YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Mason

lines on the record: 89
first: 2017-12-13
most recent: 2017-12-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, no, thank you. I'm doing just fine here with Casey Newton. We really enjoy it. I'm an entrepreneur sometimes every now and again. Anyway, it's been totally enjoyable having you. I forgot how much I really did enjoy talking to you. And I think I was completely right about you not being interviewed by a seven-year-old”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, I don't want to do it again and have be like David Bowie or Elton John where it's just like. You know, I'm more like a Billy Joel. You know, you just call it you quit while you're ahead.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, just the impact in the business world. You know, some things it's hard to measure by sales or just the quantity. It's the quality. So, you know, I heard about, I read an article about Twitter all hands meeting where they were talking about how, look, guys. We need to turn this around. And you know who's going to do it? We are. Nobody else is going to get in our way. Nobody's going to help us get there. And of course, I have a track on my album called It's Up To Us. That's who they took those ideas. So that was really humbling. And just in general, seeing how the economy's been growing. I mean, just up and to the right since the album came out.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good idea. I enjoyed your business. Yeah, I mean, you know, the impact has been humbling. It's just I look around”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't look at it that closely. I thought you might ask me this, and I remember coming up with that answer. It took a lot of work, but also just like realizing how untrue it would sound. But it's actually true. I just, I mean, I don't really know what's going on. I do Google Groupon and I look for news, but there's no news. Everybody I know is gone.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just Mac. It's just Mac. I mean, you can also, oh, another cool thing you can do is you can publish your compositions that you create, your kind of audio-linked transcripts to the web, and then other people can comment on them, like Google Doc style, and you can pull them back. That's for anybody that's reviewing audio or doing it in a collaborative environment with other people to really awesome way to get feedback.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“descript.com. It's on Mac for now, and we're working on web support. But where we are right now, the kind of audio editing, there's not really any good examples of kind of web-based technology doing.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm really just on the edge. I keep on, I see both sides and I can't make up my mind. People would need to write some more articles about it.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did you do that? Because you won't answer my innovation quest. You know, we have I think it's my problem that I didn't like Hamilton to be sure to be clear. But I don't know. I just think”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what? It's been 20 years since I watched it, so I'm going to watch it. You need to watch it on a second chance. I respect your judgment.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So it just feels really exciting to be out here and the quality of life, I mean just the weather, I mean, having lived in Chicago, you know Casey. It's like you come out here and you're like, do those people know that this place exists, that you don't have to be freezing your ass off? It's really simple and trite to say that it's cold in Chicago, but it's fucking cold in Chicago.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, the people out here are so smart and so engaging, and you really feel like to complain about it out here, I feel like it's like 450 BC and I'm in the Roman forum. It's like, what the, that's Socrates guy is such an asshole. He's just going on and on and bloviating. And, you know, it's like we're in a special, like for better or worse, we're in a special place in a very special moment of time. Yeah, fair point.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two things. Like one is we've had this product in beta for a while. We have people using it, like we really feel pretty strongly that there's a there there. And so we feel better about product market fit. It doesn't feel as experimental. It's like a beautiful thing to be building just a tool that exists in the tool chain instead of making a bet that, oh, I'm going to invent this new consumer behavior. And the other thing is I like having somebody on the team who's super smart and just relentlessly focused on the financial outcome to counterbalance the focus on how to come up with some ridiculous. I don't think we're going to do it.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't. And part of that was because I always knew it was like, you know, I mean, I take it very seriously, the idea of being a steward of other people's money. And I didn't want to take that on. It always felt like experimental in a lot of ways. I thought it could be a really big business. Don't get me wrong, but I wanted a little bit of meat on the bone before I asked somebody to take a bet on me on that. I also just wanted a little bit of a break from working with investors. For the most part, my experience was good. My experience with the investors out here was largely good. But I just wanted to see what it would like to be like to not have to think about that. And I actually miss it now.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, most of the things that I've learned are relatively banal. They're things like that we could pick up innumerable business books. They'll express it better than I would. It's how to be a better. Managing people is not a innate skill. It's like learning to golf or something. It just takes practice and learning from better people. So I learned a lot over the course of my time at Groupon. And I continue to learn. Yeah, I don't know. I don't have anything to say.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I think we're very interested in, that part of it. Yeah. So, I mean, we'll be at a point within a relatively short period of time where you can produce a soup to nuts podcast in descript.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are you interested in other parts of the podcast tech stack, like all the things you would need to create a podcast, whether it's the actual recording software or hosting or distribution? Does any of that, do you think would introduce you over time?”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that, I mean, there's, right? So between all of those professional creative tools, there's millions of people that are using those things already. So the hope is that some of them will also use descript and that we can increase the size of the market by creating a tool that makes it easier and more accessible to use this stuff.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a cavernous conference room, and four people are having a conversation, it's going to be lower, and we have human power transcription for those people.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Although we do have a white glove version too, if you're not happy with the quality of, because there's still like. For certain types of audio, for something like this, the transcription would be great. It's probably 95% accurate. But if you're recording on an iPhone in a”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So it'll be $20 a month right now for early adopters, it's $10 a month. And then we charge per minute for transcription, seven cents a minute. We also have a version that has no monthly fee for just people that want to use the transcription service. It's 15 cents a minute for that version. You can download it and get 33 minutes of transcription and demo all the audio editing features. We also have a promo going where your transcript is guaranteed and five minutes or less or your pizza is free.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't think those are super highly edited. So that might not, I think they're broadcast live. It may not be the best use case for it, or maybe they'll find ways to edit in some more screams.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes. Yeah, you're right. And also it's evolved from talk radio, which was very screaming. How does that work? For example, when you put talk radio on your thing. That's just a lot of screaming. That's like. Yeah, I don't think those”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feel like one of the only times I feel relaxed in this day and age is when I'm having a conversation with someone, right? Where you're just able to get a different point of view, where you are able to wander for a really long time. I often think the longer podcasts are often better when in print, like a longer story is often usually not better.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they don't love you. In the other, they don't. There's sort of like that annoyed me, or you piss me off. But it's a very, even if they don't agree, it's a much, first of all, it's much more civil. I know it sounds crazy, but it's much because it's the way you present yourself, I suppose. I'm not like Rush Limbaugh going, ah, like that all the time, but it has evolved into a much more thoughtful medium, I guess, where people can actually think in long sentences.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't have to do with the intimacy of being. You know, you're pummeled every day with everything's visual. Either it's Twitter, reading visual or imagery. And it's exhausting and not understandable. I think audio creates an intimacy. I do find it interesting the people that talk, and you'll find this case, see, the people that talk to me who love the podcast are a very different fan base. They almost love you. It's a really, they feel maybe in their ear. No, but it's”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like you think about how you read about gun violence in the press, and you might go around and read 15 minutes of articles and you just feel like shit and the world is hell in a handbasket and everybody's stupid. And then you listen to an episode of The Daily and they interview somebody that you just couldn't agree less with. But yet you walk away with an appreciation for their sincerity and the fact that they're not evil crazy or stupid. They're doing what they think the right thing is. And so, and I think there's just something about that medium and their approach that's like it's weird listening to the daily, like you listen to an episode and you walk away feeling good and it's not like you understand things a little bit better. And that's not how you're used to feeling.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the same time, you're listening. And there's just these incredible examples of content that don't exist anywhere else. To give you two examples, like Sam Harris's podcast. I mean, there's just, I've learned more from that than... I can remember in recent memory because he has these like three hour long, incredibly nuanced conversations with people. I mean, even like the same kind of format as this, right, where people can just have a conversation and And it's not about just pulling out one quote So, I think stuff like that is really exciting, stuff like the daily. Do you guys listen to the daily? Yeah.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brings headphones, reduces the friction of having headphones with you and taking them out of your pocket and putting them in your ears, right? Like, I mean, if I'm going now to take a walk and get a coffee, I can take my headphones out. I have them with me all the time, which wasn't always the case. But even when I did have them with me, you have to untangle them. Like it's stupid stuff, right? But it's often like solving those stupid little things that makes all the difference. And so I think all of that is just getting us to the point where audio has a lot of headroom.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah What gets me excited is just how much more. Time of the day seems to be becoming accessible to audio first experiences. I mean, that's obviously mobile phones are enabling that, things like carplay are enabling that. But even, like, I think we'll look back and see AirPods and really great wireless headphones as another kind of step function enabler of audio, where all of a sudden this relatively simple Innovation of taking the wires away”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our near term focus is doing a multi track version where I can add music and multiple tracks of voice. And the way that works is if I want to add a music file to my piece, I just drag and drop it at the word where I want it to start playing and it starts playing. And so that's an example of how. How well this idea of the word processor or this UI paradigm is in.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I don't know how far we can take that. I know that we had what got us thinking about video was at one point one of Errol Morris's editors came through our office and he had just finished editing 30 hours of Donald Rumsfeld interviews for that movie. And he was just... Begging us to do a video version because of the amount of time it would have saved him instead of scrolling through a timeline, looking at a talking head to be able to search by a script and do everything in that way. But there's some really incredible implications of moving to this word processor format. Like the way that we haven't released it yet, but in the next...”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Automatically, I love that. I love that. There's still a role for craft. And intention, and that's the kind of media production that we're focused on is people that have a specific idea of what they want to create and they just want tools that get things out of their way so they can express that vision more efficiently.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, totally. And the beauty of the word processor is it's kind of like they built it, or even the typewriters, the basic concept, like they built it. And if that's your medium, you learn the tool and you're done. Like everything else in your career is about evolving your craft and being more effective at getting the ideas in your head down onto paper. And it doesn't work that way with audio or video. You have to constantly be invested in learning the latest tools. And our goal is to make it as intuitive as a word processor. But also a lot of the creative tools that have come along for For people are about like, oh, you press a button and all of a sudden we'll cut your video in a way that's magical and will put background music and we'll do all this stuff automatically. But I think there's so automatically.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But go more about this journalism because this would be an aid to creating businesses, media businesses, or helping people do media businesses cheaper or bring down the costs for doing them because a lot of these things are not prohibitively expensive necessarily, but they're prohibitively creative, I guess, is that you can't be as creative as you want if you're not”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And the reason I said I can't believe I say that is I feel like every startup founder finds a way to talk about how their company is making the world more empathetic. It must be like even though the fact that I'm aware of it, I can't stop myself.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, yeah, it's been a fascination of mine for a long time, and I think audio as a medium is a, I can't believe what I'm about to say because I'm talking to Casey, but it has an empathy bias or an empathy handicap where there's something about not needing to stare at someone's ugly face that makes you... That makes it easier to relate to them.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when I was actually working on another startup idea when I was in school for public policy, I still want to go back and do it. It was called Policy Tree. And the idea was you would take a debate and break it down into the atomic assertions and show them on a flowchart where you would have some like, at the time it was like we should invade Iraq. And then stemming from that in green and red bubbles or leafs would be the arguments for and against, and then more arguments would stem from that and so on. And it wasn't like this public forum for debate. The idea was that it was aggregating all of the things that people were saying in the popular media outlets, but just breaking it down in a way that you can make sense of it all, right?”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's really cool to think about what you could do. Like, and in this case, we know if there's a period at the end of it, you put a period at the end of a sentence or a question mark, like there's things that we can do to make that sound natural.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's definitely where we want to take it, where you can move things around as thoughtlessly as you would move around text and still have it work. And you don't have to get in and do a crossfade and adjust your edit boundaries. And really what we're doing with descript by moving by pairing the text and audio as one thing, we're setting ourselves up for this future of artificial intelligence assisted media synthesis, where that's one example of it, because all of a sudden your media, your audio, or your video, you have meaning behind it because of the natural language processing you can do on the text.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I mean, now we're not going to resample at the boundaries of the edits in a way that it'll sound natural. So you'll have to, there will be a little bit of skill involved in that. But that's where we want to take it. And we can talk about the ethical implications of that. Yeah.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technology hasn't existed. Or it hasn't been mature enough to be able to transcription. Yeah, and the text audio alignment, and all this stuff is being enabled by machine learning and artificial intelligence and blah, blah, blah.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. And now they have Photoshop. And there's a lot more people that have Photoshop than had dark rooms. Right. And we hope it's the same kind of thing with audio and video where it's prohibitively difficult to manipulate that content. And by taking away those prohibitions, by reducing the friction and making content creation as expressive as print or text, you can enable a whole new class of creators.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, editing. And for people that are doing it today, but hopefully very much how if you think about how the number of people that had dark rooms Before Photoshop came along. Like hopefully, we can create that same You did Yeah, okay. So my point is completely invalid then. Is that what you're saying? No.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Immediate transcription services and the dirty secret of them is they're all using one of the same series of APIs that's provided for the most part they're all using the same series of APIs by Google and Nuance and IBM. Now, Amazon, we use the Google Speech API, but we're relatively agnostic, and we're focused on creating the instrumentation to measure these different APIs and their accuracy for different types of audio and pick the right one for the right type of audio, and then build tools beyond that. Because it doesn't stop with the transcript, right? You do stuff with.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Programming in binary anymore. They're writing words. People would be editing using language and scripts if the technology existed. Now it's just starting to exist. So whether it's us that does it or somebody else, I think this is where it's headed.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for now we're starting with people that need transcriptions. It's a great standalone transcription service. You can drop an audio file in that's like two hours long and get a transcript in a couple of minutes. So anyone that needs transcription and then people who are working with audio is their primary medium podcasters, radio. As we grow and as we add more stuff, the goal is yes to get in is to become the new standard for how talk-driven media gets made. So if you're working in talk-driven media, it just makes sense that you would be doing it from a script driven viewpoint as opposed to a timeline-driven standpoint where you're looking at these abstractions. I mean, for the same reason that people aren't”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's derivative. It's not as good of a story as Groupon or something like that. It's basically we had detour and descript. They both start with D.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. This allows you as we meet a lot of people who come from a print journalism background and are getting into podcasts, and they are beholden to some audio engineers. So they'll do, you know, they might do a piece and then they might do a paper edit of it, send it off to the audio engineer who does the edit, finds out that, and then you get it back and you find out that the audio doesn't sound right when you cut it that way. We basically pair the two into one thing that the editor or the producer or the journalist can use as long as they know how to use a word process.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and audio doesn't work that way, and I think it's, and we're seeing this explosion of audio in popularity as a medium, as evidenced by the fact that you guys are basically sitting in here all day recording podcasts. But we really need the tools to keep up with the consumer demand.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT