Underlord: Descript’s AI Video Editor, with CEO Andrew Mason

**Christina Farr** (0:00)
I'm Christina Farr.

**Ash Zenooz** (0:01)
I'm Ash Zenooz.

**Luba Greenwood** (0:03)
And I'm Luba Greenwood. Welcome to Second Opinion, a podcast for digital health insiders from Second Opinion Media and Turpentine. Each week, we navigate what's really going on in healthcare through unfiltered conversations with entrepreneurs and investors that are leading the charge.

**Ash Zenooz** (0:18)
This season, we're tackling meaty topics like biosecurity, the latest in telemedicine, why patient acquisition is so hard, and the pros and cons of VC versus private equity.

**Christina Farr** (0:29)
I've covered the industry now for a decade as a former journalist with CNBC turned investor with Oma's Ventures. With my good friends Ash and Luba, we are developing a show at Second Opinion that brings real experts into the ring and ask them the tough questions that you've been dying to know in digital health.

**Luba Greenwood** (0:47)
Exactly, Chrissy. Ash brings her experience as a physician, as an executive in government in big tech, and healthcare CEO at many companies.

**Ash Zenooz** (0:55)
Luba's background as a lawyer, investor, biotech CEO and managing partner at the Data for Work Cancer Institute Venture Fund, adds another layer. What's that joke? An investor, a lawyer, and a doctor walk into a bar and...

**Christina Farr** (1:10)
Anyways, it leads to a lot of treat telling. Fun fact, I originally met these two in the bathroom line while we were trying to put on lipstick at a healthcare conference. Now here we are. Join us at Second Opinion.

**Ash Zenooz** (1:22)
Follow Second Opinion on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you can get your podcasts.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:27)
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week we'll explore their revolutionary ideas and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a B2B SaaS application, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication, SCIM provisioning, role-based access control, and audit trails. That's where WorkOS comes in. With easy to use and flexible APIs that help you ship enterprise features on day one without slowing down your core product development. Today, some of the hottest startups in the world are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know like Proplexity, Vercel, Jasper, and Webflow. WorkOS also provides a generous free tier of up to one million monthly active users for user management, making it the perfect authentication and authorization solution for growing companies. It comes standard with rich features like bot protection, MFA, roles and permissions, and more. If you're currently looking to build SSO for your first enterprise customer, you should consider using WorkOS. Integrate in minutes and start shipping enterprise plans today.
Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Andrew Mason, CEO of Descript, the AI-powered video editing platform that's revolutionizing content creation by making it as easy to edit video as it is to edit a text document. As you'll hear, we at the Cognitive Revolution are longtime users of Descript. It's an integral part of our production process and we can sincerely attest to its radical ease of use. In this conversation, we get into the details of how Descript is using AI to re-imagine the content creation and editing process. This is a journey that began with a novel editing interface built on top of AI transcription technology and has since expanded to include a variety of post-production techniques, including AI custom voice overdubbing, the AI eye contact model that makes it appear as if I'm looking directly into the camera right now, while in fact I'm reading from a document, as well as a number of editing shortcuts that remove pauses, filler words, retakes, and more. Collectively, Descript calls this suite of AI features Underlord, a clever bit of branding that's obviously meant to imply that Andrew and team want to keep humans at the helm of the content creation process. Along the way, we also touch on Descript's partnership with OpenAI and Andrew's perspective on AI-generated content. And I also share some details about how we're using AI workflows at the Cognitive Revolution. For those, I have to give the bulk of the credit to our production team led by Adi and Sai from AI Podcasting. I've been working with these guys for the last six months, and they have both worked really hard to not only produce the eight or more episodes that we publish each month, but also to build AI workflows that streamline the process and create distribution leverage. The short clips that I post on Twitter, for example, are the outputs of an AI workflow. AI creates six to eight of them for each episode, and then I choose and post my favorite one or two. You can read my full testimonial on their website, AIPodcast.ING.