#1275 Cliff Weitzman | This Immigrant Just Helped 25 Million People Read

Cliff Weitzman is the founder & CEO at Speechify. In this conversation, we talk about the explosion in audio content on the internet, how text to speech audio has become so great, why exactly so many people are now listening vs reading or watching, and how this impacts content creators and human productivity. ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= Trust and Will has simplified the process of creating and managing your will or trust online. They leverage a data-driven, design-first approach and amazing customer support to help you protect your legacy from the comfort of your home starting at just $159. Sign up today for 10% off using ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://trustandwill.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Cliff Weitzman, the founder and CEO of Speechify. In this conversation, we talk about the explosion in audio content on the internet, how text-to-speech audio has gotten so great, why exactly so many people are now listening versus reading

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  or watching, and how exactly this is going to change with the nuances of content creators, where there will be legal issues, and also how human productivity may skyrocket now that we're going to have much more audio content that can be listened to faster and also still be able to retain the information. I really enjoyed this conversation with Cliff. He is operating at the absolute tip of the spear of innovation when it comes to text-to-audio, and I think that you will really enjoy this conversation as well. Here is my episode with Cliff Weitzman.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Base. Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people on-chain. What exactly is Base? It's a layer-two offering, a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the on-chain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time. Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So if you're looking for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make on-chain the next online. Learn more at base.org, or follow along on Twitter at BuildOnBase. Again, that's @BuildOnBase,

• 2:24Anthony Pompliano?

  to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. Today's episode is brought to you by Trust and Will. I've gone through a number of different changes in my life over the last few years. I got married, I had a kid, and I had to start thinking about how could I ensure that my wife and my child would be okay if anything ever happened to me? That's where trust, wills, and estate planning come into play. Now, most people, what they do is they get introduced to a friend, an uncle, or someone in their local community. It tends to be someone who's really expensive, a lawyer, an accountant, or somebody who does estate planning. And they just simply are using a one-size-fits-all template and just telling you, pay me thousands of dollars and I'll use the same thing for you as the guy down the street. But that's not what Trust and Will does.

• 3:05Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Whether it's for you or one of your loved ones, having a trust and/or a will can literally be the difference between someone being taken care of and someone not. Go check them out today at trustandwill.com/pomp. All right, guys. Bing bing. I've got Cliff here. Cliff, I thought a great place to start is the rise of audio. It seems like everywhere I turn, I see Amazon's audiobook sales exploding. I see obviously things like Alexa or Siri. I see, you know, podcasts, everything seems to be going more and more audio. What is happening with the rise of audio?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  So this is Pay. Nice to meet you, by the way. I'm Cliff. I'm the CEO of Speechify. Here's the way to think about it. Humans have been listening and speaking for like hundreds of thousands of years. We've only been reading for like a couple of thousand. And reading is an amazing hack that people make, right? You have a couple of glyphs and you read them and you understand what they say. But when you read, you're employing about 70% of your brain decoding and about 30% actually comprehending. When you listen, it's like 3% is dedicated to words decoding and then 97% is comprehending. A couple of things happened. The first one is you have to remember that text is very easy to store. Audio is a little bit more difficult to store and a little bit more difficult to stream.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  You had the huge shift that happened when podcasts started to rise about like fifteen years ago. Cause it was the first time that now everybody had a device in their pocket that was connected to the internet. Where you didn't need to store all the audio files on your phone, right? If you remember, you know, the big thing when the iPhone came out to Steve Jobs was like one thousand songs in your pocket. One thousand songs is like two podcast episodes, so you couldn't store them on a device. So one, you saw the solution where you didn't need to store all of it, cause you could stream it. And you know, download upload speeds became fast enough. And then everybody got used to having earphones in their pocket that were really mobile. And then you got AirPods. And AirPods really, really changed the game. Cause now you're not getting your, you know, earphones stuck in the door handle.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  People carry them every single day, along with your wallet, along with your keys, you have your AirPods with you. And in addition, you had a couple more changes. Number one is YouTube released double speed for YouTube. So a lot of people listen to things at double speed, right? I'm sure the majority of people listening to this are listening at 1.5x speed. So you had the rise of podcasts, rise of audiobooks, double speed WhatsApp messages and audio messages, double speed YouTube videos. And audiobooks absolutely exploded. And so at Speechify, there's about twenty-five million people who use Speechify. The average American reads at about a hundred and eighty words per minute. But it used to be that most people who would come to Speechify would set the speed at two hundred and ten words per minute. Which is about like 1.15x speed.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  We've noticed that over the last like two, three years, the average person comes in and sets it at two point four, sorry, two hundred and forty words per minute. So like closer to 1.5, 1.4x speed. And then they build up in the first like four months of using Speechify to listening at like three hundred and fifty to four hundred words per minute. My experience is I moved to the US when I was thirteen from Israel. And I didn't speak English. And so I learned English by listening to Harry Potter audiobooks twenty-two times in a row. And in the beginning, I would listen at like zero point seven five X speed because I was just getting used to the language. But with time, I started to listen at one X and then one point two five, and then one point five, and two X, and two point five, and three X. And then I built Speechify and it made it easier for me. Now I listen to most things at like seven hundred words per minute. So I have to coach myself to speak a little slower.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  But that's the first segment, is it's more accessible and people have trained themselves to listen faster. And by the way, listening fast is a skill, in the same way that running fast is a skill. And once you get good at it, there's a couple of things that you unlock. Number one is the ability to listen and do other things at the same time. So in the same way that you can walk and breathe, or walk and chew gum, most people have now learned to walk and listen to an audiobook at once, or listen to a podcast at the same time. I used to give a lot of talks to kids in universities and high schools. And people would be like, oh, I listened to an audiobook, but like, I didn't understand it really well. I didn't like it. And I was like, well, this is the first book you listened to in an audiobook, right? You probably didn't retain the first book you read well either. So you got to listen to ten

• 7:53Speaker 02

  books before you can knock whether you're an auditory learner or not. And I've never actually met someone who listened to ten audiobooks and keep doing it more. And then we can go more into AI wherever you want to.

• 8:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So one of the things that is interesting is you can do more things, right? The downside is that you may not remember as much of it. And, you know, I'm a person who for years only listened to audiobooks. So like, I was like the perfect customer for you and Audible and all these guys. And I told a story before, but a friend handed me a physical book about two years ago and was like, hey, you should read the book. I sat down, tried to read, and I could not concentrate because I'd lost the skill of reading the physical book. And some of it's social media and doom scrolling and all this kind of stuff, and made me think more critically about it. And so now I probably do, I would say eighty to eighty-five percent physical books, fifteen percent is still audio, right? There's certain books that just, for whatever reason, I enjoy them, especially when the

• 8:46Anthony Pompliano?

  author is reading it, you know, something about the voice being kind of unique. But then I've noticed now there's TikTok videos, there's Instagram videos, and the audio that is being Used here, it is kind of AI-generated audio. It is faster. It is being clipped in a way that holds your attention more. So what are you guys seeing that maybe is kind of the intersection of many of these different trends? You have kind of the the rise of audio. You have this AI generation that you guys have really helped to pioneer with Speechify. And then you have it kind of being used for entertainment purposes that really hold people's attention and also deliver information.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Yep. So there's like three points you touched on, so let me hit all all of them. The first one was regarding uh reading versus listening. So the best thing to do is to read and listen at the same time. Cause you could do it a lot faster and you retain a lot more. So what most people who use Speechify will do is the nice thing about it is it'll highlight the words for you while it's reading. You can do it on your computer. You could do it on your phone. But like if I go here and I open a random file. Um, and let me text plus my classification, whatever. Um, and I pick like, let's do like boom. So also listening in your own voice helps a lot um in terms of retention.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Roberta and GPT three pre-trained models for text punctuation classification task. The distilled models are small and fast for mobile use, reduces costs, improves privacy and it is better with live speech to exit on mobile devices.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  So that's what most people who use Speechify will do is actually seventy percent.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Computer opener in front of them. Um, and so people listen and read at the same time. And a lot of times what students especially will do is they'll use the scan fixture feature to take a picture of their textbook. And then they'll set the phone to the side. They'll follow in the book and they'll listen at the same time. And they get the higher retention. You still get, you know, the feeling of the physical book. Cause like, this is also a tactile thing that matters. Um, with regards to how we make the AI behind how to generate these voices and how to make them retain really well. Here's how it works. So AI is really just uh statistics. It's exceptional pattern matching. And so what you do is you take a hundred million hours of speaker data, right? You and me speaking, you know, Hugh Jackman saying something, whatever it might be. And you feed all of that audio into an AI model as well as the text.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  And then you do a lot of fancy computer science to try and make it uh super efficient. Yeah, not cost too much, generate very quickly and also be. Exceptionally accurate. So one thing you spend a lot of time on is this thing called a loss function that figures out how accurate or not accurate is the actual MP3 output after you put in text. And if you get that really well, you end up with a system like Speechify that can generate almost anyone's voice extremely accurately, relatively instantly. And it takes us one third of a second to generate a second worth of audio. And then you get to AV tests. So, you know, people listen to more than six billion words per month with Speechify. And so we run a lot of tests and people tell us this sounded good, this sounded bad, this sounded good, this sounded bad.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  And you feed back into the model and you see, well, did the person actually retain on this book? Or did they not retain on this book? And if they didn't retain on this book, what do I need to change about my audio output to make it sound really good? And then, so that was kind of how we started, is this B to C product that helped people scan physical books, upload documents, read your Kindle books, you can like click into Kindle. And then we were like, okay, well, we built all these fundamental models around speech to speech, text to speech, transcription, translation, natural language processing, optical character recognition. For B to C purposes, let's also allow businesses to use this. Because we found that half the traffic we got was people looking for B to B solutions and half of it was people looking for B to C solutions. And so for podcasters like yourself, you know, you can hypothetically, if it was not a video component,

• 12:26Speaker 02

  like just give it a script and it'll read the entire thing to you. And we have a lot of podcasters that are now signing up for Speechify to do that because it saves them time. Or you can translate yourself to speaking in Japanese or Chinese or, you know, whatever you want. And so we added those models to a video interface that we built on the web. And you can upload whatever text you want, you can upload whatever video you want or podcast you want. And it can let you translate between text and voice, voice from one language to the other language. And it just saves people a lot of time and people have gotten used to these types of voices. And kind of that's how it's changed.

• 12:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Another thing that I think is really interesting is, uh, let's say that we have somebody who speaks English and somebody who speaks Spanish. They both speak those individual languages. They do not understand the other. When you introduce this technology, now those two people can talk to each other. There's a lot of ramifications to that and it feels pretty important that eight billion people can now all speak the same language and understand each other, right? But also what you're talking about between text and speech is another form of translation, right? We're now getting two different types of things to come together. And so is this kind of end result that language doesn't matter, you know, content type doesn't matter? Like, at the end of the day, it's just the information will more seamlessly and frictionlessly kind of move between individuals, creators, audience, et cetera, and language, audio,

• 13:41Anthony Pompliano?

  text, et cetera, just all of that stuff that used to be really high friction points kind of falls into the background?

• 13:46Speaker 02

  You're actually, you're asking an excellent question and the answer is yes and no. So first of all, I think Nelson Mandela said, you know, if you talk to a man in a language he understands, you talk to his brain. If you talk to a man in a language that is his language, you talk to his heart. It's very true. And so that's, you know, another piece of technology that we're very proud that we're able to offer people. And you're right, there's a lot of nuance that you get to resolve when you have this, especially when you can keep the actual vocal intonation with speech to speech when you do the translation, not just machine translation. And so we've had to spend a lot of time on our algorithms, making sure that the translation

• 14:22Speaker 02

  is not just accurate, but it also conveys with it the semantic analysis of the tone. That's one. Two, when you have this translation that happens between text and video, technically the person can understand what the video said. That doesn't mean the person will retain on the video. It doesn't mean the person will engage on the video. And so there is a, because it's not scientific, it's more of a art, let's call it, you know, a genius. There's a genius that some people, Mr. Beast is a great example, have of being able to create a piece of content that people want to watch, they're curious, they retain, and there's not a second where they would click off. We're not at the point where the ability to translate content from one language to another

• 15:06Speaker 02

  or from one medium to the other is so accurate that it'll keep that form of genius. And so you still will always need people in the mix in order to make that final judgment call that is more like a genus equa, like what, what is the thing that makes this so attractive and unique? But it does mean that the AI portion can alleviate 90% of the work.

• 15:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk to me about this rise of artificial intelligence when it comes specifically to audio. We've obviously seen the concern around deep fakes. We see the whole like responsible AI movement. Is it a problem? Like, shouldn't we be worried about the fact that people can now clone their own voice or even maybe more concerning clone other people's voices and make them say anything? And then how do you think about if I hear an audio clip, is it real or not? Like, how do we start to kind of sift through some of this stuff?

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is definitely something that isn't very important and requires to be very responsible. So this is one thing at Speechify that we spend a lot of time thinking about is AI safety. And there's a lot of technology that we built internally that we haven't yet publicly released because we do it gradually. We're waiting for the world to pick up to be ready for it. And we're doing small AV tests to make sure that there's zero chance of abuse. There's a couple of ways we think about it. The first one is we always put the content owner in the driver's seat. For example, we have partnerships with all of the top book publishers to resell their audiobooks and their ebooks, but we only do that with permission. You can go and listen to Snoop Dogg's voice or Mr. Beast's voice or Gwyneth Paltrow's voice at Speechify. Those are things where like there are official

• 16:39Speaker 02

  partnerships with them. And then we have the ability to clone your own voice. And the way that we do that is we say, hey, if you have the device and I'm speaking, a unique text that the device shows me that changes over time, cool, I can add my voice, I can even send it to my friend, they can be provisioned to use it. And I can have my mom, you know, read out my grandmother, read out my girlfriend, whatever it might be. I can't just upload any random person's voice and listen to it because that is not something that is secure or safe. Now, sometimes I'll get a message from the bank being like, hey, voice over IP, sign into your bank account with your voice. And I'm like, this is ridiculous. Like that, like you're asking to get hacked. And so it's important to realize that these

• 17:20Speaker 02

  types of technologies exist. Now, one thing that's featured by, we built internally and we're going to offer externally soon is a classifier. You can upload any piece of audio and we can tell you whether it was AI-generated or not. So the thing to know is that because AI is really exceptional at pattern recognition, you can then reverse engineer any audio file because it geometrically makes sense. Like the, the audio pattern is different than the audio pattern you get from a normal person. You don't get as much sound, it's less choppy, it like makes, makes sense. The way to think about it is in mathematics, there's a concept called a polynomial. So y equals a plus b x twice c whatever. And you can also think

• 18:03Speaker 02

  about it like images in computer science. So there's a dot JPEG, which is a bunch of pixels together. And if you expand it, it gets pixelated. But there's a dot SVG, which is a polynomial that represents a shape. But if you expand it, it does not get pixelated. The same is true for AI-generated audio. And so you can, by and large, always tell. Obviously, you can't tell with your human ear, but you can tell if you run it through a processor. And so that'll be, you know, a thing that you need to do in the same way that the New York Times to publish a piece of content, they need to fact check it. You need to fact check, hey, is this audio real, is this audio an audio?

• 18:33Anthony Pompliano?

  And is this something where like eventually Apple or Android operating systems, or maybe the phone carrier, somebody will be able to like, hey, right now, the voice on the phone is actually AI-generated and almost like alert you?

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Um, this is a good question. So these types of things often take a very long time to roll out. Like, think about spam with email. Like, you still get spam in your email. And Gmail's done a really good job of fighting that. But like, that'll always be a problem. Same thing here. So I'm sure that the phone carrier has a, has a deep incentive to solve this problem because there are laws in the United States about, you know, RoboCop. And the more we resolve that, the better for everybody. However, I think that at the same time, you'll have a bunch of other pieces of software that let you pull the future forward a little bit for yourself as a user if this is a problem that you care about, right? So there's a thing called Global Caller that you can download and it will automatically stop spam calls. There's a bunch of Chrome extensions that you can download.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Both, by the way, for your desktop Chrome, so speechify is a desktop Chrome extension. But you can also download the speechify mobile Safari extension that works on your iPhone. You could, for example, take a screen recording, upload it to, we haven't released this yet, an app that has a classifier that tells you, hey, this is real, this is fake. You know, I remember many years ago, there was a Mitt Romney clip about him talking about the forty seven percent, if you remember this.

• 19:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Tanked, tanked a lot of his prospects and that could have been completely faked. And this is something that has always existed in politics and, you know, in corporate espionage. And it's, it's very, very important to understand and, you know, the last election cycle, we had so much conversations about fake news and this upcoming election cycle is gonna be absolutely ridiculous. And the problem is that you are speaking to, you know, to everybody, whether they're educated about this technology or not. And so it's very, very difficult to have a megaphone to make sure that everybody is aware of how good technology has gotten. And that's why there's a responsibility and an onus on companies that are able to create this content to do it responsibly. Now, here's the difference.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  There's this like cyberpunk portion of, you know, the web sphere, which is engineers who just love making things that push boundaries. And they're not doing it inside of the context of a company. They might not even be based in the United States. And the way that AI works in general is we're very much focused on open source. Like everything that we make, we like to share with other people. We let them use it. We might not share the data, but we'll share the models or how we built the models. And so there's a lot of open source content out there. It's not as high quality as speechify. It's not as easy to use as speechify. But someone who's very technical and really willing to do it can set something up, which means that, you know, bad actors can always do things by themselves in a clandestine manner. And it's, I mean, it's not even a matter of time. It's already here.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Like someone who wanted to cause harm with this type of technology already has the ability to do this through open source repositories. And so, one, there's a responsibility for companies that are good at this to act responsibly. And two, it's in our best interest to provide the tools to allow people to understand what's going on to protect themselves.

• 21:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So another debate around this is will it create or displace workers? And a good example or kind of corollary is in the banking sector, a lot of people don't remember, but when ATMs first came out, they were like, oh, bank tellers are never going to have a job again. We're going to literally put all the bank tellers out of business. And I recently was talking to a friend about this and I looked it up. There's more bank tellers today than any time ever in history. And so ATMs actually increased access to the financial system, which then led to the need for more bank tellers. How do you look at some of this AI specifically around audio? Like there's voice actors, but there's also a number of other ways that people use audio, either in commercial settings or for, you know, kind of personal income. And so do we end up displacing some of those people? Or do we actually create the need for more human voice, you know, kind of components?

• 22:23Speaker 02

  So I'll answer your question from a historical perspective and then I'll answer about today.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  What is the difference between humans and, you know, normal animals for the most part, right? Some people say maybe it's opposable thumbs, but really one of the biggest definitions is the ability to create tools. And so every time a human creates tools, society leapfrocks forward, right? Whether it be the steam engine or the plow or whatever. And so back in the day, people were like, oh my gosh, not the plow. You know, you will, you know, take us out of a job, not the cotton gin, not the train instead of a horse, not the computer, not the calculator, not the internet. And so the idea, the technology will displace humans is fanciful. Because at the end of the day, we are humans. And so, you know, the human condition is taking tools and using them to your benefit.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Now, the big problem is who controls and has access to these tools? Because you will have a situation where wealth accrues to people who have access to these tools and learn how to use them.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  And so you gave a great example, which is the bank tellers. And so it's just a tool that gives you more leverage, right? I think it's Archimedes, give me a lever long enough and I can move the world. And so here's how to think about it. I was having a conversation with a really exceptional voice actress not long ago, and she asked me exactly the same question. And she has a bunch of contracts with government agencies, with companies, with the military, where, you know, YouTubers, etc. And she's limited by how many times a day she can speak. And if you speak for six hours a day, you know this, you know, your voice gets hoarse, like, what can you do about it? And so I was explaining to her, listen, here's, I'll give you a free access to the Speechify B2B suite. Upload your voice. Take all the clients that you currently have and send them a year's worth of work in the next two weeks.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  And then see whether the quality is good enough or not good enough. And if it's good enough, great, you just made like 300,000 additional dollars per year. If it's not good enough, get really good at editing your voice to make sure that it sounds the way that it needs to for that piece of content. And if it needs to be something that's exceptionally high quality, you need to make the director's cut decision making about, you know, it should be sad, it should be happy, it should be this, it should be that. But this is just a tool that allows you to multiply yourself in the same way that Photoshop and Lightroom made it so much easier for creators to have bigger impact. You know, it used to be that to make film, you literally cut physical film and like paste it together. And now we're doing this over Zoom and you'll be able to push it out and millions of people will benefit from it.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  And so the key here is everybody needs to learn. So I have a friend who has a great quote, which is, "A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of why intercept." It's not where you start out. It's your growth curve over time. And so if you are a person who is determined to not learn and stay exactly as you are, yes, AI will displace you, but not because the AI displaces you. AI will displace you because people who have started out at a lower position from you will pass you very quickly because they learned how to use new tools. And so there is a pressure and an onus on every single person out there today. In the same way that you had to learn how to touch type, how to use the computer, how to use Google, how to use ChatGPT. If you're not learning how to use new tools as they come out, you will be displaced, not by the tools, but by people who use the tools.

• 25:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, you mentioned that you have these partnerships with Mr. Beast, Snoop Dogg, etc. Describe a little bit how you guys think about those partnerships and are they making money off of it? Are they having some other sort of benefit? Is it just like, hey, get your eyeballs on Snoop Dogg's voice and that makes him more valuable for, you know, other types of, you know, production or, or commercial engagements? How does it work?

• 25:58Speaker 02

  So exactly right. So we had to go and write the first contract ever for a digital licensing of someone's voice for perpetual use. And you know, it makes it depending on the person. So a lot for us is like, can the person bring in new customers to Speechify? So if they have a large following and they post, you know, they get a certain share from those who they bring into the platform for the most part. A lot of people come to us and ask, hey, can you just post my voice? They consider it like the new version of Instagram verification, right? Like anybody can get verified now, but like not everybody can get their voice as a public voice on Speechify. You can upload your own, but it's like a very high status thing. If you can get your voice to be, you know, one of the default voices. And once your voice is there, you build a crazy amount of affinity with your audience. So what's funny is like,

• 26:40Speaker 02

  my voice happened to be one of the first voices of Speechify because, you know, I was working on it, but it's the third most popular voice in Speechify. And sometimes I'll meet people and they'll be like, oh, my God, like I've listened to your voice for like hundreds of hours. And so you have this like very strong affinity with a person. And if you are Mr. Beast or Snoop Dogg, a lot of your business is not just being well-known, but being known well. And so it's having that, you know, intense relationship with your audience. And when your audience is going to sleep and you're the one that's narrating to them, when they're doing your work, you're having a conversation with them for hundreds of hours on a regular basis. And so it really, really impacts the level of affinity that people build with those partners. And then the place where it gets really

• 27:24Speaker 02

  fun is sometimes Snoop Dogg will get, you know, called to do a commercial and he doesn't have time to do the commercial, but he can license Speechify's voice for the commercial and still make money without even needing to set foot in the studio.

• 27:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Has he been doing that?

• 27:36Speaker 02

  This is something that a bunch of people have been doing, both through, you know, different agencies and through just the web portal for Speechify.

• 27:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And I don't know how much you know about the individual deals, but are they actually getting paid the same price? Or if it is the AI voice, will they actually get paid less? So it's like more cost effective for the agency and the product owner as well?

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if you look at, you know, any A-list celebrity, like their day rate is going to be, you know, $800,000 for the day, whether they're on set or they're in the studio. You're paying for their time. So the second that you disintermediate away their time,

• 28:15Speaker 02

  You're just paying for the value without paying for the time. And so by definition, it's going to be a lot cheaper.

• 28:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so actually, there may be a world where they start to incentivize, say, hey, actually, we don't want you, we want your voice. And therefore, it's way cheaper to be able to do that.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  And the other thing that you'll see is, you know, Marvel and Disney and all these other studios, like, they'll shoot. And then they'll need to reinvite the actors into the studio in order to, you know, add dubbing, add background audio. You know, all that jazz. And like, you're still paying the day rate. And so what you'll have is in the contract in the future, it'll say, hey, we are paying you for your likeness and your image and your time on camera. But we're also paying for an exclusive license for this movie to generate additional versions of your voice. Because it just allows the process to be faster. And this obviously has to happen with permission. It should not happen without permission. You're still the person who owns your likeness, who owns your voice. You just need to license it. And in the same way that you license someone to use your photo, you can license someone to use a likeness of your voice.

• 29:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So another thing that becomes pretty interesting is, let's say that I was to put my voice on a platform, somebody was to come and license it. I know that it's going to go into X movie, let's say. And then all of a sudden, I don't like the script. And they made me say something that I wouldn't have said, or I didn't want to say. I did license it to them. But there's nuance now. How do you see that stuff playing out? And that may be kind of an extreme example for movies.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  It's not that extreme. It's exactly the same way as if you sign yourself up to be in a reality TV show. And they can cut it however you want. In reality TV shows, sometimes they'll shoot over your shoulder. You're saying one thing, and then you see, you know, the back of my head. But to take a clip of me saying something else from a completely different thing. And the person's like, do you want to kill me? And I said, of course not. But then they switch of me saying yes. Right? They have creative license and you sign that away when you participate in any movie, in any TV show, in any whatever. So it's not that different. It is true that you should always only partner with people that you actually believe are good people. And if you are partnering with people who you think are bad actors to begin with, then, you know, that's what's gonna happen.

• 30:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Talk to me about the company itself in terms of how big is it revenue wise, number of employees? What data or information can you share with us?

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So I started working on Speechify back in 2015. And the reason I was excited about it is I read a bunch of academic papers about the narrow applications of deep learning, specifically around speech synthesis. And my thesis was I'm gonna be able, we're gonna have text to speech be more than 10x better than it currently is. Like, this is absolutely insane. And I ended up writing this 30-page paper about my world views. And the conclusion was that I am the person I am today because of my experience overcoming dyslexia when I was a kid. And because I listened to two audiobooks a week and I've done that for like the last 17 years, 100 books per year. And I was like, this is the most important piece of technology for me to invest my time in. And this is why I'm on this earth, is to solve dyslexia, to solve ADHD.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  And I'm so lucky that audiobooks existed when I was nine, 10, 11 years old. Because if I was born 15 years earlier, 20 years earlier, I would not have had the academic experience that I had, not at all. I'd be a completely different person. And yet, most textbooks did not have an audiobook. And so, that's what we set out to do. Now, there's about a little more than 100 people who work at Speechify, or like 75 engineers, 30 people on the AI team. My brother Tyler is actually blind in his left eye, he's astigmatic in his right eye. And so, he does all of his coding on a giant projector. But he started coding when he was in third grade, building triangle multi-websites. He taught himself assembly in fifth grade to hack video games. He skipped three and a half years of math in high school, three years of computer science. Then he did maths as an undergrad at Stanford, he did his masters in AI there. And he joined the team and leads the AI team for Speechify.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  And so, we both have this very big passion of making sure that reading is never a barrier to learning for anyone, no matter what your background is. And really, above everything else, my goal in life is to be the person that I needed most when I was young. When I was young, the thing I really needed was someone to do my readings for me. And so, in the beginning, it was a bunch of people like me, people with dyslexia, ADHD, low vision, autism, concussions, anxiety, second language learners. Now, that's less than, you know, 30, 20%. Most users of Speechify are doctors, lawyers, accountants, people in the military, executives, people in finance. Who, they like to listen when they drive, they like to listen when they work out, they like to listen when they walk, they like to listen when they're cook. They find that they can listen two to three times faster than they can read. They can comprehend better when they listen and read at the same time. It's way less boring.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  So, the contingent of people who have used it the most happen to be people with ADHD. What's interesting is if you have ADHD, your brain is wired slightly differently. Turns out, you're way better at listening fast. So, the percentage of people who I meet Who listen at three X speed, it's like eighty percent people with ADHD. Because the speed of the listening is equal to the speed at which their mind is working and that helps them. But if you intake the text of two hundred words per minute, there's a dissonance there. You get bored, you act down in class, or you walk out to, you know, pet a dog, whatever it might be. But the second that it's equal to your brain, which already moves fast, you're absolutely locked in. And so we have the the Chrome extension is, you know, our most popular product and then the iPhone app.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  And then we have the mobile web product and then the the B two B tools that we built. And so right now we're like twenty five million people. The goal is to go to two point five billion. The thing is, audio is a fundamentally better user interface than digital screens. And it's funny because almost every futuristic movie that you see, the predominant user interface is audio. Right? People talking to their computer and the computer will have wit and it'll be funny and it'll have a nice voice, whatever. And so our goal is to build an auditory operating system. We started by solving a very single player mode problem, which is how do you read documents? Emails, chat, GPT, Google, physical books and have it Kindle and have it in an exceptional manner with super high quality voices.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  All the integrations, the ability to change speed, to play, pause, to pick the word that you want to listen to. And for the most part, like we've cracked that we've been the number one app in our app store category for about four years above the New York Times, above the Wall Street Journal. And now a lot of the investments that we're doing is, hey, users listen to so much content on speechify, there will come a time where we can recommend to you the most relevant material to you. So you have all these beautiful books behind you. Let's assume that you finished reading eighty percent of them. And some of them you stopped twenty five percent of the way through. I can start recommending to you the most relevant books for you to read next, based on what you actually completed, exactly like TikTok recommends videos. And so except for entertainment, it's for business and knowledge purposes. That to me is really, really exciting. It gets even more exciting when you put it in the context of a team.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  So now we're launching speechify teams that knows the entire knowledge base that all your team has. Because it knows that you read this macroeconomics paper about inflation as it relates to solar panels. And I read this paper about GPUs from Nvidia. And actually, we should be the two people called into the organization to talk about this topic. And so that to me is just like a very exciting feature.

• 34:57Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about audio, everything we've talked about is kind of the input to the human, right? Audio is coming in, I'm digesting the audio. There is the audio interface, though. We see this with Siri, we see this with Alexa, we see this with, you know, a bunch of these different products. Is it just going to be kind of a bimodal or kind of two directional? I'm consuming audio, but I'm also using audio to kind of dictate my life and that's the dominant use case kind of moving forward?

• 35:23Speaker 02

  So if you want to build an AI company, and there's like 10 fastest growing generative AI companies, obviously OpenAI is number one, Speechify is often number like six or seven. You've got to think where value accrues, right? And so there's two ways of thinking about it. The first one is this value accrue to the person who has the best model? Or does it accrue in another place? And often that place actually ends up being distribution. Because if you have the largest amount of distribution, you get to train your models on more and more data than everybody else. And so there were many companies, hundreds of companies, that were at the same level of OpenAI during GPT-1, GPT-2, GPT-3. The thing that really changed everything is ChatGPT. For Speechify, we started with being user-first, and then we leaned really hard into the deep

• 36:06Speaker 02

  learning part. And the reason it took a little bit of time is, one, I was a college student. And two, audio is a lot more heavy than text. And so obviously, what you're going to see is first, you have this battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, then you'll have this battle to see who is going to win the audio, and obviously Speechify and OpenAI are two leaders there. And then you're going to have this fight about like text to video, because that's the next thing that is the most heavy.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  And so it's not enough to just have the foundational models. And by the way, it's important to note that within large language models in AI, they're not all the same. Some of us are for textual reasoning, and some are for audio, and some are for video, and some are for other things. So we're especially good at the voice part. But it's not just enough to have the foundational models. You need to have the end relationship with the user. And so the way that Speechify has decided to build the products that we create is they sit on top of other software. So if you think about the technology stack and you think about Microsoft, they started with DOS. And then you start with an operating system. And then on top of that, you build applications, call it the App Store or the Chrome browser. And then you build websites on top of that. And then on top of that, you get to have Chrome extensions like Speechify or mobile Safari extensions like Speechify or Gmail plugins like Speechify.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  And then we end up being the conduit for information intake. We're the last piece of technology you interface with before the information gets into your brain. And then that's the input. And now we're starting to work on the output as well. So the output is important because it helps you navigate. It needs to be able to deal with interruptions. It needs to be able to deal with sound in the background. And by the way, what's very interesting is if you're able to use Speechify's technology and you're recording a conversation like this, let's say I was in the middle of a stadium. I could transcribe my voice and then I could text the speech my voice again with the same intonation, generate the voice perfectly, but drop all the background audio, drop all the additional speakers, drop if we're in a stadium, the bouncing of the basketball, the sound, the roaring of the crowd, whatever it might be. And so you end up with these fundamentally new primitives for data on the internet. And that's really, really exciting.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  And so what ends up happening is the user interfaces change. You're going to have a situation in the next like two, three, four years where your AirPods will be LTE compatible and you can leave the house without your iPhone. And that's already kind of amazing because you're not addicted to this physical screen anymore. And humans, a lot of the depressions that we're seeing these days is people being sucked into these social media platforms. And you know, whatever it might be, TikTok, Instagram. But if you are able to still get all the value, all the knowledge, all the entertainment, all the learning, without being stuck with your face inside of here, but you can look up and you can walk around and you can be in nature and you can row your boat, whatever it might be, while listening, that's a far better human experience. And you can cook and you can do it and the second that you want to, boom, you take out your earphones, you interface with your child. And so that I think is a much more exciting feature. Than where we've been headed in the last 10 years.

• 38:47Anthony Pompliano?

  My last question for you is a little bit more fun. Music, obviously, people have heard, you know, the Kanye renditions and many others. Those were people who basically were doing it more for entertainment purposes and kind of to show what the technology could do. Do you think music artists will begin to use this technology to basically say, hey, look, screw it. I can just, rather than go in and record myself, use my own voice and figure out how to make, you know, chart topping hits?

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Of course. So we already have a bunch of artists that work with us. And it's really funny, actually. So like one of the really good example is a guy who, this is people who they don't want to record in the studio because the studio sucks. They want to record on their phone. So they're recording your phone, but what happens is, you know, we'll capture the intonation, everything you have, and then we'll spit it back out. But it'll be super high quality in a lossless format because we regenerated it from scratch. So actually, it starts to not matter what microphone quality you use. And so you can record in the subway as long as the vibe is right and you get the intonation that you want, boom, you can get it there. And the way that the music industry works is you have a bunch of people who will write hit songs. And then artists will try it on during a studio session and they'll keep the one that they really, really like.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  And so now what you can have is every artist, they can just listen to a stable of songs, sang with their voice, and then they can decide before they even actually go to record whether they like it or not. And you're going to have artists who already have a really big name be able to feature on any song you want as long as they give permission. And that's really interesting. And you obviously have artists like Grimes, who are publicly allowing anybody to use her voice and just like, you know, 50% split it. You'll see more things like this. Again, it's not a solution for creativity, but it is a solution for more efficient execution.

• 40:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Cliff, where can we send people to find you on the internet or learn more about Speechify?

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Easiest place is follow me on YouTube or Instagram, Cliff Weitzman, C L I F F W E I T C M A N. I also write a lot on Medium. If you want to find Speechify, search on the app store, Speechify, speech and then I F Y. Or go download the Chrome extension for Speechify, easy to listen to your emails. It'll save you a lot of time.

• 40:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. We'll do it again in the future.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Great, Anthony. Great to meet you.