#151 – Dan Kokotov: Speech Recognition with AI and Humans

Dan Kokotov is VP of Engineering at Rev.ai, an automatic speech recognition company. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil – Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium – Business Wars: https://wondery.com/business-wars/ – Cash App: https://cash.app/ and use code LexPodcast to get $10 EPISODE LINKS: Rev: https://www.rev.com Rev.ai: https://www.rev.ai PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (09:17) – Dune (12:34) – Rev (18:33) – Translation (25:22) – Gig economy (34:02) – Automatic speech recognition (44:53) – Create products that people love (53:02) – The future of podcasts at Spotify (1:14:41) – Book recommendations (1:16:02) – Stories of our dystopian future (1:19:45) – Movies about Stalin and Hitler (1:24:59) – Interviewing Putin (1:30:56) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Dan Kokotov, 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,

• 0:45Lex Fridman?

  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,

• 1:30Lex Fridman?

  that comes along and just makes my life way easier. Examples are Adobe Premiere for video editing, Azitope RX for cleaning up audio, AutoHotKey on Windows for automated keyboard or mouse tasks, Emacs as an ID 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.

• 2:15Lex Fridman?

  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

• 2:57Lex Fridman?

  a consideration. In general, no amount of money can buy my integrity. That's true for this podcast, and that's true for anything else I do. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now, and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps, so if you skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It is the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by, who's quickly becoming my favorite sponsor, Athletic Greens,

• 3:39Lex Fridman?

  the all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I just, in fact, actually finished drinking it. It replaced the multivitamin for me, and went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals. I do intermittent fasting of 16 to 24 hours every day, and always break my fast with Athletic Greens. I can't say enough good things, can't stop raving about these guys. It helps me not worry whether I'm getting the nutrients I need. One of the many reasons I'm a fan is that they keep iterating on the formula, keep improving it, like all good engineers and scientists always should be. Life is not about reaching perfection, it's about constantly striving for it and making sure each iteration is a positive delta.

• 4:25Lex Fridman?

  The other thing I've taken for a long time outside of Athletic Greens is fish oil. So I'm especially excited now that they're selling fish oil and are offering listeners of this very podcast, free one month supply of Wild Caught Omega 3 Fish Oil. When you go to athleticgreens.com/lex to claim the special offer. By the way, if the link doesn't seem to work for you for whatever reason, sometimes it doesn't if you have an ad blocker enabled. So try to turn off your ad blocker for this one particular case, but they're also trying to fix it. So they're on top of it. Click the athleticgreens.com/lex link in the description to get the fish oil and the

• 5:05Lex Fridman?

  all in one supplement I rely on for the nutritional foundation of my physical and mental performance. This episode is supported by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. I'm a big believer in reading at least an hour every day. As part of that, I use Blinkist to try out a book I may otherwise never have a chance to read. And in general, it's a great way to broaden your view of the ideal landscape out there and find books that you may want to read more deeply. With Blinkist, you get unlimited access to read or listen to a massive library of condensed

• 5:49Lex Fridman?

  nonfiction books. I also use Blinkist's Shortcast. That's a lot of S's to quickly catch up on a podcast episode I've missed. Right now Blinkist has a special offer just for the listeners of this podcast. Let me take a sip of this drink first. If you're listening to this, I dare you to try to guess which drink I'm drinking. Go to blinkist.com/lex to start your free seven day trial and get 25% off a Blinkist Premium Membership. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, blinkist.com/lex to get 25% off and a seven day free trial. Blinkist.com/lex.

• 6:33Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Business Wars Podcast. Tech entrepreneurs are in all out race to cash in on our collective addiction to social media. That sentence was way harder to pronounce than I thought when I first started saying it. In the new season of Wondery's Business Wars, TikTok versus Instagram, they track the war between two social media giants. I've spoken about possibly entering this space by helping build a new social network. This is something I struggle with quite a bit because it feels like standing on the edge of a cliff, hoping to fly. I want to keep my mind and heart open, fragile, but it seems that the world can too easily destroy such a mind.

• 7:17Lex Fridman?

  And so I wonder if I'm able to face such challenges. Perhaps the choice isn't mine to make. Perhaps it's already been made. Anyway, this podcast season looks at just one heated competition in the space where the game, in my view, is not one that makes for a better world. Listen to the latest season of Business Wars, TikTok versus Instagram on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or listen ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. I just, just in general, I highly recommend Wondery. There's a lot of good podcasts on there. Finally, the show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store.

• 8:01Lex Fridman?

  When you get it, use code LEXPODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. I'm thinking of doing some conversations with folks who work in and around the cryptocurrency space. Similar to artificial intelligence, there are a lot of charlatans in this space, but there's a lot of free thinkers as well, technical geniuses that are worth exploring ideas with in depth and with care. And I think it's pretty clear that cryptocurrency is here to stay. Bitcoin just hit $32,000. Anyway, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use code LEXPODCAST,

• 8:43Lex Fridman?

  you get $10, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Dan Kokoroff.

• 9:17Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  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. So 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.

• 9:49Lex Fridman?

  No, I have not. It's one of my biggest regrets, especially because the new movie is coming out.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:55Lex Fridman?

  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. It used to be Dune. I guess you would call that real time strategy.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Right, right. I think I remember that game.

• 10:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's kind of awesome, 90s or something. I think I played it actually when I was in Russia.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:30Lex Fridman?

  So you didn't get color? You didn't get like?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  So I left Russia in 1991, right?

• 10:35Lex Fridman?

  1991, okay.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  So I was one of the few like a kids 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?

• 10:48Lex Fridman?

  Nice, with floppy disks.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:51Lex Fridman?

  So, okay, but back to Dune.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Back to Dune. And by the way, the new movie, I'm pretty interested in, but.

• 10:58Lex Fridman?

  You're skeptical?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  I'm a little skeptical. I'm a little skeptical. I saw the trailer. I don't know. So there's a David Lynch movie, Dune, as you may know. And I'm a huge David Lynch fan, by the way. So the movie is somewhat controversial, but.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  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 Dune is so much about kind of mood and 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 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.

• 11:39Lex Fridman?

  So the worms are involved.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Worms are involved. You probably saw the worms in the trailer, right?

• 11:44Lex Fridman?

  And in the video game.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  So he kind of like merges with the swarm 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 he 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.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Maybe that's a bit of a cruel philosophy to take away, but.

• 12:27Lex Fridman?

  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,

• 13:07Lex Fridman?

  holy shit, somebody figured out how to do it just really easily. I, I'm, I'm such a fan of just.

• 13:17Lex Fridman?

  When people take a problem and they just make it easy. 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, 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, I thought I had, you know, just for the hell of it.

• 13:58Lex Fridman?

  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 Isotope RX. It's for audio editing. And like, that's another one where it was like, you just drop it. I dropped in the audio and it just cleans everything up really nicely. All the stupid, like the mouth sounds and sometimes there's uh, background like s- sounds. Due to the malfunction, the equipment, it can clean that stuff up. It can, it has like general voice denoising, it has like automation capabilities where you can do batch processing and you can put, put a bunch of effects.

• 14:44Lex Fridman?

  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'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. 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?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Revrev.com. Same thing, I guess. We do have Rev.ai now as well, which we can talk about later.

• 15:28Lex Fridman?

  Like, do you have the actual domain, or is it just?

• 15:31Speaker 01

  The actual domain, but we also use it kind of as a sub-brand. So we use Rev.ai to denote our ASR services, right? And Rev.com is kind of our more human and to the end user services.

• 15:44Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:52Lex Fridman?

  They provide almost like a separate branch of.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  A little bit. 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.

• 16:02Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  With us, the differentiation is a little bit different, but maybe similar idea.

• 16:06Lex Fridman?

  Yep. Okay, so what is Rev?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Before I launch into what is Rev, I was gonna say, you know, like you're talking about like Rev was music to your ears.

• 16:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Your spiel was music to my ears.

• 16:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  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's very familiar with their.

• 16:34Lex Fridman?

  Upworked company.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Upworked 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 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?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  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 how can you really tell? So there's a kind of like a lot of potential regret, right? What if I choose a bad person? They're like going to be late on the work. It's going to 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? They're not an expert on that either. So like Rev's idea was, let's remove the barrier, right? Like, let's make it simple. We'll pick a few verticals that are fairly standardizable.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Now, 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. You know, as soon as possible, you know, originally maybe it was 48 hours, then we made it shorter and shorter and shorter.

• 18:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a rush processing too.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  There's a rush processing now. And we'll hide all the details from you, right?

• 18:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:26Lex Fridman?

  That's really cool. The, so you picked like a vertical, by vertical, you mean basically a

• 18:31Speaker 01

  A service, a service category.

• 18:33Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  The focus now is, is language or speech services generally, speech to text, language services. You can kind of group them however you want. So, but we, originally, the categorization was work from home. So one of work that was done by people on a computer, you know, we weren't trying to get into, you know, Task Rabbit 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,

• 19:24Speaker 01

  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, 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. And

• 19:45Speaker 01

  we picked a kind of a specialty of translation where we would translate things like board certificates,

• 19:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:02Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 20:15Speaker 01

  So now it looks for audio transcription, right? It's per audio minute.

• 20:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, that, that, yes.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  For, for, for translation, we don't really actually focus it on anymore. But, you know, it back when it was still a main business of rabbit was per page, right? Or per word, depending on the kind of.

• 20:31Lex Fridman?

  Because you can also do translation now on the audio, right?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Like subtitles. So it would be both transcription and translation. That's right.

• 20:39Lex Fridman?

  I wanted to test the system to see how good it is, to see like how, how, well, is Russian supported?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Think so. Yeah.

• 20:48Lex Fridman?

  It'd be interesting to try it out. I mean, one of the.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:57Lex Fridman?

  Got it. Because it's, I'm, I'm deeply curious about this. I'm, when COVID opens up a little bit, when the economy, when the world opens up a little bit.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  You want to build your brand in Russia?

• 21:07Lex Fridman?

  No, I don't. First of all, I'm allergic to the word brand.

• 21:12Lex Fridman?

  I'm definitely not building any brands in Russia.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 21:15Lex Fridman?

  But I'm going to Paris to talk to translators of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. There's this famous couple that does translation. And, you know, I'm more and more thinking.

• 21:27Lex Fridman?

  Of how is it possible to have a conversation with a Russian speaker? Cause 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 Grigory Perlman, who's a mathematician, who obviously doesn't speak any English.

• 22:08Lex Fridman?

  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 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.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Complicated.

• 22:34Lex Fridman?

  It's complicated, but I feel like it's worth the effort for certain kinds of people. One of whom I'm confident Vladimir Putin, I'm for sure talking to. I really want to make it happen. Cause I think I could do a good job with, but the, the right, you know, understanding the fundamentals of translation. It's 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. 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, that's like a little bit of a, a baby project that I hope to push forward. But anyway.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  It's a challenging thing. So just to share. My dad actually does translation, not, not professionally. He's a, he writes poetry. That was kind of always his.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Not a hobby, but he had a job, like a day job, but his passion was always writing poetry. And then we got to America and like he started also translating.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  First he was translating English poetry to Russia, now he also like goes the other, the other way. You kind of gained some small fame in that world anyways, because recently this poet like Louis Cluck, I don't know if you know, so an American poet, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  And so my dad had translated one of her books of poetry into Russian. He was like one of the few, so he kind of like they asked him and gave an interview to Radios Vabode, 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 just, you know, interviews.

• 24:19Lex Fridman?

  Do you remember any, any experiences and challenges to having to do the translation? That this to go to like something he's talked about?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  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 the way English is structured, right? Just there is 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 like 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.

• 24:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, Russian language, they play with words much more.

• 25:02Lex Fridman?

  So you, you're mentioning that Rev was kind of born out of trying to take a vertical and upwork and then standardize it, so.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Or just trying to make the freelancer marketplace idea better, right? Better for both. Customers and better for the freelancers themselves.

• 25:22Lex Fridman?

  Is there something else to the story of Rev, finding Rev? Like, what did it take to bring it actually to life? Was there any pain points?

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Plenty of, plenty of pain points. I mean, 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 revs. If there's not enough revs, revs are what we call our freelancers. So if there's not enough revs, 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 revs 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 is a quite challenging problem. And, you know, that's like a problem we've been working on for many years.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  We're still like refining our methods, right?

• 26:20Lex Fridman?

  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. And it's connecting, connecting people in a more systematized way. I would say, you know, 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,

• 27:04Lex Fridman?

  it could, it could be scaled to like tens of thousands of people, right? Is there something interesting about that world that you could speak to?

• 27:12Speaker 01

  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 diminishes the work being done, right? It sounds kind of like almost amateurish. Well, maybe like music is still a 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?

• 27:53Speaker 01

  And, you know, they don't want the traditional nine to five job, but they want to make some income and Rev kind of like allows them to do that and decide like exactly how much to work and when to work.

• 28:03Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Or by the same token, maybe someone is, you know, someone wants to live the mountain top, 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.

• 28:25Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak to like, what's the demographics, like distribution, like where do Revs live? Is it from all over the world? Like what is it? Do you have a sense of what's out there?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  From all over the world. Most of them are in the US. That's the majority. Um, you know, because most of our work is audio transcription and so you have to speak pretty good English.

• 28:50Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  So the majority of them are from the US. We have people in some other of the English speaking countries. And as far as like US, it's really all over the place. Um, you know, for some of the years now, we've been doing these little meetings where the management team will go to some place and we'll try to meet Revs and, you know, pretty much wherever we go, it's pretty easy to find, you know, a large number of Revs. You know, the most recent one we did is in Utah. So, but, but anyway, really.

• 29:19Lex Fridman?

  Are they from all walks of life, are these young folks, older folks?

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, all walks of life really. Like I said, you know, one, one category is, you know, the work from home mom, 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 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.

• 30:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's kind of interesting through the captioning process for me to learn about the, the, the reveres. Because 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 a machine learning, a deep learning.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:25Lex Fridman?

  Like I've used Rev to annotate, to caption 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 were already knowledgeable, but they do a really good job at like, I don't know.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  They invest time into these things. They will like do the research. They will Google things, you know, to 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.

• 31:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So what's that captioning transcription process look like for the rev? 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?

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, we've invested a pretty good amount of time to give like our reveres

• 31:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  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've built to make transcription as efficient as possible. They'll start with a speech reg 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.

• 32:17Lex Fridman?

  So it's basically a process of correction.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  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 ASR 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 cross talk and things like that, then maybe the ASR wouldn't do a good job. So the person might say like, you know what? I'm just gonna do it from scratch.

• 32:49Lex Fridman?

  Do it from scratch, yeah.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  So it kind of really depends.

• 32:51Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  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 for their, 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.

• 33:25Lex Fridman?

  Is it possible? Like, there's somebody, we're probably gonna use Rev to caption this. They're, they're listening to this right now. What's, what's, what do you think is the fastest you could possibly get on this right now?

• 33:39Speaker 01

  I think on a good audio, maybe two to three X, I would say, real time.

• 33:44Lex Fridman?

  Meaning it takes two to three times longer than the actual audio of the, of the podcast? This is, this is so meta. I could just imagine the rev is working on this right now.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Like, you're way wrong.

• 33:55Lex Fridman?

  You're way wrong. This takes way longer. But yeah, definitely.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Or you doubted me. I could do real time.

• 34:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Okay, so you mentioned ASR. Can you speak to what is ASR? Automatic speech recognition? How much?

• 34:12Lex Fridman?

  Like, what is the gap between perfect human performance and perfect or pretty damn good ASR?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so ASR, automatic speech recognition, it's a class of machine learning problem, right, to take, you know, speech like we're talking and transform it into a sequence of words, essentially.

• 34:31Lex Fridman?

  Audio of people talking?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  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, 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 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 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.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  And our accuracy, right now, it's, I think it's maybe 14% word error rate on our test suite that we generally use to measure. So word error rate is like one way to measure accuracy for ASR, right?

• 35:33Lex Fridman?

  So what's 14% word error rate?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  14% means across this test suite of a variety of different audios, it would be, it would get, in some way, 14% of the words wrong, 14% of the words wrong.

• 35:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  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...

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Weren't in the transcript, substitutions is you said Apple, but I said, but 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?

• 36:25Lex Fridman?

  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, you know, Google is probably up there in terms of their teams on

• 36:54Lex Fridman?

  on ASR or just NLP, natural language processing, different technologies. So do you think you can beat Google?

• 37:00Speaker 01

  On this kind of stuff? Yeah, we think so.

• 37:03Lex Fridman?

  Google just woke up on my phone. This is hilarious. Okay.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Now Google is listening, sending it back to headquarters. Who are these Rev people?

• 37:13Lex Fridman?

  But that's the goal?

• 37:14Speaker 01

  No, yeah, I mean, we measure ourselves against like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, you know, some of the, some smaller competitors. And we use like our internal test suite, we try to compose it of a pretty representative set of audience. Maybe it's some podcasts, some videos, some interviews, some lectures, things like that, right? And we beat them in our own testing.

• 37:37Lex Fridman?

  And actually Rev offers automated, like you can actually just do the automated captioning. So like, I guess it's like way cheaper, whatever it is, whatever the rates are.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:49Lex Fridman?

  So it's a, by the way, it used to be a dollar per minute for captioning and transcription. I think it's like a dollar 15 or something like that.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Dollar 25.

• 37:57Lex Fridman?

  Dollar 25.

• 38:00Lex Fridman?

  Dollar 25 now. Yeah. It's, it's pretty cool. That was the other thing that was surprising to me is actually. Like the cheapest thing you could one of the, I mean, I, I don't remember it being cheaper. You could on Upward get cheaper, but it was clear to me that this, that's going to be really shitty.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:19Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, one click.

• 38:43Lex Fridman?

  The one click. That's genius right there. Like that is so important for services.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:49Lex Fridman?

  That simplicity and I mean Rev is, is uh almost there. I mean, there's like some

• 38:57Lex Fridman?

  trying to think. So I, I think of uh, I stopped using uh this pipeline, but Rev offers it and 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 in Dropbox. So like it, it, it, it closes the loop to where I don't have to go to Rev at all and I can download it. Uh, sorry, I don't have to go to Rev at all and to download the files. It could just like automatically copy them.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Right. You put in your Dropbox and you know, a day later or maybe a few hours later.

• 39:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Depending if you're good rush. Just shows up. Yeah.

• 39:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I, 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 to like flawlessly because I wasn't doing enough captions to justify to myself the time investment into automating everything perfectly.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say if, if you're doing so many interviews that your biggest roadblock is uh clicking on the Rev download, but now, now you're talking about Elon Musk levels of business.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  But for sure, we have like a variety of ways to make it easy. You know, there's the integration you mentioned, I think, is through a company called Zapier, which kind of can connect Dropbox to Rev and vice versa. We have an API if you want to really like customize it, you know, if you want to create the Lex Fridman, you know, CMS or whatever.

• 40:35Lex Fridman?

  For this whole thing, okay, cool. So can you speak to the ASR a little bit more? Like, what is it?

• 40:44Lex Fridman?

  What does it take? Like, approach wise, machine learning wise, how hard is this problem? How do you get to the 3% error rate? Like, what's your vision of all of this?

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the 3% rate error rate is definitely, that's, that's the grand vision. We'll see what it takes to get there.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  But we believe, you know, in ASR, the biggest thing is the data, right? Like, it is true of like a lot of machine learning problems today, right? The more data you have and the high quality of the data, the better labeled the data.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  That's how you get good results. And we at Rev have kind of like the best data, like we have.

• 41:24Lex Fridman?

  Think you're literally, your business model is annotating the data.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Our business model is being paid to annotate the data.

• 41:30Lex Fridman?

  Being paid to annotate the data.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  So it's kind of like a pretty magical flywheel.

• 41:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  And so we've kind of like ridden this flywheel to, 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 revs make, right?

• 42:01Lex Fridman?

  Oh, that's interesting. How can you use that as data?

• 42:04Speaker 01

  We, 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?

• 42:10Lex Fridman?

  So the data, but the data is there, that'd be interesting, like, almost like a recurring YOLO net for fixing, for fixing transcripts. I always remember. We did segmentation annotation for for driving data, so segmenting the scene like visual data. And you could 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. Now, there's a few papers written about how to draw polygons like with recurrent neural nets

• 42:52Lex Fridman?

  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. And 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 data.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  The intuition is for sure there must be, right?

• 43:20Lex Fridman?

  There must be.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  And in in all kinds of signals and how long you took to, you know, make that edit and stuff like that. And it's gonna be like up to us. That's why like the next couple of years is like super exciting for us, right?

• 43:32Lex Fridman?

  So that's what like the focus is now is you mentioned rev.ai. That's where you want to.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so rev.ai is kind of our way of bringing this ASR to, you know, the rest of the world, right? So when we started, we were human only, you know, 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 a dollar twenty five, but you want to pay it. Now it's twenty five cents a minute, I think, and you get there. The transcript, the machine generated transcript, you get an editor and you can kind of fix it up yourself, right? Then we started using T S R for our own human transcriptionists. And then the kind of Rev AI is the final step of the journey, which is, you know,

• 44:19Speaker 01

  we have this amazing engine. What can people build with it, right? What kind of new applications could be enabled if you have speech track that's that accurate?

• 44:30Lex Fridman?

  Do you have ideas for this? Or is this just providing it as a service and seeing what people come up with?

• 44:34Speaker 01

  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 try to make it easier to build those things, right? And we kind of hope to do the same thing.

• 44:53Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's horrible.

• 45:18Lex Fridman?

  Why, why is it so painful? Does nobody at Amazon want to like 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 like two people just sitting back, like, like a meeting, they meet once a month, like, what are we going to do with Mechanical Turk? If, it's like, uh, two websites making me feel like this, that and Craigslist.org, whatever the hell it is.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:47Lex Fridman?

  It feels like it's designed in the 90s.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Well, Craigslist basically hasn't been updated pretty much since the guy originally built.

• 45:54Lex Fridman?

  Do you seriously think there's a team, like, how big is the team working on Mechanical Turk?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  I don't know. There's some team, right?

• 46:01Lex Fridman?

  I feel like there isn't. I'm skeptical.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, if nothing else, they benefit from. You know, the other teams like moving things forward, right? In a small way.

• 46:12Lex Fridman?

  Possibly.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  But I know what you mean. We do. We we use mechanical turf for a couple of things as well. And yeah, it's painful.

• 46:17Lex Fridman?

  It's painful, but yeah, it works.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  I think most people, the thing is, most people don't really use the UI, right? Like, so like we, for example, we

• 46:25Lex Fridman?

  That's right.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Use it through the API, right?

• 46:27Lex Fridman?

  So. But even the API documentation and so on, like it's super outdated.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Like, yeah.

• 46:32Lex Fridman?

  It's it. I don't. I don't even know what to. I mean, same my 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 is just the documentation is so shitty. Like, it's not so shitty. I should. I should actually be, I should exhibit some gratitude. Okay, let's practice some gratitude.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Ratitude.

• 47:05Lex Fridman?

  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 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 of stuff.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  I gotta imagine it's like, you know, 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.

• 47:58Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's a it's a weird thing. I I sometimes think about this. For somebody who wants to also build a company, I think about this a lot.

• 48:10Lex Fridman?

  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's 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, their new YouTube studio, for example. There's like features that that were like begged for, for a really long time.

• 48:51Lex Fridman?

  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,

• 49:36Lex Fridman?

  like Steve Jobs type of characters, 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.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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? 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. You know, 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?

• 50:10Lex Fridman?

  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, 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. 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 is they always should love your product.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  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, 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, he was an engineer, like there's that book, Creative Selection. I don't know if you read it by an Apple engineer named Ken Koscienda. 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 what it was like to pitch Steve Jobs, you know, on like, you know, I think it was in chart of like the keyboard and the auto correction, right?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  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. I 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.

• 51:52Lex Fridman?

  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 where I was saying, we're going to take this like ultra seriously. And then what's the mission to try to keep pushing towards a 3%?

• 52:20Speaker 01

  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, they're as easily accessible as your notes, right? Like, so like, imagine all the meetings a 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. That's less like my day is in meetings, right?

• 52:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  And, you know, pretty often I want to like, see what was said, right? Who said it, you know? What's the context? But it's generally not really something they 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?

• 53:02Lex Fridman?

  So that might change completely. It's 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?

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 53:13Lex Fridman?

  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,

• 53:24Lex Fridman?

  you know, I'm torn, I know a lot of the engineers at Spotify. So I love them very much because they, 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, to start converting everything into, 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, it's similar, 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.

• 54:09Lex Fridman?

  And like, you just,

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:11Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, but even aside from searching this cover 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 would be

• 54:57Lex Fridman?

  It's a game changer.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  It'd be so much better.

• 54:59Lex Fridman?

  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 the thing I've just been lazy.

• 55:11Lex Fridman?

  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 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 your Shabakh conversation.

• 55:55Lex Fridman?

  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 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.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  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 the section.

• 56:27Lex Fridman?

  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 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. Like, I've had this conversation with a friend of mine, a mixed martial artist, Ryan Hall, and we talked about, you know, 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

• 57:12Lex Fridman?

  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, you know, 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 like Hitler is 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, there's all these articles written about like MMA fighter, UFC fighter.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  MMA fighter loves Hitler.

• 57:55Lex Fridman?

  No, like, well, no, they didn't. 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 it, the headline made it sound a lot worse than, than, than it was, but I'm fine with it. That's the way, that's the way of 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.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Right. They can see it for themselves.

• 58:32Lex Fridman?

  For themselves.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  There's the headline, but they can go.

• 58:35Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 58:52Lex Fridman?

  Like myself experimenting with stuff. So like they 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,

• 59:15Speaker 01

  I mean, like it kind of wants support from the entire ecosystem, right? Like from the toolmakers and the podcast creators, even clients, right? I mean, imagine if like 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 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,

• 59:59Speaker 01

  you could go and see the transcripts, right? In your like normal podcast app.

• 1:00:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, somebody, so I have somebody who works with me is works, helps with advertising, 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.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:20Lex Fridman?

  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 is 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's, that's a beautiful thing. That that's why I go on exclusive, like Joe Rogan went exclusive. I'm not sure if you're familiar with, he went to 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 that Spotify steps up. They've added video, which was very surprising that they were.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  So exclusive meaning you can't subscribe to his RSS feed anymore. It's only Spotify.

• 1:01:06Lex Fridman?

  For now, you can until December 1st. And December 1st, it all, everything disappears and it's Spotify only. I, you know, and Spotify gave him a hundred million dollars for that. So it's, it's a, 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 a hundred 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.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  The open source spirit.

• 1:01:46Lex Fridman?

  The open source spirit, it just doesn't seem right, 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, 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 them any notes on anything. They want him to succeed. And that's the cool thing about exclusivity with a platform is like,

• 1:02:27Lex Fridman?

  you're 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, Veritas, him, 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.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  We have like a hundred other.

• 1:03:00Lex Fridman?

  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, they see him as like a headache potentially. So, you know, a lot of people talk, talk about this. It's, 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?

• 1:03:43Lex Fridman?

  And which conspiracy theories represent dangerous untruths? And which 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.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Lex Fridman?

  Starts getting weird.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, putting yourself in a 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. But, you know, yes, I mean, no one likes Nazis.

• 1:04:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  But it's like many shades of gray. Like very soon after that.

• 1:04:31Lex Fridman?

  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, in my opinion, his conversation with Jack Dorsey. Now, I'll also, I spoke with Jack before on this podcast and we'll talk again. But Sam brought up, uh, Sam Harris does not like Donald Trump.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  I, I, I do listen to his podcast, so I'm, I'm familiar with his views on the matter.

• 1:05:00Lex Fridman?

  And he, uh, he asked Jack Dorsey, he'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 is 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 this should be.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  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 YouTube, right?

• 1:05:56Lex Fridman?

  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 a 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, 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 asshole?

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:06:35Lex Fridman?

  That's not a constitutional like, uh, so you have the right for, to, for free speech, but like, just don't be an asshole. Like, you can't really put that in the constitution. The Supreme Court can't be like, eh, 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.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  Machine, yeah, machine learning for niceness.

• 1:07:10Lex Fridman?

  It is, I mean,

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Responsible AI, I mean, it is, it is a thing, um, for sure.

• 1:07:14Lex Fridman?

  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 entering that space a little bit.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  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, outrage maybe is a better word, right? Outrage drives engagement and well, these companies are judged by engagement, right?

• 1:07:49Lex Fridman?

  So it's 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,

• 1:08:02Lex Fridman?

  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 to like, 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.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:08:30Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  Right, you gotta pass for anything.

• 1:08:41Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:53Lex Fridman?

  Because they believe in your vision, so that but that requires being really good at uh really good at what you do.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Requires being Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. And there's there's kind of a reason why like a third name doesn't come immediately to mind, right? Like there is maybe a handful of other people, but it's it's not that many.

• 1:09:07Lex Fridman?

  It's not many. I mean, people say like, why are you 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.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:09:26Lex Fridman?

  And it's kind of making it happen, which is like, it's it's crazy.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:09:39Lex Fridman?

  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 that it's just like you said, I mean, it gives you a reason to wake up in the morning and and dream for us engineers to.

• 1:10:04Lex Fridman?

  It is inspiring as hell, man. I what? Well, let me ask you this, the the worst possible question, which is, so you're like, at the core, you're a programmer, you're.

• 1:10:17Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  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, right? And something comes to life that kind of didn't exist before. I don't think you have that in like many other fields. Like you have that with some other kinds of engineering, but you're maybe 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 godlike what you do, like when you create it. And so, I mean, that's why I got into it.

• 1:11:15Lex Fridman?

  Do you remember like first program you wrote, or maybe the first program that like made you fall in love with computer science?

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  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 like, that's why I always loved about, you know, being a programmer is just the creation process. And it's a little bit different when you're not the one doing the creating. And, you know, another aspect to it, I would say is 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

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:12:28Lex Fridman?

  You can get like, what is it? Like a ripple effect of a dope or somebody else's dopamine.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you live off other people's dopamine.

• 1:12:40Lex Fridman?

  So is there pain points and challenges you had to overcome from becoming, from going to a programmer to becoming a programmer of humans?

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:13:05Lex Fridman?

  Do you find that people are different?

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:07Lex Fridman?

  Like I, I, one of the things, like I had a group at MIT that, you know, I found that like

• 1:13:18Lex Fridman?

  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 nonstop 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 that like all that, the complete difference in people.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Definitely people respond to different motivations and different loads of feedback. And you kind of have to figure it out. There's like a, a pretty good book, which for some reason now the name escapes me, about management. First break all the rules.

• 1:14:13Lex Fridman?

  First break all the rules?

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  First break all the rules. It's a book that we generally like ask a lot of like first time managers to read and read. Like one of the kind of philosophies is manage 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.

• 1:14:41Lex Fridman?

  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 recommend? You already mentioned Dune, like all of the Dune.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  All of the Dune. The second one was probably the weakest, but anyway, so yeah, all of the Dune is good.

• 1:15:03Lex Fridman?

  I mean, yeah, can you just slow little tangent on that? Is, how many Dune books are there? Like, do you recommend people start with the first one? If that was?

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you kind of have to read them all. I mean, it is a complete story, right? So you start with the first one, you got to read all of them.

• 1:15:20Lex Fridman?

  So it's not like a tree, like that, like a creation of like the universe that you should go in sequence?

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  You should go in sequence, yeah. It's kind of a chronological storyline. There are six books in all. Then there's like many kind of off books that were written by Frank Herbert's son, but those are not as good, so you don't have to bother with those.

• 1:15:44Lex Fridman?

  Shots fired.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  Shots fired. But the main sequence is good. So what are some other books? 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. And it's kind of incredible how prescient he was about like what a brave new world might be like, right? You know, you kind of see genetic sorting in this book, right? Where there's like these alphas and epsilons and how from like the earliest time of society,

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  like they're sorted and 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 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.

• 1:17:00Lex Fridman?

  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, his ideas.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:09Lex Fridman?

  Being put into these bins of these little echo chambers and so on.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And 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.

• 1:17:22Lex Fridman?

  Yes, a slightly different view of the future, right?

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  But I kind of like identify with Brave New World a bit more.

• 1:17:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:38Lex Fridman?

  I've heard of, and I know I need to watch it. But, yeah, because it's in, is it in English or no?

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  It's an English movie, yeah. And it's a sort of like dystopian movie of authoritarian incompetence, right? It's like, like, 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? Just things kind of envelope 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.

• 1:18:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's one funny thing that stands out to me is in, what is it, 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.

• 1:18:43Lex Fridman?

  Like 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 where much more realistically is it's incompetence. And that incompetence isn't itself has consequences that are difficult to 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,

• 1:19:21Lex Fridman?

  you know, leads to catastrophic events, but not through any kind of evil in any one particular place, but more just like the

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  It's just the system kind of.

• 1:19:33Lex Fridman?

  System, distorting information as it travels up the chain, that people unwilling to take responsibility for things. And it's just kind of like this laziness resulting in evil.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  There's a comedic version of this. I don't know if you've seen this movie. It's called The Death of Stalin.

• 1:19:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I I like that. I wish it wasn't so. There's a movie called Inglourious Basterds about, you know, Hitler and whoa, you know, so on.

• 1:20:02Lex Fridman?

  For some reason, those movies piss me off. I know a lot of people love them, but like, 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 Donfall that people should watch. I think it's the last few days of Hitler. That's a good movie. Turned into a meme.

• 1:20:24Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  That's true. Let's try to see that. Actually, so I I agree with you on Inglourious Basterds. I didn't love the movie.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  Because I felt like kind of the the stylizing of it, right? The whole like Tarantino kind of Tarantinoism, if you will, kind of detracted from it. It made it seem like unserious a little bit.

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  But Death of Stalin, I felt differently. Maybe it's because of the comedy to begin with. This is not 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's something gross probably like this, right? Like a bunch of kind of people that are like, oh shit, right? Like.

• 1:21:16Lex Fridman?

  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. And well, in reality, this is, that's the absurdity of how people act with dictators. I mean, that's, I guess it was too close to reality for me.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:57Lex Fridman?

  And like. Cause I think there's a good, I haven't watched it yet, the good movie on, the movie on Churchill. With Gary Oldman, I think is Gary Oldman. I may be making that up. But I think he won, like he was nominated for an Oscar or something. So I like, I love these movies about these humans and Stalin. Like 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 Russian 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.

• 1:22:41Lex Fridman?

  And he just went in and just studied it, like did a good job of creating it 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.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  It was nice. It was good, yeah. I saw the series.

• 1:23:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's incredible. It made me, made me wish that somebody did a good, like 1930s, like starvation of Stalin, like like leading up to World War Two. And in World War Two itself, like Stalingrad and so on, like. I feel like that story needs to be told. Millions of people died. And it's, it's to me, it's so much more fascinating than Hitler. Cause 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.

• 1:23:47Lex Fridman?

  Like the, the 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, there's, there's a lot of possibilities there. I suppose.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:24:20Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's a, I don't know if you know, there's a guy named Stephen Kotkin. He is a historian of Stalin that I, I spoke to on this podcast. I'll speak to him again. The guy knows his shit on Stalin. He like read everything and it's, it's so fascinating to, to, to talk to somebody, like he knows Stalin better than Stalin himself. It's crazy. Like you have, so I think he's at Princeton. He is basically, his whole life is Stalin.

• 1:24:53Speaker 01

  Signing Stalin.

• 1:24:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's, 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, of English biography of Putin. I need to read some Russians. Obviously I'm mentally preparing for a possible conversation with Putin.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  So what, what is your first question to Putin when you have him on your, on, on, on the podcast?

• 1:25:16Lex Fridman?

  I. It's interesting you bring that up. First of all, I wouldn't tell you, but.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  Can't give it away now.

• 1:25:24Lex Fridman?

  Uh, but I actually haven't even thought about that. So my current approach, and I do this with interviews often, 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. What? 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.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  Mob morale, maybe I could see that. But I like your approach anyways of this, um, the extreme empathy, right? It's a little bit like, you know, Hannibal, right? Like if you ever watched the show Hannibal, right? They had that guy, um, um, you know, Hannibal, of course, like, uh.

• 1:26:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Silence of the Lambs.

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  Sounds a lot, but there was TV show as well. And they focused on this guy, Will Durant, who's a character like extreme empath, right? So in the way he like catches all these killers, so he pretty much,

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  he can empathize with them, right? Like you can understand why they're doing the things they're doing, right?

• 1:26:39Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  It's a pretty excruciating thing, right? Like, because you're pretty much like spending half your time in the head of evil people, right? Like, uh, but.

• 1:26:48Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I definitely try to do that with, uh, with others. So you, you, you should do that in moderation, but.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Lex Fridman?

  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 don't know, you didn't sign up to hear me listen to this bullshit, but.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  That was interesting.

• 1:27:06Lex Fridman?

  I, uh, in, um, 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 talk with. I talk with him again on this podcast and whether he gives me private advice a lot. And you 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 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

• 1:27:49Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  Right. You go so far to the opposite side. And it's like demystifies it a little bit, right?

• 1:28:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  There is a person behind all of these things.

• 1:28:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. 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.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:28:33Lex Fridman?

  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. There's somebody who is just smokes some weed, sit back on a couch and just like enjoying, like I guarantee you that will write in the comments right now that yes, I'm in St. Petersburg, I'm in Moscow, I'm 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, before I went on Joe Rogan, and still I'm just a huge fan of his. So

• 1:29:18Lex Fridman?

  it was like surreal. We had, I've been friends with Joe Rogan for 10 years, but one way.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, from this way, from the St. Petersburg way.

• 1:29:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the St. Petersburg way. And it's a real friendship. I mean, now it's like two way, but it's still surreal. It's, 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.

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  Evolved over, you know, millions of years, right, to be very fine tuned to things like that, right?

• 1:29:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  Oh, expressions as well, of course, right? But, uh, you know, back, back in the day on the, you know, on the savanna, you had to be very tuned 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 were probably gonna be left behind and eaten by the lions.

• 1:30:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but it's weird that the tribe is different now. Like, you could have a connection, one-way connection with Joe Rogan, as opposed to the tribe of your physical vicinity.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  But that's, 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.

• 1:30:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  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 is much harder to do when it's a real voice, right? Because like you realize it's a real person behind the voice.

• 1:30:56Lex Fridman?

  Let me, uh, try this out on you. I sometimes ask about the meaning of life. Do you, uh, you're, you're a father now, uh, 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 descended to vapes even on this planet? What's, what's the meaning of it all?

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  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, 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 all contributing in our way, but just by existing, by having our own unique set of desires and drives, right? 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. But I mean, to me, that's pretty much it.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  I mean, if you're not a religious person, right, which I guess I'm not, uh, that's, that's the meaning of life. It's in the living and then the

• 1:32:12Lex Fridman?

  Creation.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  And the creation.

• 1:32:15Lex Fridman?

  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 the, a button on, 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 like reproduction and sex, whatever that's in evolution. But like, creating that HTML button has, has echoes of that feeling and it's magical.

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I mean, if you're a religious person, maybe you could even say, right? Like we were, we're 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.

• 1:33:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that HTML button is the creation in God's.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So maybe, maybe hopefully it'll be something a little more.

• 1:33:13Lex Fridman?

  Dynamic, maybe.

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  Bigger. Yeah, maybe some, some JavaScript, some React and so on. But no, I mean, I think that's what differentiates us from, you know, the apes, so to speak.

• 1:33:26Lex Fridman?

  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. Allow me to sort of fanboy over some of the things I love. So thanks for wasting your time with me today.

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  That was awesome. Thanks for having me on and giving me a chance to try this out.

• 1:33:51Lex Fridman?

  Awesome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Kokotov. And thank you to our sponsors. Athletic Greens, only one nutrition drink. Blinkist app that summarizes books. Business Wars Podcast and Cash App. So the choice is health, wisdom or money. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Ludwig Wittgenstein. The limits of my language means the limits of my world. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

• 1:34:51Lex Fridman?

  Thank you.