Dan Kokotov: Speech Recognition with AI and Humans | Lex Fridman Podcast #151
the following is a conversation with dan kokodav vp of engineering at rev.ai which is by many metrics the best speech-to-text ai engine in the world rev in general is a company that does captioning and transcription of audio by humans and by ai i've been using their services for a couple years now and planning to use rev to add both captions and transcripts to some of the previous and future episodes of this podcast to make it easier for people to read through the conversation or reference various parts of the episode since that's something that quite a few people requested i'll probably do a separate video on that with links on the podcast website so people can provide suggestions and improvements there quick mention of our sponsors athletic greens all in one nutrition drink blinkist app that summarizes books business wars podcast and cash app so the choice is health wisdom or money choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that i reached out to dan and the rev team for a conversation because i've been using and genuinely loving their service and really curious about how it works i previously talked to the head of adobe research for the same reason for me there's a bunch of products usually software that comes along and just makes my life way easier examples are adobe premiere for video editing isotope rx for cleaning up audio auto hotkey on windows for automating keyboard mouse tasks emacs as an ide for everything including the universe itself i can keep on going but you get the idea i just like talking to people who create things i'm a big fan of that said after doing this conversation the folks at rev.i offered to sponsor this podcast in the coming months this conversation is not sponsored by the guest it probably goes without saying but i should say it anyway that you cannot buy your way onto this podcast i don't know why you would want to i wanted to bring this up to make a specific point that no sponsor will ever influence what i do on this podcast or to the best of my ability influence what i think i wasn't really thinking about this for example when i interviewed jack dorsey who is the ceo of square that happens to be sponsoring this podcast but i should really make it explicit i will never take money for bringing a guest on every guest on this podcast is someone i genuinely am curious to talk to or just genuinely loves something they've created as i sometimes get criticized for i'm just a fan of people and that's what i talk to as i also talk about way too much money is really never a consideration in general no amount of money can buy my integrity that's true for this podcast and that's true for anything else i do if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter alex friedman and now here's my conversation with dan kokodov you mentioned science fiction on the phone so let's go with the ridiculous first what's the greatest sci-fi novel of all time in your view and maybe what ideas do you do you find philosophically fascinating about it the greatest sci-fi novel of all time is dune and the second greatest is the children of dune and the third greatest is the god emperor of doom so i'm i'm a huge fan of the whole uh series i mean it's just an incredible world that he created and i don't know if you've read the book or not no i have not it's one of my biggest regrets especially because the new movie is coming out right everyone's super excited about it i used to it's ridiculous to say and sorry to interrupt is that i used to play the video game used to be dune that's i guess you would call that real-time strategy right right i think i remember that game yeah it's kind of awesome 90s or something i think i played it actually when i was in russia i definitely remember it i was not in russia anymore i think at the time that i used to live in russia i think video games were about like the suspicion of pong i think pong was pretty much like the greatest game i ever got to play in russia which was still a privilege right in that age so you didn't get color you didn't get like uh so i left russia in 1991 right 191 okay so i always wanted to feel like a kiss because my mom was a programmer so i would go to her work right i would take the the metro i've got to work and play like on i guess the equivalent of like a 286 pc you know nice with floppy disks yes okay but back to you back to dune and by the way the new movie i'm pretty interested in but they're skeptical i'm a little skeptical i'm a little skeptical i saw the trailer uh i don't know so there's there's a david lynch movie dune as you may know i'm a huge david lynch fan by the way so the movie is somewhat controversial uh but it's a little confusing but it captures kind of the mood of the book better than i would say like most any adaptation and like do you know so much about kind of mood in the world right but back to the philosophical point so in the fourth book god emperor of dune there's a sort of setting where lito one of the characters he's become this weird sort of god emperor he's turned into a gigantic worm and you kind of have to read the book to understand what that means so the worms are involved worms are involved you probably saw the worms in the trailer right yeah and in the video so it kind of like merges with the swarm um and becomes this tyrant of the world and like oppresses the people for a long time right but he has a purpose and the purpose is to kind of uh break through kind of a stagnation period in civilization right um but people have gotten too comfortable right and so it kind of oppresses them so that they explode and like go on to colonize new worlds and kind of renew the forward momentum of humanity right and so to me that's kind of like fascinating right you need a little bit of pressure and suffering right to kind of like make progress not not not get too comfortable okay maybe that's a bit of a philosophy to take away but that seems to be the case unfortunately obviously i'm a huge fan of uh suffering so one of the reasons we're talking today is that a bunch of people requested that i do transcripts for this podcast and do captioning i used to make all kinds of youtube videos and i would go on upwork i think i would hire folks to do transcription and it was always a pain in the ass if i'm being honest and then i don't know how i discovered rev but when i did it was this feeling of like holy somebody figured out how to do it just really easily i i'm i'm such a fan of just when people take a problem and they just make it easy right you know like just um there's so many it's like there's so many things in life that you might not even be aware of that are painful then rev you just like give the audio give the video you can actually give a youtube link and then it comes back like a day later or uh two days later whatever the hell it is with the captions you know all in a standardized format it was i don't know it was it was it was it was truly a joy so i thought i had you know just for the hell of it uh talk to you that one other product it just made my soul feel good one other product i've used like that is uh for people who might be familiar is called izotope rx it's for audio editing and like and that's another one where it was like you just drop it i i dropped into the audio and it just cleans everything up really nicely all the stupid like the mouth sounds and sometimes there's uh background like sounds due to the malfunction the equipment it can clean that stuff up it can it has like general voice to noise and it has like automation capabilities where you can do batch processing and you can put a bunch of effects i mean it just i don't know everything else sucked for like voice based cleanup that i've ever used i've used audition adobe audition i've used all kinds of other things with plugins you have to kind of figure it all out you have to do it manually here's just it just worked so that that's another one in this whole pipeline that just brought joy to my to my heart anyway all that to say is uh uh rev put a smile to my face so can you maybe take a step back and say what is rev and how does it work and rev or rev.com rap.com same thing i guess uh though we do have rev.a.i now as well which we can talk about later like do you have the actual domain or is it just uh the actual domain but we also use it kind of as a as a sub brand and so we so we use ram.ai to denote our asr services right and rev.com is kind of our more human and to the end user services so it's like wordpress.com and wordpress.org they actually have separate brands that like i don't know if you're familiar with what those are yeah yeah they provide almost like a separate branch of uh hello but i think with that it's like wordpress.org is kind of their open source right and wordpress.com is sort of their hosted commercial offering yes um and what else the differentiation is a little bit different but maybe similar idea yeah okay so what is rev before i launch into uh what is rav i was gonna say you know like you you're talking about like rebels music to your ears yeah your spiel was music to my ears yeah to us the founders of rev because um rev was kind of founded to improve on the model of upwork that was kind of the original um or part of their original impetus like our ceo jason was a early employee of uh upwork so he's very familiar with their work the company upwork the company um and so he was very familiar with that model and he wanted to make the whole experience better because he knew like when you go at that time upwork was primarily programmers so the main thing they offered is if you want to hire you know someone to help you code a little site right um you could go on upwork um you could like browse through a list of freelancers pick a program or website you know have a contract with them and have them do some work but it was kind of a difficult experience because uh for the for you you would kind of have to browse through all these people right and you have to decide okay like well is this guy good um or somebody else better and naturally you know you're going to upwork because you're not an expert right if you're an expert you probably wouldn't be like getting a programmer from upwork so so how can you really tell so this is kind of like a lot of potential regret right what if i choose a bad person they like gonna be late on the work it's gonna be painful experience and for the freelancer it was also painful because you know half the time they spent not on actually doing the work but kind of figuring out how can i make my profile most attractive to the buyer right and they're not an expert on that either so like graham's idea was let's remove the barrier right like let's make it simple we'll pick a few uh verticals that are fairly standardizable you know we actually started with translation um and then we added audio transcription a bit later and we'll just make it a website you go give us your files we'll give you back uh the results you know as soon as possible you know originally maybe it was 48 hours then we made it shorter and shorter and shorter um yeah there's a rush processing too there's a rush processing now and will hide all the details from you right yeah and like that's kind of exactly what you're experiencing right you don't you don't need to worry about the details of how the sausage is made that's really cool the so you picked like a vertical by vertically you mean basically a service service category why translation is rev thinking of potentially going into other verticals in the future or is this like the focus now is uh translation transcription like language uh the focus now is language or speech services generally speech-to-text language services you can kind of group them however you want um so but we originally the categorization was work from home also wanted uh work that was done by people on the computer you know we weren't trying to get into you know taskrabbit type of things and something that could be relatively standard not a lot of options so we could kind of present the simplified interface right yeah so programming wasn't like a good fit because each programming project is kind of unique right we're looking for something that transcription is you know you have five hours of audio it's five hours of audio right translation is somewhat similar in that you know you can have a five page document you know and then you just compress it by that and then you pick pick the language you want and that's that's mostly all it is to it so those were a few criteria we started with translation because we saw the need um and uh we picked a kind of a specialty of translation um where we would translate things like birth certificates uh illustrations documents things like that and so they were fairly um even more well defined and easy to kind of tell if we did a good job so you can literally charge per type of document was that was was that the so what what is it now is it per word or something like that like how do you like how do you measure the effort involved in a particular thing so now like so for audio transcription right it's uh per audio minute well that that yes for for translation we don't really actually focus on that anymore uh but you know back when it was still a main business of revit was per page right or per word depending on the kind of uh because you can also do translation now on the audio right like subtitles so it would be both uh transcription and translation that's right i wanted to test the system to see how good it is to see like how how uh will is russian supported i think so yeah it'd be interesting to try it out i mean one of the now it's only in like the one direction right so you start with english and then you can have subtitles in russian not really not really the other way got it because it's i'm i'm deeply curious about this i'm one kovit opens up a little bit when the economy when the world opens up a little bit you want to build your brand in russia no i don't first of all i'm allergic to the word brand i'm definitely not building uh any brands in russia nice but i'm going to paris to talk to the uh translators of dostoyevsky and tolstoy there's this famous couple that does translation and you know i'm more and more thinking of how is it possible to have a conversation with a russian speaker because i have just some number of famous russian speakers that i'm interested in talking to and my russian is not strong enough to be witty and funny i'm already an idiot in english i'm an extra level of like awkward idiot in russian but i can understand it right and i also like wonder how can i create a compelling english russian experience for an english speaker like if i there's a guy named pearlman who's a mathematician who uh obviously doesn't speak any english so i would probably incorporate like a russian translator into the picture and then it would be like a not to use a weird term but like a three like a three three person thing where it's like a dance of work like i understand it one way they don't understand the other way but i'll be asking questions in english i don't know i don't know the right way complicated it's complicated but i feel like it's worth the effort for certain kinds of people one of whom i'm confident of vladimir putin i'm for sure talking to i really want to make it happen because i think i could do a good job with it but the the right you know understanding the fundamentals of translation is something i'm really interested in so that's why i'm starting with um the actual translators of like russian literature because they understand the nuance and the beauty of the language how it goes back and forth but i also want to see like in speech how can we do it in real time so that's that's like a little bit of a baby project that i hope to push forward but anyway it's a challenging thing so just to share my dad um actually does translation um not not professional he's a uh he writes poetry that was kind of always his not a hobby but he's uh he you know he had a job like a day job but his passion was always writing poetry and when we got to america and like he started also translating first he was translating english poetry to russia now he also goes the other the other way you kind of gain some small fame in that world anyways because uh recently this poet like lewis clark i don't know if you know of some american poet um she was awarded the nobel prize for literature uh and so my dad had translated uh one of her books of poetry into russian and he was like one of the few so he kind of like they asked him and gave an intro to radius vabode if you know that is and he kind of talked about some of the intricacies of translating poetry so that's like an extra level of difficulty right because translating poetry is even more challenging than translating just you know it's interviews do you remember any any experiences and challenges to having to do the translation that that stick out to like something he's talked about i mean a lot of it i think is word choice right it's the way russian is structured is first of all quite different than um why english is structured right just there's inflections in russian and genders and they don't exist in english one of the reasons actually why machine translation is quite difficult for english to russian and russian to english because there's such different languages but then english has like a huge number of words um many more than russian actually i think so it's often difficult to find the right word to like convey the same emotional meaning yeah russian language they play with words much more so you you're mentioning that uh rev was kind of born out of um trying to take a vertical on the upwork and then standardize it so we're just trying to make the freelancer marketplace idea better right better for both customers and better for the freelancers themselves is there something else the story of rev finding rev like what what did it take to bring it actually to life was there any pain points plenty of plenty of pain points i mean as as often the case it's with scaling it up right um and in this case you know the scaling is kind of scaling the the marketplace so to speak right rev is essentially a two-sided marketplace right because you know there's the customers and then there's the rivers um if there's not enough reverse rivers there will call our freelancers so if there's not enough reverse then customers have a bad experience right you know it takes longer to get your work done um things like that you know if there's too many then drivers have a bad experience because they might log on to see like what work is available and there's not very much work right so kind of keeping that balance um is is a quite challenging problem and you know that's that's like a problem we've been working on for many years we're still like refining our methods right if you can kind of talk to this gig economy idea i did a bunch of different psychology experiments on mechanical turk for example i've asked to do different kinds of very tricky computer vision annotation on mechanical turrican it's connecting connecting people in a more systematized way i would say you know between tasks and and uh what would you call that worker is what mechanical terror calls it what do you think about this world of gig economies of there being a service that connects customers to workers in a way that's like massively distributed like potentially scaling to it could it could be scaled to like tens of thousands of people right is there something interesting about that world that you can speak to yeah well we we don't think of it as kind of gig economy like to some degree i don't like the word gig that much right because to some degree diminishes the works being done right it sounds kind of like almost amateurish well yeah maybe in like music and it's just like it's a standard term but in work it kind of sounds like a it's it's it's frivolous um to us it's um improving the nature of working from home on your own time and on your own terms right and kind of taking away geographical limitations and time limitations right so you know many of our freelancers are maybe work from home moms right and you know they don't want the traditional nine-to-five job but they want to make some income and ref kind of like allows them to do that and decide like exactly how much to work and when to work or by the same token maybe someone is you know someone wants to live the mountaintop you know life right you know cabin in the woods but they still want to make some money and like generally that wouldn't be compatible before before this new world you kind of had to choose but like with rev like you feel like you don't have to choose can you speak to like what's the demographics like distribution like where do reverse live is it from all over the world like what is it do you have a sense of uh uh all over the world most of them are in the u.s that's the majority um yeah because most of our work is audio transcription and so you have to speak pretty good english yes uh so the majority of them are from the us we have people in some other english-speaking countries and as far as like us it's really all over the place um you know for some years now we've been doing these little meetings where the management team will go to some place and we'll try to meet reverse and you know pretty much wherever we go it's pretty easy to find you know a large number of rivers you know the most recent one we did is in utah so but but anyway really are they from all walks of life are these young folks older folks yeah all walks of life really like i said you know one one category is you know the work from home mound students you know who want to make some extra income there are some people who may be you know maybe they're have some social anxiety so they don't want to be in the office right and this is one way for them to make a living so it's really pretty pretty wide variety but like on the flip side for example one wherever we were talking to was a person who had a fairly high powered career before and was kind of like taking a break and just wanted she was almost doing this just to explore and learn about you know the gig economy quote unquote right so it really is a pretty wide variety of folks yeah it's kind of interesting through the captioning process for me to learn about the the the reverse because um like some are clearly like weirdly knowledgeable about technical concepts like you can tell by how good they are at like capitalizing stuff like like technical terms like machine learning and deep learning right like i've used rev to annotate to caption um the deep learning lectures or machine learning lectures i did at mit and it's funny like a large number of them were like i don't know if they looked it up or already knowledgeable but they do a really good job but like they invest time into these things they will like do research they will google things you know so kind of make sure to they get it right but to some of them it's like it's actually part of the enjoyment of the work like they'll tell us you know i love doing this because i get paid to watch a documentary on something right and i learn something while i'm transcribing right pretty cool yeah so what's that uh captioning transcription process look like for the rever can you maybe speak to that to give people a sense like how much is automated how much is manual what's the actual interface look like all that kind of stuff yeah so you know we've invested a pretty good amount of time to give like our reverse um the best tools possible you know so typical day forever they might log into their workspace they'll see a list of audios that need to be transcribed and we try to give them tools to pick specifically the ones they want to do you know so maybe some people like to do longer audios or shorter audios people have their preferences some people like to do audios in a particular subject or from a particular country so we try to give people you know the tools to control things like that and then when they pick what they want to do we'll launch a specialized editor that we build to make transcription as efficient as possible they'll start with a speech rag draft so you know we have our machine learning model for automated speech recognition they'll start with that and then our tools are optimized to help them correct that so it's basically a process of correction um yeah it depends on you know i would say the audio if audio itself is pretty good like probably like our podcast right now would be quite good so dsr would do a fairly good job but if you imagine someone recorded a lecture you know in the back of a auditorium right where like the speaker is really far away and there's maybe a lot of crosstalk and things like that then maybe the sr wouldn't do a good job so the person might say like you know what i'm just going to do it from scratch yeah so it kind of really depends what would you say is the speed that you could possibly get like what's the fastest can you get is it possible to get real time or no as you're like listening can you write as fast as uh real time would be pretty difficult it's actually a pretty it's not an easy job you know we actually encourage everyone at the company to try to be a transcriber for their descriptions where they um and it's way harder than you might think it it is right because people talk fast and people have accents and all this kind of stuff so real time is pretty difficult is it possible like there's somebody we're probably going to use rev to caption this they're they're listening to this right now what's what's uh what do you think is the fastest you could possibly get on this right now i think on a good audio maybe two to three x i would say uh real time meaning it takes two to three times longer than the actual audio of the of the podcast this is this is so meta i can just imagine the whoever's working on this right now like you're way wrong you're way wrong this takes way longer but yeah you doubted me i could do real time yeah okay so you mentioned asr can you speak to what is asr automatic speech recognition how much like what is the gap between perfect human performance and uh perfect or pretty damn good asr yeah so is our automatic speech recognition it's a class of machine learning problem right to take you know speech like we were talking and transform it into a sequence of words essentially audio of people talking audio audio to words and you know there's a variety of different approaches and techniques which we could talk about later if you want so you know we think we have pretty much the world's best asr for this kind of um speech right so there's there's different kinds of domains right for asr like one domain might be voice assistance right so siri um very different than what we're doing right because siri there's fairly limited vocabulary you know you know you might ask siri to play a song or you know order pizza or whatever and it's very good at doing that very different from when we're start talking in a very unstructured way and siri will also generally like adapt to your voice and stuff like this so for this kind of audio we think we have the best and our accuracy right now it's i think it's maybe 14 word error rate on on um our test test suite that we generally use to measure so word error rate is like one way to measure uh accuracy for asr right so what's fourteen percent what fourteen percent means across this test suite of a variety of different audios um it would be um it would get in some way fourteen percent of the words wrong uh 14 of the words wrong yeah so the way you kind of calculate it is you might add up insertions deletions and substitutions right so insertions is like extra words deletions are words that we said but um weren't in the transcript right substitutions just use that apple but i said but the sr thought was able something like this human accuracy most people think realistically it's like three percent two percent word error rate would be like the max achievable so there's still quite a gap right would you say that so youtube when i upload videos often generates automatic captions are you sort of from a company perspective from a tech perspective are you trying to beat youtube google it's a hell of a so google i mean i don't know how seriously they take this task but i imagine it's quite serious and they you know google is probably up there in terms of their teams on on asr just nlp natural language processing different technologies so do you think you can be google on this kind of stuff yeah we think so um google just woke up on my phone this is hilarious okay now google is listening sending it back to headquarters for these rough people but that's the goal yeah i mean we measure ourselves against like google amazon microsoft you know some of the some smaller competitors um and we use like our internal tests we try to compose it of a pretty representative set of ideas maybe it's some podcasts some videos some intro some interviews some lectures things like that right and we beat them in our own testing and uh actually rev offers automated like you can actually just do the automated uh captioning so like i guess it's like way cheaper whatever it is whatever the rates are yeah yeah so by the way it used to be a dollar per minute for captioning and transcription i think it's like a dollar fifteen or something like that twenty-five dollar twenty-five uh dollar twenty-five no yeah it's pr it's pretty cool that was the other thing that was surprising to me it was actually like the cheapest thing you could one of th i mean i i don't remember it being cheaper you could on upwork get cheaper but it was clear to me that this that's gonna be really shitty yeah so like you're also competing on price i think there were services that you can get like similar to rev kind of um feel to it but it wasn't as automated like the drag and drop the entirety of the interface it's like the thing we're talking about i'm such a huge fan of like frictionless like uh amazon's single uh buy button whatever yeah that one click the one click that's genius right there like that is so important for services yeah that's simplicity and i mean rev is uh almost there i mean there's like some i'm trying to think so i i think i've uh i stopped using um this pipeline but rev offers it and that i like it but it was causing me some issues uh on my side which is um you can connect it to like dropbox and it generates the files and dropbox so like it it it closes the loop to where i don't have to go to rev at all and i can download it uh um sorry i don't have to go to rev at all and to download the files it could just like automatically copy them all right you put in your dropbox and you know a day later or maybe a few hours later yeah eventually it just shows up yeah yeah i was trying to do it programmatically too is there an api interface you can i was trying to through like through python to download stuff automatically but then i realized this is the programmer in me like dude you don't need to automate everything like in life just like flawlessly because i wasn't doing enough captions to justify to myself the time investment into automating everything perfectly yeah i would say if you're doing so many interviews that your biggest roadblock is uh clicking on the rough download button now you're talking about elon musk levels of business but for sure we have like a variety of ways to make it easy you know there's the integration you mentioned i think it's a story company called sapir which kind of can connect um dropbox to revan uh vice versa we have an api if you want to really like customize it you know if you want to create the lux friedman you know uh cms or or whatever but this whole thing okay cool so can you speak to the the asr a little bit more like what is it uh what does it take like approach wise machine learning wise how hard is this problem how do you get to the three percent error rate like what's your vision of all of this yeah well the three percent ratio error rate is definitely that's that's the grand vision um we'll see what it takes to get there um but we believe you know in in asr the biggest thing is the data right like that's true of like a lot of machine learning problems today right the more data you have and the higher quality the data the better label the data um yeah that doesn't get good results and we at rev have kind of like the best data like we have i think you're literally your literal model is annotating the data our business model is being paid to annotate the data so it's kind of like a pretty magical flywheel yeah and so we've kind of like ridden this flywheel to to this point um and we think we're still kind of in the early stages of figuring out all the parts of the flywheel to use you know because we have the final transcripts and we have the um the audios and we train on that but we in principle also have all the edits that the reverse make right um oh that's interesting how can you use that as they'd done that's that's something for us to figure out in the future but you know we feel like we're only in the early stages right so the data but the data is there that'd be interesting like uh almost like a recurrent neural net for fixing for fixing transcripts i i always remember we did uh segmentation annotation for uh for driving data so segmenting the scene like visual data and you could you can get all so it was drawing people drawing polygons around different objects and so on and it feels like it always felt like there was a lot of information in the clicking the sequence of clicking that people do the kind of fixing of the pod guns that they do now there's a few papers written about how to draw polygons like with uh recurrent neural nets to try to learn from the human clicking but it was just like experimental you know it was one of those like cvpr type papers that people do like a really tiny data set it didn't feel like people really tried to do it seriously yeah i wonder i wonder if there's information in the fixing that's hot that that provides deeper set of signal than just like the raw uh data the intuition is for sure there must be right it must be in in in all kinds of signals and how long it took to you know make that edit and stuff like that uh you know it's gonna be like up to us that's why like the next couple years is like super exciting for us right so that's what like the focus is now is you mentioned rev.a.i that's where you want to yeah so wrap the ai is kind of um our way of bringing this asr to you know the rest of the world right so when we started um we were human only and you know then we kind of created this uh temi service i think you might have used it which was kind of asr for the consumer right so if you don't want to pay a dollar 25 but you want to paid now it's 25 cents a minute i think and you gather um the transcript the machine generated transcript you get an editor and you can kind of fix it up yourself right then we started using tsr for our own human transcriptionists and then the kind of ai is the final step of the journey which is you know we have this amazing engine what can people build with it right what kind of new applications could be enabled if you have speed track that's that accurate do you have ideas for this or is it just providing it as a service and seeing what people come up with it's providing it as a service and seeing what people come up with and kind of learning from what people do with it and we have ideas of our own as well of course but it's a little bit like you know when aws provided the building blocks right um and they saw what people built with it and they try to make it easier to build those things right and we kind of hope to do the same thing although aws kind of does a shitty job of like i'm continually surprised like mechanical turk for example how shitty the interface is we're talking about like rev making me feel good like when i first discovered mechanical turk the initial idea of it was like it made me feel like ref does but then the interface is like come on yeah it's horrible why why is that so painful does nobody at amazon want to like seriously invest in it felt like you could make so much money if you took this effort seriously and it feels like they have a committee of like two people just sitting back like like a meeting they meet once a month like what are we gonna do with mechanical turk if it's like uh two websites making me feel like this that and craiglist.org whatever the hell it is yeah it feels like it's designed in the 90s well craigslist basically hasn't been updated pretty much since the game do you seriously think there's a team like how big is the team working on a mechanical turk i don't know their thumb team right i feel like there isn't i'm skeptical yeah well if it's not possible they benefit from you know the other teams like moving things forward right in a small way possible but no i know you mean we do we use mechanical turk for a couple of things as well and yeah it's painfully nice it's painful but yeah it works actually i think most people the thing is most people don't really use the ui right like so right like we for example we that's right use it through the api right so yeah but even the api documentation and so on like it's super outdated like yeah it's it i don't i don't even know what to i mean the same like same criticism as long as we're ranting my same criticism goes to the apis of most of these companies like google for example the api for the different services it's just the documentation is so shitty like it's not so shady i should i should actually be uh i should exhibit some gratitude okay let's practice some great gratitude the the you know the documentation is pretty good like most of the things that the api makes available is pretty good it's just that in the sense that it's accurate sometimes outdated but like the degree of explanations with examples is only covering i would say like 50 of what's possible and it just feels a little bit like there's a lot of natural questions that people would want to ask that doesn't uh doesn't get covered and it feels like it's almost there like it's such a magical thing like the maps api youtube api i there's a bunch i got to imagine it's like you know there's probably some team at google right responsible for writing this documentation it's probably not the engineers right and exactly this team is not you know where you want to be what it's a it's a weird thing i i sometimes think about this for somebody who wants to also uh build the company i think about this a lot you know youtube the you know the service is one of the most magical like i'm so grateful that youtube exists and yet they seem to be quite clueless on so many things like that everybody is screaming them at like it feels like whatever the mechanism that you use to listen to your quote-unquote customers which is like the creators is not very good like there's literally people that are like screaming why like uh their new youtube studio for example there's like features that that were like begged for for a really long time like being able to upload multiple videos at the same time that was missing for a really really long time now like there's probably things that i don't know which is maybe for that kind of huge infrastructure it's actually very difficult to build some of these features but the fact that that wasn't communicated and it felt like you're not being heard like i remember this experience for me and it's not a pleasant experience and it feels like the company doesn't give a damn about you and that's something to think about i'm not sure what that is that might have to do with just like small groups working on these small features on these specific features and there's no overarching like dictator type of human that says like why the hell are we neglecting like steve jobs type of character there's like there's people that we need to we need to speak to the people that like want to love our product and they don't let's maybe at some point you just get so fixated on the numbers right and it's like well the numbers are pretty great right like people are watching you know it doesn't seem to be a problem right and you're not like the person that like built this thing right so you really care about it yeah you know you're just there you came in as a product manager right you got hired sometime later your mandate is like increase the number like you know ten percent right and that's brilliantly put like if you this is okay if there's a lesson in this is don't reduce your company into a metric of like how much uh like you said how much how much people watching the videos and so on and and and like convince yourself that everything is working just because the numbers are going up yeah there's something you have to have a vision you have to uh you have to want people to love your stuff because love is ultimately the beginning of like a successful long-term company companies they always should love your product you have to be like a creator and have that like creator's love for your own thing right like and you paint by you know these these comments right and probably like now apple i think did this generally like really well you know they're they're well known for kind of keeping teams small even when they were big right and you know you as an engineer like there's that book uh creative selection i don't know if you read it by a apple engineer named ken cocienda it's kind of a great book actually because unlike most of these business books where it's you know here's how steve job ran the company it's more like here's how life was like for me you know an engineer here the projects i worked on and hear what it was like to pitch steve jobs you know on like you know i think it was in charge of like the keyboard and the audit correction right and at apple like steve jobs reviewed everything and so he was like this is what it was like to show my demos to steve jobs and you know to change them because like steve jobs didn't like how you know the shape of the little key was off because the rounding of the corner was like not quite right or something like this but he was famously a stickler for this kind of stuff but because the teams were small you really owned the stuff right so you really cared yeah elon musk does that similar kind of thing with tesla which is really interesting there's another lesson in leadership in that is to be obsessed with the details and like he talks to like the lowest level engineers okay so we're talking about asr and so this is basically we're saying we're gonna take this like ultra seriously and then what's the mission to try to keep pushing towards the three percent um yeah and kind of try to um try to build this platform where all of your you know audits all of your meetings you know um they're as easily accessible as your notes right like so like imagine all the meetings the company might have right you know i'm now that i'm like no longer a programmer right then i'm a quote-unquote manager uh that's less like my day is in meetings right yeah and you know pretty often i want to like see what what was said right who said it you know what's the context but it's generally not really something that you can easily retrieve right like imagine if all of those meetings were indexed archived you know you could go back you could share a clip like really easily right so that might change completely like everything that's said converted to text might change completely the dynamics of what we do in this world especially now with remote work right exactly exactly it was with zoom and so on that's that's fascinating to think about i mean for me i care about podcasts right and one of the things that was you know i'm torn i know a lot of the engineers at spotify so i i love them very much because they uh they dream big in terms of like they want to empower creators so one of my hopes was with spotify that they would use a technology like rev or something like that to to start converting everything into uh into text and make it indexable like one of the things that that sucks with podcasts is like it's hard to find stuff like the the model is basically subscription like you find uh it's similar use is similar to what youtube used to be like which is you basically find a creator that you enjoy and you subscribe to them and like you just yeah uh you just kind of follow what they're doing but the search and discovery wasn't a big part of youtube like in the early days but and that's what currently with podcasts like is the search and discovery is uh like non-existent you're basically searching for like the dumbest possible thing which is like keywords in the titles of episodes yeah even aside from searching discover like all the time so i listen to like a number of podcasts and um you know there's something said and i want to like go back to that later because i was trying to i'm trying to remember what do you say like maybe like recommended some cool product that i want to try out and like it's basically impossible maybe like some people have pretty good show notes so maybe you'll get lucky and you can find it right but i mean if everyone had transcripts and it was all searchable it was a game-changer maybe it's so much better i mean that's one of the things that i i wanted to i mean one of the reasons we're talking today is i wanted to take this quite seriously the the rough thing i just been lazy so uh because i'm very fortunate that a lot of people support this podcast that there's enough money now to do uh transcription and so on it it seemed clear to me especially like ceos and sort of uh like phds like people write to me who are like graduate students in computer science or graduate students or whatever the heck field it's clear that their mind like they enjoy podcasts when they're doing laundry whatever but they want to re-visit the conversation in a much more rigorous way and they really want a transcript like it's clear that they want to like analyze conversations like so many people wrote to me about a transcript for your shabbat conversation i had just a bunch of conversations and then on the elon musk side like reporters want like they want to write a blog post about your conversation so they want to be able to pull stuff and it's like they're essentially doing on your conversation transcription privately they're doing it for themselves and then starting to pick but so much easier when you can actually do it as a reporter just look at the transcript yeah and you can like embed a little thing you know like into your article right here's what you said you can go listen to like this clip from the section i'm actually trying to trying to figure out i'll probably on the website create like a place where the transcript goes like as a web page so that people can reference it like reporters can reference and so on i mean most of the reporters probably have uh want to write clickbait articles that are complete falsifying which i'm fine with it's the way of journalism i don't care like i've had this conversation with a friend of mine a mixed martial artist the ryan hall and we we talked about you know as i've been reading the rise and fall of the reich and a bunch of books on hitler and we brought up hitler and he made some kind of comment where like we should be able to forgive hitler and uh you know like we were talking about forgiveness and we're bringing that up as like the worst case possible thing is like even you know for people who are holocaust survivors one of the ways to let go of the suffering they've been through is to is to forgive and he brought up like hitler is somebody that would would potentially be the the hardest thing to possibly forgive but it might be a worthwhile pursuit psychologically so on blah blah blah it doesn't matter it was very eloquent very powerful words i think people should go back and listen to it it's powerful and then all these journalists there's all these articles written about like mma fight ufc fighter loves hitler no like well no they didn't they were somewhat accurate they didn't say like loves hitler they said um thinks that uh if hitler came back to life we should forgive him like they kind of it's kind of accurate-ish but it it the headline makes it sound a lot worse than than uh than it was but i'm fine with it that's the way that that's the way the world i wanna i wanna almost make it easier for those journalists and make it easier for people who actually care about the conversation to go and look and see right they can see it for themselves for themselves there's something about podcasts like the audio that makes it difficult to to go to jump to a spot and to look for that for that particular information i think some of it you know i'm interested in creating like myself experimenting with stuff so like taking rev and creating a transcript and then people can go to it i do dream that like i'm not in the loop anymore that like you know spotify does it right like automatically for everybody because ultimately that one-click purchase needs to be there like you know like you kind of want support from the entire ecosystem exactly from the tool makers and the podcast creators even clients right i mean imagine if like uh most podcast apps you know if it was a standard right here's how you include a transcript into a podcast right like it's just an rss feed ultimately and actually just yesterday i saw this company called bus sprout i think they're called uh so they're trying to do this they propose to spec um an extension to their uh rss format to reference podcast uh reference transcripts in a standard way yeah and they're talking about like there's one uh client dimension that will support it but imagine like more clients support it right so any podcast you could go um and see the transcripts right in your like normal podcast app yeah i mean somebody so i have somebody who works with me uh his works helps with advertis with advertising uh matt this awesome guy he mentioned bus brought to me but he says it's really annoying because they want exclusive uh they want to host the podcast right this is the problem with spotify too uh this is where i'd like to say like f spotify there's a magic to rss with podcasts this it can be made available to everyone and then there's all there's this ecosystem of different podcast players that emerge and they compete freely and that that's a that's a beautiful thing that that's why going exclusive like joe rogan one exclusive um i'm not sure if you're familiar with you want just just spotify as a huge fan of joe rogan i've been kind of nervous about the whole thing but let's see let's i hope the spotify steps up they've added video which is very surprising that they were so so exclusive meaning you can't subscribe to this rss feed anymore only in spotify for now you can until december 1st and december 1st it all everything disappears and it's spotify only i uh you know and spotify gave him a hundred million dollars for that so it's it's uh it's an interesting deal but i i you know i did some soul searching and i'm glad he's doing it but if spotify came to me with 100 million dollars i wouldn't do it i wouldn't do well i have a very different relationship with money i hate money but i just think i believe in the pirate radio aspect of podcasting the freedom and that there's something about the source spirit the open source spirit it just doesn't seem right it doesn't feel right that said you know because so many people care about joe rogan's program they're gonna hold spotify's feet to the fire like one of the cool things what joe told me is the reason he likes working with spotify is that they they're like ride or die together right so they they want him to succeed so that's why they're not actually telling him what to do despite what people think they they don't tell they don't give him any notes on anything they want him to succeed and that's the cool thing about exclusivity with a platform is like you kind of want each other to succeed and that process can actually be very fruitful like youtube it goes back to my criticism youtube generally no matter how big the creator may be for pewdiepie something like that they want you to succeed but for the most part from all the big creators i've spoken with veritasium all those folks you know they get some basic assistance but it's not like youtube doesn't care if you succeed or not they have so many creative there's like a hundred other data they don't care so and especially with um with somebody like joe rogan who youtube sees joe rogan not as a person who might revolutionize the nature of news and idea space and nuanced conversations they see him as a potential person who uh who uh has racist guests on or like you know they see him as like a headache potentially so you know a lot of people talk talk about this it's a hard place to be for youtube actually is figuring out with the search and discovery process of how do you filter out conspiracy theories and which conspiracy theories represent dangerous untruths and wish conspiracy theories are like vanilla untruths and then even when you have start having meetings and discussions about what is true or not it starts getting weird yeah it's that's difficult these days right i worry more about the other side right of too much you know too much censorship well maybe censorship is the right word i mean uh censorship is usually government censorship but still uh yeah putting yourself in the position of arbiter for these kinds of things it's very difficult and people think it's so easy right like it's like well you know like no nazis right what a simple principle uh but you know yes i mean no one likes nazis yeah but there's like many shades of grey yeah like very soon after that yeah and then you know of course everybody you know there's some people that call our current president a nazi and then there's like so you start getting uh sam harris i don't know if you know that is wasted i in my opinion his conversation with jack dorsey and i lost i spoke with jack before in this podcast and we'll talk again but sam brought up uh sam harris does not like donald trump and i i i do listen to his podcast i'm familiar with his views on the matter and he uh he has jack dorsey's like how can you not ban donald trump from twitter and so you know there's a set you have that conversation you have a conversation where some number some significant number of people think that the current president of the united states should not be on your platform and it's like okay so if that's even on the table as a conversation then everything's on the table for conversation and yeah it's it's tough i'm not sure where i land on it i i'm with you i think that censorship is bad but i also think ultimately i just also think you know if you're the kind of person that's going to be convinced you know by some youtube video you know that i don't know our government's been taken over by aliens it's unlikely that like you know you'll be returned to sanity simply because you know that video is not available on on youtube right yeah i'm with you i tend to believe in the intelligence of people and we should we should trust them but i also do think it's the responsibility of platforms to encourage more love in the world more kindness to each other and i don't always think that they're great at doing that particular thing so that that um there's a nice balance there and i think philosophically i think about that a lot where's the balance between free speech and like encouraging people even though they have the freedom of speech to not be an yeah right that's not a constitutional like uh so you have the right for to first free speech but like just don't be an like you can't really put that in the constitution the supreme court can't be like just don't be a dick but i feel like platforms have a role to be like just be nicer maybe do the carrot like encourage people to be nicer as opposed to the stake of censorship but i think it's it's an interesting machine learning problem just be nicer machine yeah machine learning for niceness it is i mean responsible ai i mean it is it is a thing um for sure jack dorsey kind of talks about it as a vision for twitter is how do we increase the health of conversations i don't know how seriously they're actually trying to do that though uh which is one of the reasons i am in part considering uh entering that space a little bit it's difficult for them right because you know it's kind of like well known that you know people are kind of driven by you know rage and you know uh outrage maybe is a better word right outrage drives engagement and well these companies are judged by engagement right so in the short term but this goes to the metrics thing that we were talking about earlier i do believe i have a fundamental belief that if you have a metric of long-term happiness of your users like not short-term engagement but long-term happiness and growth and both like intellectual emotional health of your users you're going to make a lot more money you're going to have long-term like you should be able to optimize for that you don't need to necessarily optimize for engagement yeah and that'll be good for society too yeah no i mean i i generally agree with you but it requires a patient person with you know trust from wall street to to be able to carry out such a strategy this is the was what i believe the steve jobs character and elon musk's character is like you basically have to be so good at your job right you got to pass for anything that you can hold the board and every all the investors hostage by saying like either we do it my way or i leave and everyone is too afraid of you to leave right because they believe in your vision so that but that requires being really good at uh really good at what you do requires being steve jobs and elon musk there's kind of a reason why like a third name doesn't come immediately to mine right like there is maybe a handful of other people but it's not that many it's not many i mean people say like why like people say that i'm like a fan of elon musk i'm not i'm a fan of anybody who's like steve jobs and elon musk and there's just not many of those folks it's a guy that made us believe that like we can get to mars you know in 10 years right yeah i mean that's kind of awesome and it's kind of making it happen which is like it's it's great it's kind of gotten like that kind of like spirit right like from a lot of our society right yeah like we can get to the moon in 10 years and like we did it right yeah especially in this time of uh so much kind of existential dread that people are going through because of covid like having rockets that just keep going out there now with humans i don't know that uh it just like you said i mean it gives you a reason to wake up in the morning and and dream the forest engineers too uh it uh this is inspiring as hell man i wha well let me ask you this the the worst possible question which is uh so you're like at the core you're a programmer you're um an engineer but now he made the unfortunate choice uh or maybe that's the way life goes of basically moving away from the low level work and becoming a manager becoming an executive having meetings is what's what's that transition been like it's been interesting it's been a journey maybe a couple of things to say about that i mean i got into this right because as a kid i just remember this like incredible amazement at being able to write a program right and something comes to life that kind of didn't exist before yeah i don't think you have that in like many other fields like you have that with some other kinds of engineering but you may be a little bit more limited with what you can do like right but with a computer you can literally imagine any kind of program right so it's a little bit god-like uh what you do like when you create it and so i mean that's why i got into it do you remember like first program you wrote or maybe the first program that like made you fall in love with com with computer science uh i don't know what was the first program it's probably like trying to write one of those uh games in basic you know like emulate the snake game or whatever um i don't remember to be honest but i enjoyed like that's why i always loved about you know being a program is just the creation process and um it's a little bit different when you're not the one doing the creating uh and you know another aspect to it i would say is you know when you're a programmer when you're a individual contributor it's kind of very easy to know when you're doing a good job when you're not doing a good job when you're being productive when you're not being productive right you can kind of see like you trying to make something and it's like slowly coming together right and when you're a manager you know it's more diffuse right like well you hope you know you're motivating your team and making them more productive and inspiring them right but it's not like you get some kind of like dopamine signal because you like completed x lines of code you know today so kind of like you missed that dopamine rush a little bit uh when you first become but then you know slowly you kind of see yes your teams are doing amazing work right and you you can take pride in that um you you can get like uh uh what is it like a ripple effect of a dope or somebody else's opinion yeah yeah you live off other people's dopamine so is there pain points and challenges you have to overcome from becoming from going to a programmer to becoming a programmer of humans programmer of humans i don't know humans are uh difficult to understand you know it's like one of those things like trying to understand other people's motivations and what really drives them it's difficult maybe you like never really know right do you find that people are different yeah like i i one of the things like i had a group at mit that you know i found that like some people i i could like scream at and criticize like hard and that made them do like much better work and really push them to their limit and there's some people that i had to non-stop compliment because like they're so already self-critical like about everything they do that i have to be constantly like like i cannot criticize them at all because they're already criticizing themselves and you have to kind of encourage and like celebrate their little victories and it's kind of fascinating like how that the complete difference in people definitely people respond to different motivations and different loads of feedback and you kind of have to figure it out it's like a pretty good book which some reason not the name escapes me um about management first break all the rules uh first break all the rules first break all the rules it's a book that we kind of like ask a lot of like first-time managers to read a rev like one of the uh kind of philosophies is managed by exception right which is you know don't like have some standard template like you know here's how i you know tell this person to do this or the other thing here's how i get feedback like manage by exception right every person is a little bit different you have to try to understand what drives them and tailor it to them since you mentioned books i don't know if you can uh answer this question but people love it when i ask it which is uh are there books technical fiction or philosophical that you enjoyed or had an impact on your life that you would recommend you already mentioned dune like all of all of the dunes all of the dune the second one was probably the weakest but anyway so yeah all of the doing is good um i mean yeah can you just slow little tangent on that is uh how many dune books are there like do you recommend people start with the first one if you if that was yeah you kind of have to read them all i mean it is a complete story right so um you start with the first one you got to read all of them um so it's not like a tree like that like a creation of like the universe you just should go in sequence you should go on sequence yeah it's a it's kind of a chronological storyline um there are six books in all uh then there was like many um kind of option books that were written by um frank herbert's son uh but those are not as good so you don't have to bother with those shots fired up she got fired uh okay but the main uh sequences is good so what are some other books uh maybe there's a few so i don't know that like i would say there's a book that kind of i don't know turned my life around or anything like that but here's a couple that i really love so one is brave new world by aldous huxley um and it's kind of incredible how prescient he was about like what this what what a brave new world might be like right you know you kind of see a genetic sorting in this book right where there's like this alphas and epsilons and uh from like the earliest time of society like they're starting like you can kind of see it in a slightly similar way today where well one of the problems with society is people are kind of genetically sorting a little bit right like there's much less like most marriages right are between people of similar kind of um intellectual level or socioeconomic status more so these days than in the past and you kind of see some effects of it and stratifying society and kind of he illustrated what that could be like in the extreme different versions of it on social media as well it's not just like marriages and so on like it's genetic sorting in terms of what dawkins called memes as ideas right being put into these bins of these little echo chambers and so on yeah i know so that's the book that's i think a worthwhile read for everyone i mean 1984 is good of course as well like if you're talking about you know dystopian novels of the future yeah it's a slightly different view of the future right but i kind of like identify with the world but more uh speaking of uh not a book but my favorite kind of uh dystopian science fiction is a movie called brazil which i don't know if you've heard of i've heard of and i know i need to watch it but yeah because it's in is is it in english you know it's an english movie yeah and it's a sort of like dystopian movie of authoritarian incompetence right and it's like like uh nothing really works very well you know the system is creaky you know but no one is kind of like willing to challenge it you know and just things kind of amble along it kind of strikes me as like a very plausible future of like you know what authoritarianism might look like it's not like this you know super efficient evil dictatorship of 1984 it's just kind of like this badly functioning you know but it's status quo so it just goes on yeah that's uh one funny thing that stands out to me is in um whether it's authoritarian dystopian stuff or just basic like you know if you look at the movie contagion it seems that in movies government is almost always exceptionally competent like uh it's like used as a storytelling tool of like extreme competence like you know you use it whether it's good or evil but it's competent it's very interesting to think about word much more realistically is its incompetence and that incompetence is in itself has uh consequences that are difficult to uh to predict like bureaucracy has a very boring way of being evil of just you know if you look at the the show hbo show chernobyl it's a really good story of how bureaucracy you know uh leads to catastrophic events but not through any kind of evil in any one particular place but more just like the it's just the system kind of system distorting information as it travels up the chain that people unwilling to take responsibility for things and just kind of like this laziness resulting in evil there's a comedic version of this i don't know if you've seen this movie it's called the death of stalin yeah i i like that i wish it wasn't so there's a movie called in glorious bastards about uh you know hitler and you know so on for some reason those movies pissed me off i know a lot of people love them but like i just feel like uh there's not enough good movies even about hitler there's good movies about the holocaust but even hitler there's a movie called downfall that people should watch i think it's the last few days of hitler that's a good movie turned into a meme but it's good but on stalin i feel like i may be wrong on this but at least in the english-speaking world there's not good movies about the evil of stalin that's true let's try to see that i actually so i i agree with you on the glorious password i didn't love the movie um because i felt like kind of the the stylizing of it right the whole like tarantino kind of um tarantinoism yeah if you will kind of detracted from it it made it seem like unserious a little bit um but death of stalin i felt differently maybe it's because of the comedy to begin with it's just like i'm expecting you know seriousness but it kind of depicted the absurdity of the whole situation in a way right i mean it was funny so maybe it does make light of it but it something gross probably like this right like a bunch of kind of people they're like oh right like you're right but like the thing is it was so close to like what probably was reality it was caricaturing reality to where i think an observer might think that this is not like they might think it's a comedy in when in reality this is that's the absurdity of uh how people act with dictators i mean that's i guess it was too close to reality for me yeah the kind of banality of like what were eventually like fairly evil acts right but like yeah they're they're just a bunch of people trying to survive and like because i think there's a good i haven't watched yet the good movie on uh the movie on churchill um with uh gary oldman i think is gary oldman i might be making that up i think he won like he was nominated for an oscar something so i like i love these movies about these humans and stalin like chernobyl made me realize the the hbo show that there's not enough movies about russia that capture that spirit i'm sure it might be in in russian there is but the fact that some british dude that like did comedy i feel like he did like hang over some like that i don't know if you're familiar with the person who created chernobyl but he was just like some guy that doesn't know anything about russia and he just went in and just studied it like did a good job of creating and then got it so accurate like poetically and the facts that you need to get accurate he got accurate just the spirit of it down to like the bowls that pets use just the whole feel of it it's nice it's good yeah i saw this here yeah it's it's incredible she made me made me wish that somebody did a good like um 1930s uh like starvationist stalin led to like leading up to world war ii and in world war ii itself like stalingrad and so on like i feel like that story needs to be told millions of people died it and it's it's to me it's so much more fascinating than hitler because hitler is like a caricature of evil almost that it's so especially with the holocaust it's so difficult to imagine that something like that is possible ever again stalin to me represents something that is possible like the so interesting like the bureaucracy of it it's so fascinating that it potentially might be happening in the world now like they were not aware of like with north korea another one that like there should be a good film on and like the possible things that could be happening in china with overreach of government i don't know there's there's a lot of possibilities there i suppose yeah i i wonder how much you know i guess the archives should be maybe more open nowadays right i mean for a long time they just we didn't know right like or anyways no one in the west knew for sure well there's a i don't know if you know there's a guy named stephen codkin he's a historian of stalin that i spoke to on his podcast i'll speak to him again the guy knows his on stalin he like read everything and it's cool it's so fascinating to to to talk to somebody like he knows stalin better than stalin himself it's crazy like you have seen i think he's a princeton he he is basically his whole life is stalin stalin yeah it's great and in that context he also talks about and writes about putin a little bit i've also read at this point i think every biography of putin english uh english biography putin i need to read some russians obviously i'm mentally preparing for a possible conversation with putin so what what is your first question to putin when you have them on your on on the podcast i it's interesting you bring that up first of all i wouldn't tell you but you can't give it away now uh but i actually haven't even thought about that so my current approach and i do this with interviews often that's but obviously that's a special one but i try not to think about questions until last minute i'm trying to sort of get into the mindset but and so that's why i'm soaking in a lot of stuff not thinking about questions just learning about the man but in terms of like human to human it's like i would say it's i don't know if you're a fan of mob movies but like the mafia which i am like goodfellas and so on he's much closer to like mob morality which is like maybe i could see that but i like your approach anyways of this um the extreme empathy right it's uh a little bit like you know hannibal right like if you ever watch the show hannibal right they had that guy um um well you know hannibal of course like uh yeah uh yeah sounds like the lamb but there were those tv shows well you know focused on this guy will durant uh who's a character like extreme empath right so in the way he like catches all these killers is he pretty much uh he can empathize with them right like you can understand why they're doing things they're doing right yes it's a pretty uh excruciating thing right like because you're pretty much like spending half your time in the head of evil people right like uh but i mean i definitely try to do that with uh with other so you you should do that in moderation but yeah uh i i think it's it's a pretty safe place safe place to be like one of the cool things with this podcast and i i know you didn't sign up to hear me listen to this but uh that was interesting i uh and uh what's his name chris latner who's a google uh oh he's not google anymore sci-fi he's legit he's one of the most legit engineers i talked with i talked to him again on this podcast and one of the he gives me private advice a lot and he said for this podcast i should like interview like i should widen the range of people because that gives you much more freedom to do stuff like so his idea which i think i agree with with chris is that you go to the extremes you just like cover every extreme base and then it gives you freedom to then go to the more nuanced conversations it's kind of i think there's a safe place for that there's certainly a hunger for that nuanced conversation i think amongst people where like on social media you get canceled for anything slightly tense that there's a hunger to go full right you go so far to the opposite side and it's like there is a person behind all of these things yeah and that's the cool thing about podcasting like three four hour conversations that that it's very different than the clickbait journalism it's like the opposite that there's a hunger for that there's a willingness for that yeah especially now i mean how many people do you even see face to face anymore right like this you know it's like not that many people like in my day to day aside from my own family that like i said across it it's sad but it's also beautiful like i've gotten the chance to like like our conversation now there's somebody i guarantee you there's somebody in russia listening to this now like jogging and there's somebody who is just smoke some weeds sit back on a couch and just like enjoying like i guarantee you they will write in the comments right now that yes i'm in saint petersburg i'm in moscow whatever and and we're in their head and they have a friendship with us and i'm the same way i'm a huge fan of podcasting it's a beautiful thing i mean it's a it's a weird one-way human connection like yeah before i went on joe rogan uh and still i'm just a huge fan of his so it was like so we had i've been a friend with joe rogan for 10 years but one way yeah from this way from the from the same petersburg way yeah the san francisco it's a real friendship i mean now it's like two-way but it's still surreal it's yeah and that's the magic of podcasting i'm not sure what to make of it that voice it's not even the video part it's the audio that's magical that i don't know what to do with it but it's people listen to three four hours yeah we evolved over you know millions of years right to be very fine-tuned things like that right yeah well expressions as well of course right but uh you know back back in the day on the you know on the savannah you have to be very attuned to you know whether you had a good relationship with the with the rest of your tribe or a very bad relationship right because you know if you had a very bad relationship you're probably going to be left behind and eaten by the lions yeah but it's weird that the tribe is different now like you could have a connect one-way connection with joe rogan as opposed to the tribe of your physical vicinity but that's all but that's why like you know it works with the podcasting right but it's the opposite of what happens on twitter right because all those nuances are removed right you're not connecting with the person yeah because you don't hear the voice you're connecting with like an abstraction right it's like some some stream of tweets right and it's very easy to assign to them any kind of like evil intent you know or dehumanize them which you it's much harder to do when it's a real voice right because like you realize it's a real person behind the voice let me uh try this out on you i sometimes ask about the meaning of life do you uh your your father now uh an engineer you're building up a company do you ever zoom out and think like what the hell is this whole thing for like why why are we descending to vapes even on this planet what's what's the meaning of it all that's a pretty big question i think i don't allow myself to think about it too often or maybe like life doesn't allow me to think about it too often um but in some ways i guess the meaning of life is kind of uh contributing to this kind of weird thing we call humanity right like it's in a way you can think of humanity as like a living and evolving organism right that like we're all contributing as wayward but just by existing by having our own unique set of desires and drives right um and maybe that means like creating something uh great and it's bringing up kids who you know are unique and different and seeing like you know taking joy in what they do um but i mean that to me that's pretty much it i mean if you're not a religious person right which i guess i'm not um that's that's the meaning of life it's in the living and then the in creation and the creation yeah there's something magical about that engine of creation like you said programming i would say i mean it's even just actually what you said with even just programs i don't care if it's like some javascript thing on a button on the website it's like magical that you brought that to life i don't know what that is in there but that seems that's probably some version of recreation of uh like reproduction and sex whatever that's in evolution but like creating that html button has already has echoes of that feeling and it's magical uh right there if you're a religious person maybe you could even say right like we were created in god's image right well i mean i guess part of that is the drive to create something ourselves right i mean that's that's that's part of it uh yeah that html button is the creation in god's yeah so maybe hopefully it'll be something a little more uh dynamic maybe bigger sometimes yeah maybe some uh some javascript some react uh and so on but no i mean i think that's what differentiates us from you know the apes so to speak yeah we did a pretty good job then it was uh honor to talk to you thank you so much for being part of creating one of my favorite services and products this is actually a little bit of an experiment allow me to sort of uh fanboy over some of the things i love um so thanks for wasting your time with me today that was awesome thanks for having me on giving me a chance to try this out awesome thanks for listening to this conversation with dan kokodov and thank you to our sponsors athletic greens all-in-one nutrition drink blinkist app that summarizes books business wars podcast and cash app so the choice is health wisdom or money choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from ludwig wittgenstein the limits of my language means the limits of my world thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you