Dawen has many years experience working as a researcher at Netflix with focuses on recommendation, contextual bandits and Bayesian methods. Dawen has much to say about the meeting point of the idealized academic world making contact with industry, and I have long admired his commentary and wit when discussing machine learning applied to real world systems such as recommender systems. This discussion will touch on Dawen's work at Netflix, his take on learning from bandit feedback, Bayesian methods and his latest work jumping on the large language model train.