Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: After every interview we do for the show, we upload
Speaker 2: the audio to a piece of software called descript. Descript
Speaker 2: turns the audio into a transcript, and then I can
Speaker 2: edit that transcript, cut out the boring parts, move sections around,
Speaker 2: and when I do that, descript edits the underlying audio
Speaker 2: to match. As software, Descript is pretty janky, buggy. It's
Speaker 2: constantly changing in ways that can make it hard to use,
Speaker 2: and sometimes it just blows stuff up. But we use
Speaker 2: it anyway because Descript is an incredible.
Speaker 1: Advance over what came before.
Speaker 2: Before descript audio software represented audio files not as words
Speaker 2: that you can read and edit, but as waveforms, as
Speaker 2: squiggly lines presented.
Speaker 1: On a timeline. So when does the script came along?
Speaker 2: Being able to edit audio by editing words on a
Speaker 2: screen was this huge advance, and it was an advance
Speaker 2: made possible by artificial intelligence. Eventually, Descript expanded to allow
Speaker 2: people to edit not just audio but also video, and
Speaker 2: last fall, open AI, the company that makes chat GPT,
Speaker 2: led a fifty million dollar.
Speaker 1: Investment round in Descript.
Speaker 2: It's a sign that Descript is moving out to the
Speaker 2: new AI frontier, the frontier of generative AI. AI that
Speaker 2: creates words and pictures. This is of immediate interest to me,
Speaker 2: as in is AI gonna help me do my job?
Speaker 2: Is AI gonna do my job?
Speaker 1: But there is also a bigger question here what is
Speaker 1: AI going to mean?
Speaker 2: More broadly for people whose jobs involve writing things and
Speaker 2: creating visuals, which is to say, what is AI going
Speaker 2: to mean for almost all white collar workers. I'm Jacob
Speaker 2: Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, a show about
Speaker 2: people trying to make technological progress. My guest today is
Speaker 2: Andrew Mason, founder and CEO of descript or maybe it's
Speaker 2: descript by the way, I've always said descript and I'm
Speaker 2: pretty sure that's wrong, right, it's a descript like dtour.
Speaker 3: Weird noncommittal on the issue.
Speaker 2: Let's do the subjective version.
Speaker 1: You're just one man. How do you say the name
Speaker 1: of your company?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've kind of cultivated the ability to flip between
Speaker 3: them as I speak.
Speaker 1: You're killing me.
Speaker 3: The world still needs a little mystery.
Speaker 1: Okay, how about this? Say your name and your job.
Speaker 3: My name is Andrew Mason. I work at descript. That's
Speaker 3: dscript dscript.
Speaker 1: Well played.
Speaker 2: Earlier in his career. Andrew Mason was the co founder
Speaker 2: of groupunk. He took the company public and then got
Speaker 2: fired after its stock fell by something like seventy five percent.
Speaker 2: After that, he started a company called Dtour or maybe
Speaker 2: it's I don't know. The company made these highly produced
Speaker 2: audio walking tours that you could listen to on your phone.
Speaker 2: In that job, Andrew saw the challenges of working with
Speaker 2: the old waveform.
Speaker 1: Based audio editing software.
Speaker 2: At the same time, AI generated transcripts were getting better
Speaker 2: and cheaper, and new technology was making it possible to
Speaker 2: automatically match a transcript to an audio file. Andrew looked
Speaker 2: at those two developments and thought, we should make an
Speaker 2: audio editor that works like a word processor, which he
Speaker 2: admits was a distraction from what he was supposed to
Speaker 2: be doing, which was making walking tours.
Speaker 3: If I'm being honest, it was a bit of an indulgence.
Speaker 3: It just felt like an incredibly cool problem to work on.
Speaker 3: I went to school for music technology and worked in
Speaker 3: a recording studio after I graduated, and just always loved tools,
Speaker 3: and audio visual tools in particular. It was just so
Speaker 3: fun to start thinking about this puzzle.
Speaker 1: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: So we told ourselves it was kind of way of diversifying,
Speaker 3: but that's just like a ridiculous way for a product
Speaker 3: that at like a startup that just hasn't even found
Speaker 3: product market fit in their core product to be thinking
Speaker 3: about the world. You know, all of the advice textbooks
Speaker 3: will tell you not to do that, and it's probably
Speaker 3: generally good advice, but it was just it was just irresistible.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: So I am a fan of descript. I started using
Speaker 2: it around when it came out several years ago. Certainly
Speaker 2: I think it's great. It is kind of janky, and
Speaker 2: it's always kind of janky, right, And my guess is
Speaker 2: jankie meaning like a little bit unstable, things don't quite work.
Speaker 2: It's always telling you to restart.
Speaker 3: By the way, if I'm not sure, if I have
Speaker 3: your side, so I may ask you to send me
Speaker 3: this entire portion of the interview so I can share
Speaker 3: it with the team.
Speaker 2: So the thing is, like, I wonder, why is it
Speaker 2: always kind of janky? Why is it never just like
Speaker 2: stable and it works? And my guess is it's because
Speaker 2: you're pushing forward really fast, right, You're trying to make
Speaker 2: it better and better and better, and presumably there is
Speaker 2: some trace off, right, like the faster you try and
Speaker 2: push it forward, the more janky it's gonna be. You could,
Speaker 2: I'm sure, just perfect the way it was four years ago,
Speaker 2: but then it would never get better, but it would
Speaker 2: be stable, right, And so this is like a big
Speaker 2: whatever startup founder type question, like, is that some balance
Speaker 2: you're always trying to figure out how fast do we
Speaker 2: iterate versus how much do we try and make it
Speaker 2: just stable and work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's an astute observation, not the fact that it's janky.
Speaker 3: That doesn't take a genius.
Speaker 2: Respectful but respectfully as a fan.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you it's.
Speaker 3: But I think like your your attempt to make sense
Speaker 3: out of it, I think like a good story to
Speaker 3: tell here is maybe like going back to the to
Speaker 3: the very beginning of Descript. So when we became Descript,
Speaker 3: we sold off Detour to Bows and we decided to
Speaker 3: just focus on building out this media word processor thing.
Speaker 3: And some of the public radio producers who had worked
Speaker 3: at Detour went on back into public radio and they
Speaker 3: became some of the earliest customers of dscript. And what
Speaker 3: we found was that they pushed it so much farther
Speaker 3: than we were ready for.
Speaker 1: Ah, so quickly, what do you mean by that? Like,
Speaker 1: what is an example of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean specifically in the case of like some
Speaker 3: of these shows, it means putting together three to five
Speaker 3: hour cuts of tape from many different files, with lots
Speaker 3: like tons and tons of edits and notes mixed into
Speaker 3: the edits, and just like stuff that we hadn't pressure
Speaker 3: tested from a performance just giant.
Speaker 2: The files are really big, right, Like a three hour
Speaker 2: audio file is actually a giant file, right, And if
Speaker 2: you're stacking up a bunch of those, so you have
Speaker 2: all these giant files and you're making tons of cuts,
Speaker 2: that's just like computationally intensive, that kind of thing storage intensive.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was just something that we hadn't that we
Speaker 3: hadn't optimized for. It's it's an eminently solvable problem, but
Speaker 3: it was something that in the earliest versions we hadn't done.
Speaker 3: And so that is kind of in many ways been
Speaker 3: the story of descript up to this point, where there's
Speaker 3: there's been that element of it, and there were kind
Speaker 3: of realities of needing to make quick progress that we
Speaker 3: had to balance against stability and what we had for
Speaker 3: our customers in terms of like the core product idea
Speaker 3: of being able to edit by text was still for
Speaker 3: them so much better than the alternative that there was
Speaker 3: just a tolerance of the stability issues that honestly made
Speaker 3: us sick to our stomachs that we had to put
Speaker 3: people through. And it's not like wegn but it was
Speaker 3: like we had to make trade offs there. So all
Speaker 3: of this pushing kind of culminated with this release of
Speaker 3: a pretty major overhaul that we did at the end
Speaker 3: of last year and since then, since last November and
Speaker 3: really like through the first half of this year, is
Speaker 3: when we think we start to get to a good place.
Speaker 3: Our goal is that if we're having this conversation, like
Speaker 3: we're not going to be having the same conversation in
Speaker 3: say July, for sure at the very latest, like the
Speaker 3: conversation we'll be having with someone like you will be Wow,
Speaker 3: it's gotten. It's like not an issue anymore.
Speaker 2: So you say all that, but also, you just got
Speaker 2: this big investment from open Ai. You got a thing
Speaker 2: on descript that says sign up to try GPT four
Speaker 2: with Descript, which I just signed up for and I'm
Speaker 2: very curious about That doesn't sound like, oh, we've arrived
Speaker 2: and now we've got our product and we've just got
Speaker 2: a hone it that sounds like there's this whole giant
Speaker 2: new universe of things you were about to try and
Speaker 2: figure out.
Speaker 3: That's true, And that's the funny thing about all of
Speaker 3: this are is that at the same time that we're
Speaker 3: turning to focus on quality, it's a moment where generative
Speaker 3: AI has arrived at a scale and with a force
Speaker 3: that no one really saw coming this quickly.
Speaker 2: So so okay, I know from the beginning Descript was
Speaker 2: built on top of AI, you know, the technology for
Speaker 2: transcription for matching audio to text, but was Descript itself
Speaker 2: an AI company.
Speaker 3: So we had some really smart people on the team
Speaker 3: in UH with machine learning experience, but I wouldn't say
Speaker 3: in the early days we were like a company that
Speaker 3: was with anybody that was doing like original AI research
Speaker 3: or anything like that. We saw that as a gap
Speaker 3: that we wanted to solve. And so I forget exactly
Speaker 3: what year it was, it was maybe about four years
Speaker 3: ago we saw this company called Liarbird. It was a
Speaker 3: a company out of y Combinator with some really smart
Speaker 3: PhD candidates. They had built model that would build a
Speaker 3: clone of your voice based on I think about three
Speaker 3: minutes or five minutes of training data. Of just talking
Speaker 3: to it.
Speaker 2: Let me just say, I know Liarbird is spelled l yri,
Speaker 2: but I assume they're aware.
Speaker 1: Of the hominem.
Speaker 2: Right, this is a thing that is cloning your voice
Speaker 2: so that you can make it sound like you're talking
Speaker 2: even if you're not talking. And the company is called Liarbird,
Speaker 2: and this is a somewhat fraud thing, right, Like, I
Speaker 2: feel like they're throwing it in my face that this
Speaker 2: is a sketchy product that they're developing.
Speaker 1: Did it cross your mind?
Speaker 3: Did it cross my mind? Is like the ethical quandary
Speaker 3: that we were getting into, or like the branding implications
Speaker 3: of the name.
Speaker 1: More the ethical quandary.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the ethical quandary absolutely entered our mind. And our
Speaker 3: point of view on that, and has been our point
Speaker 3: of view on these things in general, has been that
Speaker 3: we don't want to be like out there paving the
Speaker 3: way for any new paths to the apocalypse, so to speak.
Speaker 3: We actually think, like have always felt like not really
Speaker 3: sure how society was going to put the brakes on
Speaker 3: this sort of thing. We just knew that we didn't
Speaker 3: want to be part of it, and we tried to
Speaker 3: put guardrails in place on our product. That would make
Speaker 3: it easy to stay off the slippery slope. So in
Speaker 3: the case of Lyyerbird, which once we bought them, we
Speaker 3: integrated their technology and released it as something that we
Speaker 3: call overdub. It's a way that you can clone your voice.
Speaker 3: We require you to authenticate that it's actually you, and
Speaker 3: we only let you clone your own voice, and that's
Speaker 3: worked really well. We're now in a world where there's
Speaker 3: other people that have similar models and they're not putting
Speaker 3: those protections in place. And the use case that we've
Speaker 3: always been the most excited about is making it possible
Speaker 3: to edit your natural recordings, so going in and changing
Speaker 3: an individual word, and we've built some special stuff that
Speaker 3: will kind of listen to the audio on either sides
Speaker 3: and make sure that it blends in. From an intonation perspective,
Speaker 3: we started with the ability to delete stuff and move
Speaker 3: stuff around. Now you can just type and really make
Speaker 3: it feel like it's a word processor.
Speaker 2: Presumably the better you get, the better the technology you
Speaker 2: use to Clona Voice gets, the more words it can do. Right,
Speaker 2: I mean, every week, for what's your problem? I write
Speaker 2: a little introduction and then I read it. But presumably
Speaker 2: at some point overdub will be good enough that no
Speaker 2: one knows will know whether it's me reading it or
Speaker 2: I'm just typing it right.
Speaker 3: We have a new version of overdub that will release
Speaker 3: in the next couple of months, and it's the first
Speaker 3: time that I've heard my own voice doing a narration
Speaker 3: of something that made me say, like, this sounds so
Speaker 3: much like me in a way that it's not distracting
Speaker 3: or the AI does not get in the way.
Speaker 2: Can I try that new version now, like, not this minute,
Speaker 2: but like for the show?
Speaker 1: Yeah, for the show.
Speaker 3: I bet we could find a way to do it.
Speaker 3: It's just so you could hear it and stuff.
Speaker 2: There's a universe where I say, at this moment in
Speaker 2: the show, guess what today? That voice me reading the
Speaker 2: intro at the top of the show that was overdubbed.
Speaker 1: It wasn't really made.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we tried overdubb for the voice doing the intro
Speaker 3: at the top of the show.
Speaker 1: And we decided it wasn't quite.
Speaker 2: Good enough, but we decided it would work for this
Speaker 2: part of the show.
Speaker 1: What you're hearing right now, it's not really me. It's overdubbed.
Speaker 2: In a minute, what overdubb and chat GPT and generative
Speaker 2: AI will mean for descript and for the.
Speaker 1: World and also for me.
Speaker 2: Now back to the show, descript is expanding from podcasts
Speaker 2: to video, and it just took a big investment from
Speaker 2: open Ai, the company that makes chat GPT, and also
Speaker 2: this system called Dolly that uses AI to generate images.
Speaker 2: So Descript is clearly pointing toward a future where it's
Speaker 2: going to be software for creating AI generated or at
Speaker 2: least AI.
Speaker 1: Enhanced audio and video.
Speaker 2: And I asked Andrew, what does that future look like?
Speaker 2: How is generative AI going to work in descript?
Speaker 3: I don't think we know entirely yet. In a lot
Speaker 3: of ways, it feels to me like you're letting this
Speaker 3: alien into into your app. You're just giving it the
Speaker 3: keys and then the interfaces. How do you find how
Speaker 3: do you find a way to kind of give the
Speaker 3: aliens some buttons in tier UI, give them the ability
Speaker 3: to press the buttons, and then how do you talk
Speaker 3: to the alien?
Speaker 1: What do you mean? Like?
Speaker 2: That is a striking metaphor a little scarier right. It
Speaker 2: suggests a certain level of uncertainty and potential downside. It's
Speaker 2: not like, oh, this is great, this is going to
Speaker 2: solve a problem like, why do you say it's like
Speaker 2: letting an alien.
Speaker 3: In as opposed to letting a human in.
Speaker 1: It's a really interesting choice of words. Tell me more
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 3: So let's start by just saying, like, very specifically, what
Speaker 3: I mean. I think, when implemented, well, what this will
Speaker 3: feel like is as if you had a co editor
Speaker 3: in a document with you, in our case, in a
Speaker 3: video or a podcast that you're working on that is smart,
Speaker 3: knows how to do everything, definitely knows how to do
Speaker 3: the tedios busy work, and you can kind of kind
Speaker 3: of guide or direct through giving these tasks. You know,
Speaker 3: it's almost like it's the production assistant or something like that,
Speaker 3: and you're the director and you're able to just guide
Speaker 3: it and give it feedback on how it's doing and
Speaker 3: what it's doing well and what it's not doing well.
Speaker 2: There's a version of it where it's like we've gotten
Speaker 2: used to the graphical user interface, right, We've been trained
Speaker 2: since the Magintosh computer in the mid nineteen eighties that
Speaker 2: the way you interact with a computer is like there's
Speaker 2: little pictures and little folders and you point.
Speaker 1: And click one way or another, right, and.
Speaker 2: One possibility here is the new standard interface is chat.
Speaker 2: You just type in like whatever, please trim all the
Speaker 2: ums from this file, or even please turn this thirty
Speaker 2: minute interview into a twenty minute interview, and the way
Speaker 2: that makes it most interesting, right, and you just type
Speaker 2: that in and it happens.
Speaker 1: I mean that's a version of what I hear you
Speaker 1: saying there.
Speaker 3: I think some people believe that that chat or a
Speaker 3: text field will become the primary interface for making things.
Speaker 3: I think of it more as like it's the primary
Speaker 3: interface for interacting with the alien, and then you and
Speaker 3: the alien are still going to be working, like have
Speaker 3: other buttons that they can press. You still, sometimes you
Speaker 3: just want to take the thing in your hands and
Speaker 3: do it yourself.
Speaker 2: The alien metaphor, I mean there's a real like do
Speaker 2: we welcome our alien overlord's question? When you choose that metaphor,
Speaker 2: it makes.
Speaker 3: Me I mean, maybe it feels that way.
Speaker 2: It doesn't it it doesn't make me feel better.
Speaker 3: I'll say that I think it feels the way that
Speaker 3: an alien arrival would probably feel, where you know, maybe
Speaker 3: you shake its hand and immediately it has something in
Speaker 3: its skin that cures your cancer, and you feel hopeful,
Speaker 3: but you also want to know what they're up.
Speaker 2: To and yeah, and cure your cancer is definitely the
Speaker 2: happy version.
Speaker 1: Not usually in the alien movie.
Speaker 2: What happens, but I guess that could happen.
Speaker 3: Well, there's the good there's a good part, right, But
Speaker 3: you never really know, I think is the point. And
Speaker 3: I think we're all living in this kind of like
Speaker 3: pushing forward in this mystery, kind of kind of stuck
Speaker 3: between awe and terror.
Speaker 2: You sound more ambivalent than I might have thought. Why
Speaker 2: is that because you just took a giant investment from
Speaker 2: open AI.
Speaker 3: I think like at moments like this, you have a
Speaker 3: choice between either renunciation and just like stopping and out
Speaker 3: of from a place of fear. Which maybe that's right,
Speaker 3: you know, maybe fulfillment and happiness everything we have for
Speaker 3: that is is already here, and we should focus our
Speaker 3: energies on making peace with our inevitable death.
Speaker 1: In any case, we should do that.
Speaker 3: But go on the other way to think of it
Speaker 3: is to just forge ahead and realize that the potential
Speaker 3: of what's on the other end of this might make
Speaker 3: us feel in retrospect like we were just in the
Speaker 3: earliest possible innings of our of the human experiment. So
Speaker 3: you know, I feel like we're all going to die
Speaker 3: one way or another, might as well forge ahead. It's
Speaker 3: not ambivalence, but it's more just being clear eyed about
Speaker 3: the fact that not trying to pretend that there's parts
Speaker 3: of it that don't seem scary.
Speaker 2: I mean, one of the things that's really striking to
Speaker 2: me with AI, and that seems quite different from other
Speaker 2: technologies in the past, is the people who are working
Speaker 2: on it, the people who really understand it, seem more
Speaker 2: scared than everybody else.
Speaker 3: I'm not a first time founder. I went through the
Speaker 3: experience of being a young person building building group on
Speaker 3: telling myself a story about how it was going to
Speaker 3: revolutionize local commerce and all the good stuff, and it
Speaker 3: just didn't turn out that way. And I think we've
Speaker 3: seen a generation of tech companies that just like didn't
Speaker 3: turn out the way that the the super Rose colored
Speaker 3: Glasses mission statement would have suggested. And I think we're
Speaker 3: just trying to be we just have that experience, that
Speaker 3: recent experience at top of mind, and are trying to
Speaker 3: think about it in a way that has guardrails around
Speaker 3: around repeating that history and just make sure we're really
Speaker 3: proud of what we build. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: It makes sense.
Speaker 3: Am I Am I going to regret saying all this?
Speaker 1: I don't think so.
Speaker 2: You haven't said anything like incriminating as far as I
Speaker 2: can tell. You know, I heard somebody saying the other day, like,
Speaker 2: it's an interesting question to ask somebody like, what was
Speaker 2: the first thing you asked GPT chet GPT to do?
Speaker 2: And the first thing I asked chet GPT to do
Speaker 2: was write an episode of Planet Money podcast I used
Speaker 2: to host, of which there are you know, a thousand
Speaker 2: transcripts on the internet. Write an episode of Planet Money
Speaker 2: about whether the FED is going to raise interest rates
Speaker 2: by twenty five basis points or leave them unchanged, right,
Speaker 2: And it wrote something that was pretty good, like not
Speaker 2: a whole show, it's not there now, but at the
Speaker 2: rate of current improvement, you could definitely imagine it writing
Speaker 2: that episode pretty well in whatever a year or two
Speaker 2: years or some amount of time when I will still
Speaker 2: want to be gainfully employed. And like I do wonder
Speaker 2: on this one, is there a day slash? How far
Speaker 2: are we from.
Speaker 1: The day when generative a I can just make a
Speaker 1: podcast without me?
Speaker 3: How does that make you feel?
Speaker 2: I mean somewhat afraid, also like interested in figuring out
Speaker 2: how to use it, right, Like it feels like a steamroller.
Speaker 2: It's like, oh, maybe I should go get in that steamroller.
Speaker 2: If my choices are get in the steamroller or get
Speaker 2: run over by it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, like before I comment on it, I
Speaker 3: think it's important that people understand, Like it's very true that,
Speaker 3: like it's easy to think that I'll have a bullshitty
Speaker 3: answer to a question like this because I work at
Speaker 3: a tech company that's working on a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 3: But you have to remember that, like, if that's true,
Speaker 3: we're out of jobs as soon as like a human
Speaker 3: is no longer in the loop. That's really bad for us.
Speaker 3: Like does that make sense to you buy that.
Speaker 1: At some margin?
Speaker 2: Right, there's a long way between all the people who
Speaker 2: are doing it now and zero people. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of intermediate cases between the way it is now and
Speaker 2: like a fully AI generated podcast, right, and like we're
Speaker 2: already starting down the road, right, getting AI to write
Speaker 2: show notes or something that's basically has happened now. And
Speaker 2: you know, like I know the history of technology and
Speaker 2: the labor market pretty well, you know, from the Industrial
Speaker 2: Revolution on.
Speaker 1: I'm pro.
Speaker 2: Technological innovation. I believe in productivity gains and efficiency gains.
Speaker 2: I'm also aware that there are instances when highly skilled
Speaker 2: crafts people are displaced by technology. Right, that is definitely
Speaker 2: a thing that happens. And I recognize that the pie
Speaker 2: gets bigger and everybody's better off than the long run,
Speaker 2: But like, I just want to not get pinched, right,
Speaker 2: I just want to be you know, you don't want
Speaker 2: to be the one.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be the one. And you know.
Speaker 2: I'm not out on using it. It's getting really good,
Speaker 2: really fast. It's doing a lot of the things that
Speaker 2: I can do.
Speaker 3: There's one other thing I wanted to say, just about
Speaker 3: the fear for your job thing, which is something we
Speaker 3: say around here a lot, is that you should struggle
Speaker 3: with your story and not your tools. That's almost like
Speaker 3: a guiding light for us, is we want to take
Speaker 3: all of the cognitive friction away from using the tools.
Speaker 3: The funny thing about all of these things is like
Speaker 3: there's a brief moment in time where you feel like
Speaker 3: you have superpowers, but then everybody has them, and humans
Speaker 3: once again become the differentiator. And we really think to
Speaker 3: make like making great stuff is always going to be
Speaker 3: a thing, and great is always going to be determined
Speaker 3: by the human that's in the loop.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, there's this story about chess, right,
Speaker 2: a computer chess program beat a person a long time ago,
Speaker 2: decades ago now. But then after that people pointed out
Speaker 2: the fact optimistically from my point of view, that a
Speaker 2: computer plus a person could still beat any computer. Right,
Speaker 2: a person working with a computer was better than the
Speaker 2: best computer in the world. And that was like the
Speaker 2: metaphor for like, yes, if we work with machines, we
Speaker 2: can be better. That is no longer true now the
Speaker 2: computer's kept getting better, and now people can't make them better.
Speaker 2: Even a person plus a computer cannot beat a computer.
Speaker 2: And I know that chess is less complex than the
Speaker 2: real world, and so perhaps still a reason for optimism.
Speaker 2: I certainly think I'm clever and good at making podcasts
Speaker 2: and hope that I can do that. I hope that
Speaker 2: I can work with AI to make something better than
Speaker 2: ANYII or more like me or something.
Speaker 3: It's it might not be true, though, but here's the
Speaker 3: amazing thing. People are still playing chess. Right. It's like true,
Speaker 3: there's some separation. Some separation happens where the machines become
Speaker 3: so good and we just say, okay, you you machines,
Speaker 3: you go off and do your thing, and we're going
Speaker 3: to be here kind of reveling in our humanity with
Speaker 3: each other. I think what we'll see is there's there's
Speaker 3: going to be a certain category of content that's really
Speaker 3: just about like the transmission of bits of information from
Speaker 3: your brain to my brain, and that's all that it's about.
Speaker 1: That.
Speaker 3: Maybe we do one day see humans taken out of
Speaker 3: the loop, but I really do believe there will always
Speaker 3: be space for like at the core great content, storytelling,
Speaker 3: whatever you call it, it's it's about feeling connected to
Speaker 3: the humans and other people. And as soon as machines
Speaker 3: play to have too heavy a hand, it's just not
Speaker 3: interesting anymore.
Speaker 2: We'll be back in a minute with the Lightning Round,
Speaker 2: which includes a message from Andrew to.
Speaker 1: His future self. That's the end of the ads. Now
Speaker 1: we're going back to the show.
Speaker 2: Okay, so this is the Lightning Round, now you ready.
Speaker 2: It's just a bunch of questions. Do you use generitive
Speaker 2: AI in your life outside of work?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 3: You know what's interesting. I did something this morning where
Speaker 3: I was actually like, I don't I don't even care
Speaker 3: if it's wrong. I don't even care if it's.
Speaker 2: Like the test of a theory is not is it correct?
Speaker 1: But is it interesting?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Exactly. I was asking it about I think, like
Speaker 3: my son got hit in the head with a baseball,
Speaker 3: and I was trying to I really should care about this. Actually,
Speaker 3: you should.
Speaker 1: Not ask chat GPT anything significant.
Speaker 2: About that, not to give your parents advice.
Speaker 3: It's stuff like that, like I've I've pretty quickly been.
Speaker 2: Able to like that you should not be asking for
Speaker 2: medical advice about your child.
Speaker 3: I know. But when I say stuff like that, like
Speaker 3: I would have googled it and probably just done what
Speaker 3: I was going to do anyway. So it was almost
Speaker 3: just a curiosity. He was fine, He didn't.
Speaker 2: Need to go see a doctor, not according to JGBT. No,
Speaker 2: I'm curious about your time working in a recording studio, right,
Speaker 2: You worked in a recording studio where musicians came in
Speaker 2: and recorded. Did you see there any like moments of
Speaker 2: musical genius?
Speaker 1: Is there one?
Speaker 2: In particular?
Speaker 3: I worked for this guy named Steve Albini, who is
Speaker 3: a pretty well known engineer producer that was in some
Speaker 3: popular kind of punk rock bands in the in the
Speaker 3: eighties and currently and definitely saw some cool bands. But
Speaker 3: I think also I really feel like I learned a
Speaker 3: ton from watching him work. He's so talented, so articulate,
Speaker 3: so smart in many ways, like an example of what
Speaker 3: I aspired to be at the time, and so seeing
Speaker 3: that output, but then also seeing him every day and
Speaker 3: how hard he worked, it was a real like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is how it happens kind of moment for me,
Speaker 3: and it kind of inspired me. It inspired within me
Speaker 3: a kind of work ethic that I'm not sure I
Speaker 3: would have gotten to otherwise.
Speaker 2: What's the best deal you ever got from group on?
Speaker 3: Man? You know, it's so funny because, like obviously I
Speaker 3: was asked. I used to be asked that question all
Speaker 3: the time. I think it was a sensory deprivation tank.
Speaker 3: They had a sensory deprivation tank center in somewhere in Chicago.
Speaker 3: Had never tried. It was really cool.
Speaker 2: This is a descript question. Now, how will you know
Speaker 2: when it's time to do something else?
Speaker 1: But leave? Dude?
Speaker 3: I don't know if I want to say this on
Speaker 3: a podcast, because if I do decide to take the
Speaker 3: company public, it'll come back to haunt me. But I
Speaker 3: almost want to say it specifically for that reason, Andrew,
Speaker 3: I'm talking to future Andrew right now. You do not
Speaker 3: want to be a public company CEO again, Okay, hire
Speaker 3: someone else to do that. I know you're talking yourself
Speaker 3: into it and saying it's going to be different time.
Speaker 3: It's okay, but you hate it. It's the things that
Speaker 3: those people are good at is and are interested in
Speaker 3: is different than you go do something else.
Speaker 1: Amazing.
Speaker 2: I've never had someone leave themselves at time. Tast a
Speaker 2: lot of podcasts before.
Speaker 1: I'm going to send that to you. If you go public,
Speaker 1: I'm to have you back on the show and I'm
Speaker 1: going to play it to you.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Thank you for being so generous with your time.
Speaker 2: I appreciate your candor and I'm grateful for that.
Speaker 3: I appreciate that I had. I had fun too. You're
Speaker 3: good at your job in the sense that, like uh you,
Speaker 3: you bring it out in me.
Speaker 1: I'm better than a machine for now. It's gonna that's
Speaker 1: my model, better than a machine for now.
Speaker 2: Andrew Mason is the founder and CEO of Descript. Today's
Speaker 2: show was edited by Sarah Nix, produced by Edith Russolo, and.
Speaker 1: Engineered by Amanda k Wong. I'm Jacob Goldstein.
Speaker 2: We'll be back next week with another episode of What's
Speaker 2: Your Problem? And here, finally is the top of today's show.
Speaker 2: The intro to the show as read if that's what
Speaker 2: you'd call it, as generated by overdub descripts AI, powered
Speaker 2: voice whatever emulator. After every interview we do for the show,
Speaker 2: we upload the audio to a piece of soft were
Speaker 2: called the script. Descript turns the audio into a transcript,
Speaker 2: and then I can edit the transcript, cut out the
Speaker 2: boring parts, move sections around, and when I do that,
Speaker 2: descript edits the underlying audio to match. As software, descript
Speaker 2: is pretty janky, it's buggy, it's constantly changing in ways
Speaker 2: that can make it hard to use, and sometimes it
Speaker 2: just blows stuff up. But we use it anyway because
Speaker 2: descript is an incredible advance over what came before. Before
Speaker 2: descript audio software represented audio files not as words, but
Speaker 2: as waveforms, squiggly lines presented on a timeline. So when
Speaker 2: descript came along, being able to edit audio by editing
Speaker 2: words on a screen was a huge advance, and it
Speaker 2: was an advance made possible by artificial intelligence.