside from my own family, that I sit across.
	It's sad, but it's also beautiful.
	I've gotten the chance to, like our conversation now, there's somebody, I guarantee you, there's somebody in Russia, Listening to this now, like jogging, there's somebody who has just smoked some weed, sit back on a couch, and just like enjoying.
	I guarantee you that we'll write in the comments right now that yes, I'm in St.
	Petersburg, I'm in Moscow, I'm whatever, and we're in their head, and they have a friendship with us.
	I'm the same way, I'm a huge fan of podcasting.
	It's a beautiful thing.
	I mean, it's a weird one-way human connection.
	Before I went on Joe Rogan, and still I'm just a huge fan of his.
	I've been friends with Joe Rogan for 10 years, but one way?
	Yeah, from this way, from the St.
	Petersburg way. Yeah, the St.
	Petersburg way. And it's a real friendship.
	I mean, now it's like two-way, but it's still surreal.
	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.
	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 to things like that, right?
	Yeah. Oh, expressions as well, of course, right?
	But, you know, back in the day on the, you know, on the savannah, you had to be very attuned to, you know, whether you had a good relationship with the rest of your tribe or a very bad relationship, right?
	Because, you know, if you had a very bad relationship, you were probably going to be left behind and eaten by the lions.
	Yeah. But it's weird that the tribe...
	It's different now.
	You could have a one-way connection with Joe Rogan as opposed to the tribe of your physical vicinity.
	But that's why it works with the podcasting, 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 because you don't hear the voice.
	You're connecting with an abstraction, right?
	It's like some stream of tweets, right?
	And it's very easy to...
	Assign to them any kind of evil intent or dehumanize them, which is much harder to do when it's a real voice, right?
	Because you realize it's a real person behind the voice.
	Let me try this out on you.
	I sometimes ask about the meaning of life.
	Do you, your father now, 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 are we descended to vapes even on this planet?
	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.
	But in some ways, I guess, the meaning of life is kind of 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 all contribute in a sway way, but just by existing, by having our own unique set of desires and drives, right?
	Maybe that means creating something great, and it's bringing up kids who are unique and different and seeing, taking joy in what they do.
	To me, that's pretty much it.
	If you're not a religious person, which I guess I'm not, that's the meaning of life.
	It's in the living and in 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, 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's probably some version of reproduction and sex, whatever, that's in evolution.
	But creating that HTML button...
	It has echoes of that feeling, and it's magical.
	Right. Well, I mean, 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 part of it.
	Yeah, that HTML button is the creation in God's image.
	Yeah. So, I mean, you know, maybe hopefully it'll be something a little more...
	It's a dynamic, maybe some JavaScript, some React, and so on.
	That's what differentiates us from, you know, the apes, so to speak.
	Yeah, we did a pretty good job.
	Dan, it was an 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, allowing me to sort of fanboy over some of the things I love.
	So, thanks for wasting your time with me today.
	That was awesome. Thanks for having me on and giving me a chance to try this out.
	Awesome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Kokodov, and thank you to our sponsors.
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