That when you were embarking on creating you read a bunch of books on b. Theory of language acquisition to figure out for example whether the cheek blue rules before adjectives held by first and you know ultimately ended up running those tests on your own users i wonder how does the language learning reality differ from the language learning theory it differs a lot with thats one of the things we have found before before i started doing go i read a lot of books about how to best teach a language and i realised that a lot of them contradict each other usually its because theyre not based on much data theyre just based on somebody else one persons method or something so what we did is we launch to a lingo and then because we have we have hundreds of millions of students we can watch them learn and and because we can watch them learn we can find better ways to teach that a lot of times are not what what people are using in classrooms for example when teaching inning. English a lot of classrooms in many countries in the world teach the pronouns personal prominent pronouns like he she you they also teach the one thats it that one is much harder for a lot of people so one of the things we started doing with doing was when we teach the personal pronouns we dont teach that when we teach or much later and thats we we found a way to do that based on the data for use as we found that it was better to start doing that now one of the major obstacles that people learning a Foreign Language have ways social anxiety is the fear of practicing a Foreign Language and they hear of looking incompetent i know that you have followed your own very elegant i think im very easy simple easy solution for that chad but its but as easy as it may seem dont you think that those conversational skills come at the expense of social and Cultural Skills that you also acquire when you learn a language from another individual yeah i think learning a language i think ultimately you learn a language to talk to another individual thats the thats the end goal but one of the things we have found and its not just us other people have found this. One of the hardest things about learning another language is when you when you practice with another human theres a lot of anxiety in fact the u. S. Army you know the u. S. Army tries to teach people languages in particular lately theyre very interested in teaching people arabic for obvious reasons they used to they used to try to pick some soldiers to teach them arabic and they have found that for some of them it is possible to be to marry very easily whereas for others it was very difficult and they didnt know what the difference was so they developed a test to figure out which ones are better at learning a language and they found before they thought that maybe intelligence had to do with it the biggest factor that had to do whether youre good at learning a language or not is whether you are ok sounding stupid absolutely but when you are delegating that practicing capacity to chad box that here that executive doesnt disappear in fact it may become Even Stronger you may be. Very comfortable talking to chad yeah so what we have found is that what people do so we develop the chapbook for doing go and the idea is that you get to talk to the computer and not to another human so you dont feel anxious what we have found is that that is a very good thing to do at the beginning and then that gives you enough confidence to go and try to talk to somebody else its like training wheels with bicycles its just it just gets you started and we have found that that actually helps later when you go talk to a real human you feel you feel more secure of yourself and what about the cultural aspect of language learning is there any way to incorporate that into your program yeah were trying to do that we havent done it as much i mean i think that thats one of the things that where we want duolingo to get better at teaching you the culture of also the countries when you travel i mean theres theres a lot there and the english would be bitching American Culture or the British Culture they are trying to you get to you get it would go into so that would be the idea and similarly when people are learning spanish there its you know there is like twenty five Different Countries that speak spanish you would get to choose and were starting to do that but we havent quite done it i mean for example slang terms very very much between Different Countries and a lot of people really want to learn those so were going to add thats not really there yet on the lingo but were going to do that so you know you already mentioned that you think that the best the ways to have you know the best of the two worlds to come by teachers and the application in yourself benefited from having Great Teachers in life. Change your ph d. Under the guidance of professor many a little who later became you know cofounder or coinvented could invent a brother so i just wonder from your own personal experience which learning tasks you think about a delegated to algorithms and we each still require the meeting of minds a human to Human Interaction you know thats a great question i dont know the full answer to that i do know that computers are really good im giving you repetition so whenever you need to learn something by repetition computers are very good because they dont get bored whereas a teacher may get bored. Computers are also really good when one to one interaction is required because if a computer can adapt to yourself where is the future usually has to teach many people at the same time what i think computers are not yet good at is keeping you motivated its amazing how motivating another humanness just the presence of another human gets you to do all kinds of things so thats one thing that i think computers are not good at and the other thing is answering general questions so if you know that the computer may be teaching me but if i am confused and i just have a general question that that does not fit what the computer is trying to teach me. Its stuck where as a teacher you know and can actually answer that now speaking about professor blum the product i feel collaboration with here was capture and recapture application to make you whole to google a few years ago to a rookie like myself like very very think will need ideas that one has to wonder why did it take so long to develop them a why they cost google so much money what was the hardest thing to figure out about that yeah so the capture of if you havent seen this is the story of characters that you have to type whenever youre trying to get out an email account or something in retrospect that seems like oh no brainer yeah like a no brainer and the idea by the way the reason thats there is to make sure that a computer is not getting the account that its a human that is actually getting that and not on a computer it seems like a no brainer but it you know nobody has thought of it and it took us months to think things over it and a lot of times some of the best ideas seem like a no brainer i dont know what the hardest the hardest part was really coming up with with a task that was easy for humans but hard for computers. And it well and also that it was easy for computers to grade so the computer needs to be able to know whether you enter the right answer but it fired off a sickly should not be able to answer itself now one or that often pops up in your speech uses the word. Efficiency and i think what you mean by efficiency is a sense. Deriving value from things that we didnt think that had value before for example like you know the time you spent typing that rick up towards and im sure many people would be interested in how you train yourself to spot goes up the changes do you start with looking for that wasted energy or do you start with a project where that wasted educate be applied i start with a waste of energy so i start with things that people are anyways doing so in the case of a capture it started out as a security mechanism where people had to type things and then surely we realized that a lot of hours were being wasted with that if you if you think about it its about two hundred million times a day somebody types one of these guys just and each one tastes about ten seconds and if you multiply two hundred million by ten seconds humanity as a whole as we wasting five hundred thousand hours every day typing. So that all that time the first step was ok theres a lot of time there how can we use it and thats when i came up with the idea that you could be using that type to help a time to help digitize books. So this is this is the recapture project and that was what google bought the idea that books are being digitized in order to digitize a book first you take a photograph of every page then on the computer he says the cipher all of the words and then the unfortunately the cannot read all of the words but the words that i cannot read where youre using human started typing it after the help was read those words and i think thats a very ironic to some extend idea because you are using value added coude sourcing to fide against another form of malevolent crowdsourcing which spanned really is and maybe thats again another key question but do you think crowdsourcing is a technology is it more amenable to. Positive prosocial applications or is it more likely to be has more opportunities to be used in negative ways i mean everything knowledge youre going to use also theyre not going to leave the pens on what you use it for but i would say most of the applications that i have seen of outsourcing have been very positive i mean you can think of wikipedia as a crowd sourcing effort there have been a lot of applications about trying to find missing people or in their case and recapture and helping to digitize books i think most of the things have been pretty positive but life with everything i think it can be used for negatively but now both capture recapture and i think initially until lingle was based on the new economic model its essentially a swap model which limits or eliminates the need for money as a transaction facilitator at least for the for the users of the platform not speaking about the inventor of the of the platform is that how sustainable is that gay thing that. Has any potential as far as the ecommerce is concerned is it possible to eliminate money altogether as some people in this country once i i dont know i dont think its actually possible to eliminate money altogether but definitely on the internet youre seeing i mean this is not a new thing for the last five to ten years we have seen a lot of examples of people basically trading nonmonetary value i mean a Search Engine like google for example gives you the entire thing for free and what youre exchanging is youre exchanging the data that youre giving them and also every now and then you click on an ad. So theres definitely a lot of nonmonetary exchanges in the internet a lot of the economy of the internet is nonmonetary exchanges ok well mr fernand we have to take a very short break now but we will be back in just a few moments and. In two thousand and sixteen the Panama Papers show the world with a tax haven the secrets two trillion United States dollars passed through most. In the amount of time that we in the Panama Papers exposure thats what it shows a lot of money it really is. Journalism its a fact of journalism looking at things that people want to keep secret and asking why would they want to keep these things secret. Millions of fonseka documents were examine. All the people we basically have tried to get an advantage out of this sort of. Split. And probably other politician which was the other politician the media would point to find targets such as the kings of morocco in saudi arabia the president of the. Several prime ministers. And russian president Vladimir Putin of course. That tied so i have sued so many newspapers for defamation some things dont just happen by chance he was very striking there were no more american symbols specially a lot of people from the brics countries specially brazil russia and china their special project reveals what was missed in the media coverage. Of the panama chronicles. Welcome back to worlds apart on your and founder of dual lingo. The ultimate form of crowdsourcing is democratic governance at least in theory and i think there are major issues in both developed and developing countries where how power and governance are practiced and applied do you think technology can or will ever change the way our societies are not only organized by how they are governed. I think it will is very hard to say exactly how thatll happen but i think it will and i think its starting to happen were starting to see i mean were starting to see a lot of the very nascent efforts but were starting to see people for example there are programs where people can report. Problems in their neighborhood all with with computers and eventually they get to the government so were starting to see some of that. I dont know what the ultimate thing is but im sure if acknowledge i mean technology is already part of most of things in the world im pretty sure itll itll get to the government i dont know if you would agree with me but i think at the root of bad governance is actually institutionalized inefficiency because there are many powerful corporate actors around the world who have a personal interest in keeping the system inefficient and they essentially institutionalize those inefficiencies. If you were asked to approach the algorithmically what would you start thats a great question i mean i am i myself was born in a country that has very very terrible government im from guatemala the government and what im of this entirely incompetent i would say in a country like one of my probably would start by starting from scratch just started the government again from scratch when he trying to start from scratch you still have to start somewhere you know its like starting a company a lot of times i think it is you start with. You start with the Main Services that you want to provide in the case of a government i dont know them and services are probably health and education and you start with those and you get really good at that and then grow from there are you also pro need a really good tax Collection Service as you need to monetize you know as i was preparing for this interview i came across a very interesting poll about peoples attitudes towards replacing judges with computers to minimize corruption and the influence of bias and it turns out that the stronger the country support system is the lower is the percentage of people who are in favor of that in russia or i see why the malo the majority of people would rather be judged by computer is than judges and again the question is technological not political gain a thing you can ride an algorithm for Something Like the application of law i think so yeah its already its already the case that there are computer programs that are giving advice in many legal issues better than lawyers i mean thats already happening this is not for all things but there are many cases where there are for example i. B. M. Watson is being used to give legal advice then i saw a study that was starting to become more more accurate than legal then human lawyers advice for certain types of law so over time i think that i think that will happen over time well i think it all boils down to the same question youre had to face bit captioned recapture whether some tasks. How to do what have to be completed by by the humans or better to be delegated to the computers and when it comes to the society can you really ride an algorithm for power of governance because philosophically i think thats. Very interesting i think yes i think i mean i i think its only a matter of time i dont know how long but i think its only a matter of time that computers will be able to do everything that humans can now speaking about russia i mentioned before and i know that your community here has roughly six million years or so which frankly speaking is not that much but i heard that russia was the first country within the do a Little Family to deliberate a Community Generated language course how did it come about when we started doing ghost the courses that we had we thought spanish and we talk german those were generated by us inside that building a company. But at some point because we got we got asked for so many different languages we decided that it was better to allow different communities around the world to create courses the first one was in fact the course to learn english for russian speakers and that was generated entirely by Community Members the way that came about i mean the we left when we opened up this program called the dual lingual language incubator which is where the new courses are created the russian the russian team was the first to apply if you dont organize team war or just the community if users there they they are now an organized team but they didnt know each other they had different people applied and now the you know now they know each other and theres a clear theres a clear leader of the team and they organize it so initially it was a grassroots operation initially it was aggressive operation of people who applied who didnt even know each other they apply to us and we say we found about five different ones that were some of them lived in russia some of them lived in the United States but they were native russian speakers. And we put them together as a team and they have worked very well together well its interesting you say that because in this kind. Where we often amount they bill lack of sort of citizens activity and the passivity on the part of the fraggle are bogus but it seems to me that what youre saying is that there is some extra exceptions to that yeah yeah and were very happy im in the russian team house still to this day this was about four years ago that they created the course still to this day theyre working on improving it so theyve lasted a long time now i know that the one you Just Launched a lingo you relied on the crowdsourcing to source translations for various google pages and or other websites and i know that the International Association of professional translators and interpreters was very unhappy with this and other kinds of efforts because they they were afraid. To lose their own livelihood do you have any sympathy for their argument because i know you