Lex Fridman: commitment

Transcript context

…the rules of communication. It uses shorter packets of words, loads in a bunch of subtle cues and meanings, all of which, like I’m trying to describe, are lost when there’s an interpreter in the loop. Let me also describe some relevant characteristics of my peculiar language “abilities” in quotes. I was never good at speaking. I listen to think and understand better than I speak. For me, this is true for both English and Russian, but it is especially true for Russian. The Russian language allows for much more room for wit, nonstandard terms of phrase, metaphors, humor, rhyme, musicality, and let’s say deforming of words that create a lot of room for creativity and how meaning and emotion are conveyed. You could do the same in English, but it’s harder. I actually find that Brits are sometimes very good at this. One of my favorite humans to talk to is Douglas Murray. Setting the content of the conversation aside, the sheer linguistic brilliance and wit of dialogue with Douglas is a journey in itself. I think Christopher Hitchens had the same, and many others, like I said, especially Brits. Anyway, I’m able to detect and understand a lot of dynamism and humor in the Russian language, but I’m slow to generate it in part because I just don’t practice. I have very few Russian-speaking friends. Funny enough, most of them are Ukrainian, but they speak with me and each other in Russian. But of course, as I mentioned, this is slowly changing due to the war. But I tried to speak to the president in Russian so he would avoid needing an interpreter as much as possible. One of the things I want to improve for next time is to make sure I get very good equipment for interpretation and arrange for an interpreter I trust to be exceptionally good for the dynamism and the endurance of a three-hour conversation in the style that I tried to do. Just to give you some behind-the-scenes details of the experience, equipment-wise, funny enough, it’s not actually so trivial to set up wireless connections from us, the two people talking, to the interpreter, and then back to us in a way that’s super robust and has clean audio. The audio I had in my ear from the interpreter had a loud background noise, so the whole time I’m hearing a shh sound with the voice of the interpreter coming in very quietly. What a wonderful experience this whole life is, frankly. Plus, his translation was often incomplete, at least for me, so I had to put together those puzzle pieces continuously. But again, it worked out. And hopefully our constant switching of languages and having a meta-discussion about language provided good insights as to the complexity of this fight for a nation’s identity and sovereignty that Ukraine has gone through. Behind the scenes, off-mic on a personal level, President Zelenskyy was funny, thoughtful, and just a kind-hearted person. And really, the whole team were just great people. It was an experience I’ll never forget. enes, off-mic on a personal level, President Zelenskyy was funny, thoughtful, and just a kind-hearted person. And really, the whole team were just great people. It was an experience I’ll never forget. After the conversation was recorded, the next challenge was to translate all of this and overdub it and do it super quickly. These words I’m speaking now have to be translated and dubbed into Ukrainian and Russian. ElevenLabs were really helpful here, especially in bringing the president’s voice to life in different languages. But even more than that, they’re just an amazing team who inspired me and everyone involved. Please go support ElevenLabs. They are a great company and great people. The translation is separate from the text to speech and was done in part by AI and a lot by human. This is where the fact that we had constant switching between three languages was a real challenge. There are six transition mappings that have to be done: English to Ukrainian and Russian, Ukrainian to English and Russian, and then Russian to English and Ukrainian continuously, sentence by sentence, sometimes word by word. And each combination of language to language translation is best done by a person who specializes in that kind of mapping. It was all a beautiful mess, all of it. And on top of all that, great translation is super hard. For example, I’ve read and listened to a lot of Dostoevsky both English and Russian and studied the process of how these books are translated by various translators. You can spend a week discussing how to translate a single important sentence well. Obviously, in this situation, we don’t have weeks, we have hours for the whole thing. One of the things I regret is not putting enough time into the hiring and selecting great translators, from Russian and Ukrainian to English especially. I think translation is an art, so getting a good translator that works well with us is a process that needs more time and effort. I’ll be doing that more this month. By the way, we have a small but amazing team. If you want to join us, go to lexfridman.com/hiring. If you’re passionate, work hard, and everyone on the team loves working with you, then we’ll do some epic stuff together. Would love to work with you. Like I said about ElevenLabs. There are a few things is awesome in life as being able to work hard with an amazing team towards a mission all of us are passionate about. Anyway, I’ll probably be doing a few more interviews in the Russian language. I do have a lingering goal of interviewing the Mathematician Grigori Perelman, but there’s also others. I will also work on improving my whole pipeline both equipment-wise and interpreter-wise in doing these conversations in other languages because there are many that I would like to do in languages I don’t speak at all like Chinese, Mandarin or Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, French, German. I see language as both a barrier for communication and a portal into understanding the spirit of a people connected by that language. It’s all a weird and beautiful puzzle, and I’m just excited to get the chance to explore it. arrier for communication and a portal into understanding the spirit of a people connected by that language. It’s all a weird and beautiful puzzle, and I’m just excited to get the chance to explore it. All right, I got a question on how I prepare for podcasts. This has evolved and expanded more and more over time. There are some podcasts that I prepare hundreds of hours for. In AI terms, let’s say, first, I’m training a solid background model by consuming as much variety on the topic as possible. A lot of this comes down to picking high-signal sources, whether it’s blogs, books, podcasts, YouTube videos, X accounts, and so on. For this conversation with President Zelenskyy, for example, since February 2022 I’ve spoken with hundreds of people on the ground, I’ve read Kindle or audiobook, about 10 books fully, and then I skimmed about 20 more. And I don’t mean books about Zelenskyy, although he does appear in some of them, I mean books where this conversation was fully in the back of my mind as I’m reading the book. For example, I read Red Famine by Anne Applebaum. It’s about Holodomor. Does it directly relate to Zelenskyy? Not on the surface, no. But it continues to weave the fabric of my understanding of a people, of a history of the region. But it’s really important for me to read books from various perspectives. And I’m always trying to calculate the bias under which the author operates and adjusting for that in my brain as I integrate the information. For example, Anne Applebaum’s book, Gulag, is very different from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The former is a rigorous, comprehensive, historical account, the latter is a literary, psychological, and personal portrait of Soviet society. Both I think are extremely valuable. On the bias front, for example, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer is a good example. It is full of bias, but he was there, and to me, he has written probably one of the greatest if not the greatest book on the Third Reich ever. But like I said, it has a lot of inaccuracies and biases. You can read about them online if you like. But my job in this case and in all cases is to adjust based on my understanding of the authors’ biases and take the wisdom from the text where it could be found and putting the inaccuracies aside into the proverbial dustbins of history.…

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