Lex Fridman PodcastDan Kokotov: Speech Recognition with AI and Humans | Lex Fridman Podcast #151
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,007 words- 0:00 – 3:23
Introduction
- LFLex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Dan Kokotov, VP of engineering at rev.ai, which is, by many metrics, the best speech-to-text AI engine in the world. Rev in general is a company that does captioning and transcription of audio by humans and by AI. I've been using their services for a couple of years now and, and planning to use Rev to have 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 conversation because I've been using and genuinely loving their service, and really curious about how it works. I previously talked to the head of Adobe Research for the same reason. For me, there's a bunch of products, usually it's software, that comes along and just makes my life way easier. Examples are Adobe Premiere for video editing, iZotope RX for cleaning up audio, AutoHotKey on Windows for automating keyboard or mouse tasks, Emacs as an IDE for everything, including the universe itself. I can keep on going, but you get the idea. I just like talking to people who create things I'm a big fan of. That said, after doing this conversation, the folks at rev.ai offered to sponsor this podcast in the coming months. This conversation is not sponsored by the guest. It probably goes without saying, but I should say it anyway, that you cannot buy your way onto this podcast. I don't know why you would want to. I wanted to bring this up, uh, 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, uh, for example, when I interviewed Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO of Square that happens to be sponsoring this podcast, but I should really make it explicit. I will never take money for bringing a guest on. Every guest on this podcast is someone I genuinely am curious to talk to or just genuinely love something they've created. As I sometimes get criticized for, I'm just a fan of people, and that's who I talk to. As I also talk about way too much, money is really never a consideration. In general, no amount of money can buy my integrity. That's true for this podcast, and that's true for anything else I do. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman. And now, here's my conversation with Dan Kokotov.
- 3:23 – 6:39
Dune
- LFLex Fridman
You mentioned science fiction on the phone, so let's go with the ridiculous first. What's the greatest sci-fi novel of all time in your view? And maybe what ideas do you, do you find philosophically fascinating about it?
- DKDan Kokotov
The greatest sci-fi novel of all time is Dune, and the second-greatest is The Children of Dune, and, you know-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) And so on.
- DKDan Kokotov
... the third-greatest is The God Emperor of Dune, so. I'm a, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
No, I have not. It's one of my biggest regrets, especially 'cause the new movie is coming out.
- DKDan Kokotov
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
E- 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. It's, I guess you would call that real-time strategy.
- DKDan Kokotov
Right, right. I think I remember that game.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. It's kind of awesome, 90s or something.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
I think I played it actually when I was in Russia, I think.
- DKDan Kokotov
I definitely remember it. I was n- not in Russia anymore, I think, uh, at the time that I used to live in Russia, I think video games were about, like, just this vision 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.
- LFLex Fridman
So you didn't get color? You didn't get like a... (laughs)
- DKDan Kokotov
Well, so I left Russia in 1991, right?
- LFLex Fridman
'91, okay.
- DKDan Kokotov
Uh, so I was one of the few lucky kids 'cause my mom was a programmer, so I would go to her work, right? I would take the, the metro and go to her work and play like on I guess the equivalent of like a 286 PC, you know?
- LFLex Fridman
Nice. With floppy disks.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yes. Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
So okay, but back to Dune. What do you get-
- DKDan Kokotov
So back to, back to Dune. And by the way, the new movie, I'm pretty interested in it, but the original-
- LFLex Fridman
You're skeptical? (laughs)
- DKDan Kokotov
I'm a little skeptical.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DKDan Kokotov
I'm a little skeptical. I saw the trailer. Uh, I don't know. So there's, there's a David Lynch movie, Dune, uh, as you may know. And 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, Dune is so much about the kind of mood and the world, right? But back to the philosophical point, so in the fourth book, God Emperor of Dune, there's a sort of setting where Leto, one of the characters, he's become this weird sort of God Emperor, has turned into a gigantic worm. I mean, you kind of have to read the book to understand (laughs) what that means.
- LFLex Fridman
So worms are involved in Dune.
- DKDan Kokotov
Worms are involved. You probably saw the worms in the trailer, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, yeah. And in the video game.
- DKDan Kokotov
So he kind of like merges with this worm, um, and becomes this tyrant of the world, and he like oppresses the people for a long time, right? But he has a purpose. And the purpose is to kind of, uh, break through kind of a stagnation period in civilization, right? Um, but people have gotten too comfortable, right? And so he kind of...... oppresses them so that they explode and, like, go on to colonize new worlds and kind of renew the forward momentum of humanity, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DKDan Kokotov
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 yet too comfortable, right?
- 6:39 – 12:39
Rev
- LFLex Fridman
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.
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
And I would hire folks to do transcription, and it was always a pain in the ass, if I'm being honest. And then I don't know how I discovered Rev, but when I did, it was this feeling of like, "Holy shit. Somebody figured out how to do it just really easily." I- I'm, I'm such a fan of just when people take a problem and they just make it easy.
- DKDan Kokotov
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
You know? Like, just, uh... There's so many... It, it's like there's s- so many things in life that you might not even be aware of that are painful. In Rev, you just, like, give the audio, give the video. You can actually give a YouTube link, and then it comes back, like, a day later or, uh, uh, two days later, whatever the hell it is, with the captions, you know, all in a standardized format. It was... I don't know. It was, it was, it was, it was truly a joy. So I th- I thought I had... You know, just for the hell of it, uh, talk to you. The one other product and- and just made my soul feel good. One other product that I've used like that is, uh, for people who might be familiar, is called Isotope RX. It's for audio editing.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yep. Uh-huh.
- LFLex Fridman
And, like, that's another one where it was like, you just drop it. I dr- I dropped in the audio and it just cleans everything up really nicely. All the stupid, like, the mouth sounds, and sometimes there's, uh, background, like, s- sounds due to the malfunctioning of the equipment, it can clean that stuff up.
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm.
- LFLex Fridman
It can... It has, like, general voice de-noising, it has, like, automation capabilities where you can do batch processing and you can put, put a bunch of effects. I mean, it just... I don't know. The- Everything else sucked c- 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 plug-ins, and you have to kind of figure it all out, you have to do it manually. Here, it 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?
- DKDan Kokotov
Rev, rev.com. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- DKDan Kokotov
Same thing, I guess. Uh, that w-
- LFLex Fridman
It's-
- DKDan Kokotov
We, we do have rev.ai now as well, which we can talk about later.
- LFLex Fridman
So, like, do you have the actual domain or is it just the... (laughs)
- DKDan Kokotov
The actual domain, but we also use it kind of as a, as a sub-brand.
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, interesting.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah, so we, so we use rev.ai to kind of denote our ASR services, right? And rev.com is kind of our more-
- LFLex Fridman
Oh.
- DKDan Kokotov
... human and to the end user services.
- LFLex Fridman
Brilliant. 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.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
They provide almost, like, a separate branch of, uh...
- DKDan Kokotov
A little bit. I think with that it's, like, rev... WordPress.org is kind of their open source, right? And WordPress.com is sort of their hosted commercial offering.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- DKDan Kokotov
Um, and with us the differentiation is a little bit different, but-
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- DKDan Kokotov
... may- maybe similar idea.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. Okay, so what is Rev?
- DKDan Kokotov
Before I launch into, uh, what is Rev, I was gonna say, you know, like you- you were talking about, like, Rev was music to your ears.
- 12:39 – 19:28
Translation
- DKDan Kokotov
- LFLex Fridman
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?
- DKDan Kokotov
Uh, the focus now is, is language or, uh, s- speech services generally, speech-to-text language services. You can kind of group them however you want. Um, so, but we, uh... Originally, the categorization was work from home, and so any, uh, work that was done by people on a computer, you know. We weren't trying to get into, you know, uh, 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?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DKDan Kokotov
And so programming wasn't like a good fit because each programming project is kind of unique, right? We're looking for something that, uh... Transcription is, you know, you have five hours of audio, it's five hours of audio, right? Translation is somewhat similar in that, you know, you can have a five-page document, you know, and then you just can price it by that, and then you pick, pick the language you want, and that, that's mostly all there is to it. So tho- 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 translate things like birth certificates, uh-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm. So it's not just cl-
- DKDan Kokotov
... uh, immigration documents.
- LFLex Fridman
... immigration?
- DKDan Kokotov
Things like that. And so they were fairly, um, even more well-defined.
- LFLex Fridman
So you could-
- DKDan Kokotov
Easy to kind of tell if we did a good job.
- LFLex Fridman
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?
- DKDan Kokotov
So now it's for audio transcription, right? It's uh, per audio minute.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, that, that, yes.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah. For, for, for a translation, we don't really, uh, actually focus on that anymore.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay.
- DKDan Kokotov
Uh, but, you know, e- back when it was still a main business of Rev, it was per page, right? Or per word, depending on the kind of a-
- LFLex Fridman
'Cause you can also do translation now on the audio, right?
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm. Some, like subtitles. So it would be-
- LFLex Fridman
Subtitles.
- DKDan Kokotov
... both, uh, transcription and translation. That's right.
- LFLex Fridman
I wanted to test the system to see how good it is, to see, like, how, how, uh... Well, is Russian supported?
- DKDan Kokotov
Think so, yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
It'd be interesting to try it out. I mean, one of the-
- DKDan Kokotov
But now it's only in like the one direction, right? So you start with English, and then you can have subtitles in Russian.
- LFLex Fridman
In Russian?
- DKDan Kokotov
Not really, not really the other way.
- LFLex Fridman
Got it, because it's, I'm, I'm deeply curious about this. I'm... When COVID opens up a little bit, when the economy, when the world opens up a little bit-
- DKDan Kokotov
You want to build your brand in Russia?
- LFLex Fridman
No, I don't.
- 19:28 – 28:08
Gig economy
- DKDan Kokotov
- LFLex Fridman
Is there something else to the story of, of Rev, finding Rev? Like what, what did it take to bring it to actually to life? Was there any pain points?
- DKDan Kokotov
Uh, plenty of, plenty of pain points. I mean, uh, 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 Revvers. Um, if there's not enough Revvers... Revvers are what we call our freelancers. So if, if there's not enough Revvers, then customers have a bad experience, right? You know, takes longer to get your work done, um, things like that. You know, if there's too many, then the Revvers have a bad experience because they might log on to see like what work is available and there's not very much work, right? Uh, so kind of keeping that balance, um, is, is, is a quite challenging problem. And you know, that's, that's like a problem we've been working on for many years and-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DKDan Kokotov
... we're still like refining our methods, right?
- LFLex Fridman
If you can kind of talk to this gig economy idea. I did a bunch of different psychology experiments on Mechanical Turk, for example. I've asked to do different kinds of very tricky computer vision annotation on Mechanical Turk.
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
And it's connecting, connecting people in a more systematized way. I would say, be, you know, between task and, and, uh, what would you call that? Worker, is what Mechanical Turk calls it. What do you think about this world of gig economies, of there being a service that connects customers to workers in a way that's like massively distributed, like potentially scaling to... It could be, it could be scaled to like tens of thousands of people, right?
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Is th- is there something interesting about that world that you can speak to?
- DKDan Kokotov
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 it to some degree it diminishes the work being done, right? It sounds kind of like almost amateurish. Well-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DKDan Kokotov
... maybe in like music industry, like gig is, is the standard term, but (laughs) in, in work it, 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?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DKDan Kokotov
And kind of taking away geographical limitations and time limitations, right? Uh, 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 Rev kind of like allows them to do that and decide like exactly how much to work and when to work.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DKDan Kokotov
Uh, 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. Um, and like generally that wouldn't be compatible before, before this new world. You kind of had to choose. Uh, but like with Rev, like we feel like you don't have to choose.
- LFLex Fridman
Can you speak to like what's the demographics, like distribution, like where do Revvers live? Is it from all over the world? Like what is it? Do you have a sense of-
- DKDan Kokotov
Uh, uh-
- LFLex Fridman
... what's out there?
- DKDan Kokotov
... from all over the world. Uh, most of them are in the US. That's the majority. Um, you know, because most of our work is, uh, audio transcription.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DKDan Kokotov
And so you have to speak pretty good English.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- DKDan Kokotov
Uh, so the majority of them are from the US, although we have people in some other of the English-speaking countries. And as far as like US, it's really all over the place. Um, you know, for so many years now we've been doing these little meetings where the management team will go to some place and we'll try to meet Revvers and, you know, pretty much wherever we go it's pretty easy to find, you know, a large number of Revvers, you know. The most recent one we did is in Utah. Uh, and so... But, but anywhere really.
- LFLex Fridman
Are they from all walks of life? Are these young folks, older folks?
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah. All walks of life, really. Like I said, you know, one, one category is, you know, the work-from-home mom, students, you know, who want to make some extra income. There are some people who may be, you know, maybe they're have some social anxiety so they don't want to be in the office, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DKDan Kokotov
And this is one way for them to make a living. So it's, it's really pretty, pretty wide variety. But like on the flip side, for example, one Revver we were talking to was a, uh, person who had a fairly high powered career before and was kind of like taking a break-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- 28:08 – 38:58
Automatic speech recognition
- LFLex Fridman
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?
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah. So ASR, automatic speech recognition, it's a m- class of machine learning problem, right? To take, you know, speech, like we're, we're talking, and transform it into a sequence of words essentially.
- LFLex Fridman
The audio of people talking.
- DKDan Kokotov
Audio, audio to words.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DKDan Kokotov
Um, and, you know, there's a variety of different approaches and techniques, um, which we could talk about later if you want. Uh, 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 assistants, 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 a pizza or whatever. Um, and it's very good at doing that. Um, very different from when we're talk- talking in a very unstructured way.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DKDan Kokotov
And Siri will also generally, like, adapt to your voice and stuff like this. Uh, 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 a, on, um, our test, test suite that we generally use to measure. So word error rate is, like, one way to measure, um, accuracy for ASR, right?
- LFLex Fridman
So what's 14% word error rate look like?
- DKDan Kokotov
So 14% means across this test suite of a variety of different audios, um, it would be, um, it would get, in some way, 14% of the words wrong. Uh, 14% of the words wrong.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DKDan Kokotov
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 is you said apple, but I said, but the ASR thought it was able, something like this. Um, human accuracy, most people think realistically it's, like-... three percent, two percent word error rate would be like the- the max achievable. Uh, so there's still quite a gap, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Would you say that... So YouTube, when I upload videos, often generates automatic captions. Are you, sort of from a company perspective, from a tech perspective, are you trying to beat YouTube? Google? It's a hell of a-
- DKDan Kokotov
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Google, I mean, I don't know how seriously they take this task, but I imagine it's quite serious, in they... You know, Google is probably up there in terms of their teams on, um, on ASR or just NLP, natural language processing, different technologies. So do you think you can beat Google?
- DKDan Kokotov
On this kind of stuff, yeah, we think so. Um-
- LFLex Fridman
Google just woke up on my phone.
- DKDan Kokotov
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) This is hilarious. Okay.
- DKDan Kokotov
Now Google is listening, huh, sending it back to headquarters.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- DKDan Kokotov
"Who are these Rev people?"
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) But that's the goal?
- DKDan Kokotov
No- yeah, I mean, we measure ourselves against like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, you know, some of the s- some smaller competitors. Um, and we use like our- our internal test suite, and we try to compose it of a pretty representative set of audio. So maybe it's some podcasts, some videos, some intro- some interviews, some lectures, things like that, right? And we beat 'em, in our own testing.
- LFLex Fridman
And, uh, actually Rev offers automated- like you can actually just do the automated, uh, captioning. So like, I- I guess it's like way cheaper, whatever it is, whatever the rates are.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah, yeah. So-
- LFLex Fridman
It's a- by the way, it used to be $1.00 per minute for captioning and transcription. I think it's like $1.15 or something like that. $1.25?
- DKDan Kokotov
$1.25.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm. Uh, $1.25 now. Yeah. It's pr- it's pretty cool. That was the other thing that was surprising to me is actually like the cheapest thing you could... One of the- I mean, I- I don't remember it being cheaper. Y- you could on Upwork get cheaper, but it was clear to me that this- that's gonna be really shitty. (laughs)
- DKDan Kokotov
(laughs) Yeah.
- 38:58 – 47:08
Create products that people love
- DKDan Kokotov
thing.
- LFLex Fridman
Although AWS kind of does a shitty job of like... I'm continually surprised, like Mechanical Turk, for example, how shitty the interface is. We're talking about like rev making me feel good. Like, when I first discovered Mechanical Turk, the initial idea of it was like, it made me feel like rev does, but then the interface is like, come on.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah. It's horrible.
- LFLex Fridman
Why, why-
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... is it 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 make me feel like this, that and craigslist.org, whatever the hell it is.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
It's just it feels like it's designed in the '90s.
- DKDan Kokotov
Well, Craigslist basically hasn't been updated pretty much since the guy originally built-
- LFLex Fridman
Do, do you seriously think there's a team? Like how big is the team working on Mechanical Turk?
- DKDan Kokotov
I don't know. There's some team, right? (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) I feel like there isn't. I'm skeptical.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah. Well, if, if nothing else-
- LFLex Fridman
It's possible.
- DKDan Kokotov
... they benefit from-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- DKDan Kokotov
... you know, the other teams like moving things forward, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Possible. Possible.
- DKDan Kokotov
In a small way. Uh, but no, I know what you mean. We do, we, we use Mechanical Turk for a couple of things-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DKDan Kokotov
... as well. And yeah, it's painful, the UI.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. It's painful. But yeah, it works. Uh, they actually do-
- DKDan Kokotov
I think most people... The, the thing is most people don't really use the UI, right? Like, so-
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- DKDan Kokotov
... like we for example, we-
- LFLex Fridman
That's right.
- DKDan Kokotov
... use it through the API, right? So...
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. But even the API documentation and so on, like it's super outdated, like-
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... it's t- uh, it... Uh, I don't, I don't even know what to... I mean, the same like s- same criticism, as long as we're ranting. (laughs)
- 47:08 – 1:08:46
The future of podcasts at Spotify
- DKDan Kokotov
- LFLex Fridman
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.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Especially now with remote work, right?
- DKDan Kokotov
Exactly, exactly.
- LFLex Fridman
With- 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 'em 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 the 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's- 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- it used... It's- it's similar to what YouTube used to be like, which is you basically find a creator that you enjoy and you subscribe to them, and like you just...
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, you- 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-
- DKDan Kokotov
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
... of episodes.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
It's-
- DKDan Kokotov
But e- even aside from search and discover, like all the time, so I listen to, like, a number of podcasts, and, um-... you know, there's something said, and I wanna, like, go back to that later because I was trying to, I'm trying to remember-
- LFLex Fridman
That's true.
- DKDan Kokotov
... what did you say? Like, maybe you, like, recommended some cool product that I-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DKDan Kokotov
... wanna 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 even if everyone had transcripts and it was all searchable, it would be-
- LFLex Fridman
A game changer.
- DKDan Kokotov
... it'd be so much better.
- LFLex Fridman
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 Rev thing. I've just been lazy. (laughs) So, uh, because I'm very fortunate that a lot of people support this podcast, that there's enough money now to do a transcription and so on, it- w- it seemed clear to me, especially like CEOs and sort of, uh, like, PhDs, like people who write to me who are like graduate students in computer science or graduate students in whatever the heck field, it's clear that their mind... Like, they enjoy podcasts when they're doing laundry or whatever, but they wanna revisit the conversation in a much more rigorous way.
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
And they really want a transcript.
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Like, it's clear that they want to, like, analyze conversations, like, so many people wrote to me about a transcript for Josha Bach conversation, just a bunch of conversations. And then on the Elon Musk side, like reporters want like, they wanna write a blog post about your conversation, so they wanna be able to pull stuff, and it's like they're essentially doing, on your conversation, transcription privately. They're doing it for-
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... for themselves-
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... and then starting to pick, but it's so much easier when you can actually do it as a reporter, just look at the transcript.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah, and you can, like, embed a little thing, you know, like, into your article, right? Here's what they said.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- 1:08:46 – 1:10:08
Book recommendations
- DKDan Kokotov
it to them.
- LFLex Fridman
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.
- DKDan Kokotov
Dune.
- LFLex Fridman
Like, all the, all of the Dune.
- DKDan Kokotov
All of the Dune. The second one was probably the weakest. But anyways, so yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- DKDan Kokotov
All, all of the Dune is good. Um...
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, yeah, like, uh, can you just slow a 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...
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah. You kinda have to read them all. I mean, it is a complete story, right? So, um, you start with the first one, you gotta read all of them. Um, the first-
- LFLex Fridman
There's not, like, a tree, like, that, like, a c- a creation of, like, the universe that you just should go in sequence?
- DKDan Kokotov
You should go in sequence, yeah. It's, uh-
- LFLex Fridman
The universe.
- DKDan Kokotov
... it's kind of a chronological storyline.
- LFLex Fridman
Gotcha.
- DKDan Kokotov
Um, there's six books in all. Uh, then there's, like, many, um, kind of offsh- 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. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Shots fired. Okay.
- DKDan Kokotov
Shots fired. Uh-
- LFLex Fridman
Okay.
- DKDan Kokotov
But the m- but the main, uh, sequence is, is good. So what are some other books? Uh, maybe there's a few. So I, 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, here's a couple that
- 1:10:08 – 1:13:50
Stories of our dystopian future
- DKDan Kokotov
I really love. Uh, so one is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Um, and it's kind of incredible how prescient he was about, like, what this, wha- wha- what a brave new world might be like, right? You know, you kind of see genetic sorting in this book, right, where there's, like, these alphas and epsilons, and, uh, from, like, the earliest time of society, like, they're sorted. And, like, you can kind of see it in a slightly similar, uh, 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, most marriages, right, are between people of similar kind of, um, intellectual level or socioeconomic status. M- more so these days than, uh, in the past. And you kind of see some effects of it in stratifying society, uh, and kind of he, he illustrated what, what that could be like in the extreme.
- LFLex Fridman
Different versions of it on social media as well. It's not just, like, marriages and so on. Like, it's genetic sorting in terms of what Dawkins called memes, his ideas-
- DKDan Kokotov
Right. Right.
- LFLex Fridman
... being put into these bins of these little echo chambers and so on.
- DKDan Kokotov
Um, yeah. Anyhow, so that, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
He has this slightly different view of the future, right? It's-
- DKDan Kokotov
But I kind of, like, identify with Brave New World-
- LFLex Fridman
Brave New World.
- DKDan Kokotov
... a bit more. Uh...
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- NANarrator
... um, yeah. Although-
- DKDan Kokotov
Although, you know, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
I've heard of, and I know I need to watch it, but yeah, because it's in... Is, is, is it in English or no?
- DKDan Kokotov
It's an, it's an English movie, yeah. And it's this sort of, like, dystopian movie of authoritarian incompetence, right?
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Uh-huh.
- DKDan Kokotov
Uh, 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, uh, what authoritarians say it might look like. It's not like this, you know, super efficient evil dictatorship of 1984.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DKDan Kokotov
It's just kind of like this badly functioning, you know, but it's status quo, so it just goes on. Uh...
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. That, 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 conta- Contagion, it seems that in movies, government is almost always exceptionally competent. (laughs)
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Like, uh, it, it's, like, used as a storytelling tool of, like, extreme competence. Like, you know, you use it whether it's good or evil, but it's competent. It's very interesting to think about where much more realistically is its incompetence, and that incompetence is in- itself-... has, uh, consequences that are difficult to, uh, to predict. Like bureaucracy-
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... has a very boring way of being evil. (laughs)
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Of just, you know, if you look at the, uh, the show, HBO show, Chernobyl.
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
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, uh, particular place, but more just, like, the-
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah. It's just the system, kind of.
- LFLex Fridman
... the system-
- DKDan Kokotov
... doing it.
- 1:13:50 – 1:19:05
Movies about Stalin and Hitler
- LFLex Fridman
evil.
- DKDan Kokotov
There's a comedic version of this, uh, I don't know if you've seen this movie, it's called The Death of Stalin.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DKDan Kokotov
Uh...
- LFLex Fridman
I, I, I like that. I wish it wasn't so... There's a movie called Inglourious Basterds-
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... about, uh, you know, Hitler and World War... you know, and so on. (sighs) For some reason, those movies piss me off. I know a lot of people love 'em, 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 Dawn Fall that people should watch, I think it's The Last Few Days of Hitler, that's a good movie. Turned into a meme.
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) 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.
- DKDan Kokotov
That's true. I was trying to see that. I actually... So I, I, I agree with you on Inglourious Basterds, 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, Tarantino-ism-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DKDan Kokotov
... if you will, kind of detracted from it and made it seem, like, unserious a little bit.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DKDan Kokotov
Um, but Death of Stalin I felt differently. Maybe it's because it's a comedy to begin with, so it's not like I'm expecting-
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- DKDan Kokotov
... you know, seriousness. But it kind of depicted the absurdity of the whole situation in a way, right? Uh, I mean, it was funny, so maybe it does make light of it. But it, it... Some degrees probably like this, right? Like, a bunch of kind of people that are like, "Oh, shit," right? (laughs) Like...
- LFLex Fridman
You're right. But, like, the thing is, it was so close to, like, what probably was reality, it was caricaturing reality to where I think an observer might think that this is not... Like, y- they might think it's a comedy in, when in reality th- this is, that's the absurdity of, uh, how people act with dictators. I mean-
- DKDan Kokotov
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
... that's, it, I guess it was too close to reality for me.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- DKDan Kokotov
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, (laughs) and like...
- LFLex Fridman
And, and 'cause, uh, I think there's a good... I haven't watched it yet, the good movie on, uh, the movie on Churchill, um, with, uh, Gary Oldman. I think it was Gary Oldman. I might be making that up, but I think he won, like, he was nominated for an Oscar or something. So I like, I love these movies about these humans and Stalin. Like, Chernobyl made me realize, the, the HBO show, that there's not enough movies about Russia that capture, uh, 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, Hangover or some shit like that. I don't know if you're familiar with the person who created Chernobyl, but he was just, like, some guy that doesn't know anything about Russia-
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... and he just went in and just studied it, like, did a good job of creating it and then got it so accurate, uh, like, poetically and, uh, the fact 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-
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... it was incredible.
- DKDan Kokotov
No, it's, it was good. Yeah. I saw the series.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. It's, it's incredible. It made me, made me wish that somebody did a good, like, um, 1930s, uh, like, starvation that Stalin led to, like, leading up to World War II and in, in World War II itself, like Stalingrad and so on. Like, I feel like that story needs to be told.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah.
- 1:19:05 – 1:25:02
Interviewing Putin
- LFLex Fridman
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
I've, uh, also read at this point, I think every biography of Putin, English, uh, English biography of Putin. I need to read some Russians.
- DKDan Kokotov
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Obviously I'm mentally preparing for a possible conversation with Putin.
- DKDan Kokotov
Yeah. So what, what, what is your first question to Putin when you have him on your, on, on, on the podcast? (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
I...... i- i- it's interesting you bring that up. And first of all, I wouldn't tell you, but... (laughs)
- DKDan Kokotov
(laughs) Can't give it away now.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, but I actually haven't even thought about that. So my current approach, and I do this with interviews often, espe- obviously that's a special one, but I try not to think about questions until the last minute.
Episode duration: 1:28:46
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