# Transcript: Featured Session: A Conversation With Spotify's New Co-CEO About The Past, Present And Future Of Delivering Creativity To The World

**Date:** March 13, 2026 · 10:30 PM  
**Session:** [Featured Session: A Conversation With Spotify's New Co-CEO About The Past, Present And Future Of Delivering Creativity To The World](/sessions/2026-03-13/pp1149203-featured-session-a-conversation-with-spotify-s-new-co-ceo-about-the-past-present)

## Summary

Gustav Söderström, Spotify's Co-CEO, reflects on Spotify's 20-year journey through three major 'mountains': solving music piracy through streaming, expanding into podcasts and audiobooks, and now building an AI-powered personalized platform. He introduces Spotify's new AI DJ, AI-generated playlists from natural language prompts, and a vision where every listener gets a uniquely personalized experience powered by large language models.

## Topics

`spotify` · `music streaming` · `podcasts` · `audiobooks` · `ai personalization` · `creator economy` · `platform strategy` · `local maximum` · `tech transformation`

## Key Takeaways

1. Spotify uses the 'local maximum' concept from computer science — to reach the next peak, you must first walk down into the valley of uncertainty, which is why most companies stagnate.
2. Spotify paid out over $50 billion to the music industry since launch, transforming piracy-era economics into a sustainable creator revenue model.
3. The AI DJ feature combines generative AI with deep music knowledge to create a personalized radio experience that knows your taste better than any human DJ could.
4. Spotify's next frontier is making every user experience unique — AI-generated playlists from natural language prompts ('dinner party music for people who love 90s hip hop') that never existed before.
5. The company deliberately chose to cannibalize its own music-focused product to become a broader audio platform, accepting short-term pain for long-term positioning.

## Full Transcript

A pretty big deal 20 years. And, you know, in tech, that's not just a long time, it's a life most companies don't really survive by. So today, I want to spend our time sharing a little bit about how we survive, what we learn, and, most importantly, where we're going next at Spotify, we often talk about mountains that we as a company try to climb, and there's this concept in computer science called a local maximum. So you climb the hill, you get to the top, and you feel great about yourself. You optimize your position, right?

But then you look up and you realize that you just got a small air the real manager, the global maximum, is way over there. The problem is that to reach that global maximum, you can't just keep walking up here. You first have to walk down it, back into the valley into uncertainty, and then you have to start climbing all over. Many companies die because they refuse to walk down that road. They sort of hide that they know.

What if I say today? Because multiple times we were willing to walk to the edge and jump into the unknown, the first mountain was access. So in 2006 when Spotify started, the competitor wasn't any tech giant, it was piracy. I grew up in Sweden, which at the time was basically a pirate behavior. The global record industry was collapsing in such a way that famously, a UK music industry executive, when he went to Sweden and met his Swedish counterpart, he looked at his piano, his coconut statement, and he said, That's not a business, my friend, that's a hobby.

The industry was in shackles, our founder, Danny Lake, he realized that you couldn't beat piracy with lawyers. You had to beat it with a better product. Piracy, I've only given people all the world's music for free, without ads, by the way, and with all my sake. But piracy set up one big block. It was a terrible user experience.

You have to search for a torrent. You remember those wavelengths several minutes, sometimes hours, depending on the modem you had, but then when you got it, you might have ended up with a mislabel track or actually just a computer bar. Happens to me a couple of times. So in product circles, where I come from, we're going to say that all truly great products, they need to pull up some sort of magic, something that was previously considered inconceivable. Our magic trick wasn't actually just giving people access to music.

As I said, I already done that. What we did was still latest those illusions. Illusion that you have downloaded all the world's music to your local hard rock so when you click the track, it's going to play in less than 200 milliseconds. So we essentially took the technology, the peer to peer technology, the power piracy, and we re engineered it to stay in the music industry and help artists get paid. Technology alone is seldom enough about to change the world.

So the other innovation that happened at the same time was a new business model user complete with piracy. Remember, piracy was free. This was ads Plus subscription, which we call premium. So by providing access and technology and an effective business model, we had managed to climb this first mountain, and Spotify was growing fast. So there we were.

We felt, honestly, pretty good about ourselves. We were at the top of the original mountain, the local maximum. Turned out the company was firing. But then the world changed. The smartphone run internally.

We call what happened next, the gazebo room in the summer of 2010 our small team was at a beautiful yellow Xavier the party was going to act. Our business model at the time was based on people using our three desktop app to compete with free piracy, loving it, and eventually pay for the privilege of syncing those files to their phones. But if you remember Merri meter, MER meters interference report had just come out, and data was irrefutable, smartphones there were about to outpace PC sales soon, so many users didn't even have that cost. And if they skip straight from Pirates of the mobile they hit a paywall, they would strike. And he went back to piracy.

So our business model was due and according to Mary Meeker, he had this three to four years doing that, a completely new one. So we walked down the first month. We shifted our focus from the Google Desktop space and went all in on mobile. But the problem we faced was, how do you give away the exact thing that you were driving for mobility without just filling your entire business so something else that is often talked about in tech circles, is you should follow your users, look at this data and see what they do. And it turned out that our mobile premium users, who have full on demand playback, they were still paying their playlist in shopping mode about 50% of the time.

This gave us an idea. We thought to ourselves, what if we could give away just the shuffle mode for free? And in 2013 we licensed, built and launched the first mobile app in the App Store where a user could create a playlist of any song they wanted, put their phone in their pockets and listen to that playlist. New shuffle mode for free forever. This makes for device world explode, pulling millions of people out of piracy and into pain for music.

So we have readjusted to first world, and with that, we have climbed the second month now, already, as we were scaling that second mountain, the mobile mountain, another massive shift was happening for the connected home and an explosion of hardware, the Alexa and the Google homes, right? And we realized that having a great mobile app alone wasn't going to DNI. So we had to make a contrarian bet on your big league at the time, conventional wisdom said that you should pick an ecosystem and then should build a wall garden around it, like Apple did with iOS. But we went the other way with a protocol called Spotify net. We decided that Spotify should go everywhere, in your car, your kitchen, your PlayStation, your TV.

We chose openness over locking. The bet was actually very painful, and it took a long time because we had to convince all the world's hardware manufacturers to implement our protocol, even though we were a tiny one series company at the time. But today, that bet compounds, because we have 2000 different hardware devices, and users are free to listen to the music on whatever combination of hardware they want. The next month, the fourth month was a variant of the follow your users estimate, but this time, still watching the users. We watched what all developers were doing with our product.

This is generally exemplary strategy, because these are often early adopters of new behavior, and they are in a rare position actually build what they want to see in the world, instead of just waiting for this exact reason. Sport has always had hack weeks where the entire company just pauses the usual day to day execution for broad and deep holding supplementation for the entire company, just to see what people what people want to do leverage the brain of 8000 smart people. And time and time again, we had seen our developers packing their podcast into their own Spotify as a company, we wanted to be more than music, but we weren't sure how. So we looked at the podcast industry, and you realize that it was just great content and amazing creators, many of them having deep conversation, which we felt was the perfect counter to the short educational media that was going on. But podcasts have been neglected for years, so we needed that, that it supported this market with people at the same at the same time.

Remember later we also noticed enterprising book publishers in Germany upload books, kind of disguised as music albums for but it was a terrible user experience if you skipped, if you were lucky to skip whole chapter, but it could also play shuttle modes, which is very weird. What was focused was that, despite the more experience, you just put the power in this case. So actually last on the inside look at this data, the product opportunities were pretty obvious. They were right there in front of us. But we have to think about how for both of these.

The conventional wisdom at the time told us and everyone else to get a separate app for podcasts and another one for those. That was just the way things were done. Remember the there's an app for that commercial. But we asked ourselves, why should the user? Have to adapt to that format by switching software.

Shouldn't the software adapt to the user instead? So you decided to instead build an adaptive user experience, one app with the interface dynamically shifted. It was a massive technical challenge that it allowed creators from from music and podcasts and book to cross pollinate audiences, and over time, hundreds of millions of users embrace proving us right. And of course, today, we aren't just a music company, we're an audio company, and people are listening more than ever. So now we really thought we were at the peak, but it turned out that the tallest mountain we've ever faced was vitals, generative AI.

Now there's a lot of noise, a lot of breathless uptakes, but as a technologist, here's the framework that I use. As I mentioned before, new technology is such a disruptive on its own, significant disruption happens when new technologies enable you asymmetric business models. So supported by didn't disrupt downloads just because of loaded business streaming, as I said, we disrupted them because we also introduced the ad supported subscription model. Similarly, it was a business model so Uber Airbnb that disrupted their spectrum industries, not just the technology alone. And if you look at the consumer space, we believe that the dominant business model will continue to be ads to a subscription.

In fact, you can already see the big AI labs adopting exactly this model. So this puts qualified in an outstanding position, because we already have the exact right business for this world. But from a product perspective, we actually think everything is going to change. User expectations of what software and services can and students should do for them are rapidly evolving for all of you on shore sitting there to chat GPT or progress, let me give you the real, deep impact. If you look at the history of the internet, Spotify started in what we call the era of curation.

Right users were organizing their friends and the tracks and their social networks of credit. And then we'll move to recommendation, but the algorithms did that work for you, and now we are entering age of generation where the consumer participates in a much bigger way. Most consumer products today, they still operate sort of like old school broadband, and I'm getting a technical guy when it comes to user input. So in old school broadband, you have lots of data on the downlink, sending the user videos and songs and feeds, but very narrow bandwidth on the uplink, so just a few swipes from the user click or something. So for companies like Spotify, we mostly have to guess what you want to hear based on whether you, for example, skip the fact then you think about that, did you skip it because you hate it or because you love it?

But you're at the gym and jazz isn't the right song. The algorithm is just a skip. It's very hard to interpret. It all looks the same. Generative AI changes this.

You cannot communicate back to the platform in rich natural language, in English, you can tell services which you actually want and what we think that the world will move away from these sort of past and single player experiences, these one way platforms where users just receive and receive and receive, to fully interact multiplayer platforms, this is where users will participate, interact with friends, artists and creators, and enjoy much more control than they have. So for our next mountain, we're building the world's first truly intelligent agentic media platform, one that you can literally talk, steer and control one way the algorithm works for you, instead of the other way around. We started this actually some time ago with the ai dj. Give me your personalized radios, and you can ask for whatever you want. I'm going for a run.

Give me an EDM playlist with big drops at 160 ppms to match my rankings, and then, recently, with tools like prompted playlist, you can literally write your own algorithm for playlist and then schedule that to update daily or weekly. So if you ever wanted playlist that, for example, takes all the music training on Tiktok consistence of your taste and then removes any track that you've already listened to. You can right now just go in and write that sentence. Are you tired of this? Fortified paintings is your favorite shaman, just because it was for the last three years?

I know I do sometimes. Just tell you about the room to avoid it. Avoid my main Shaman. This is the power of computers actually understanding English that they can finally understand here we think sports is uniquely positioned. The client does not and make this work for reality.

Because while llms, large language models are a key ingredient to making these possible general, avalanche are not enough, because llms are trained on facts. They know the capital of Texas, Dallas, right? But taste is not a fact. It's an opinion. If you ask a model for workout reason, for example, there is no canonical answer for someone in New York, it might be hip hop.

For someone in Western Europe, it's often again and Korean, a lot of Scandinavians, it's dead now. You need billions of constantly updated data points across amazonism users that do human curation to be able to map language to music in a deep and personal way. This is the data set that sport has been building for over a decade. But I also want to touch on the artist side of all of this change, because there's a lot of fear, and it is completely understandable. AI is a tool, no doubt, a very powerful one, and like any tool, it can be used in both really good and really bad ways.

As an example, in the early 2010s people weren't convinced that computers could be used to make music at all. But then it came from Sweden, named she used this lab or to change music forever, but music has never just been about the tools used to make it. Music is identity. When a teenager buys the t shirt at a concert, they aren't just buying clothing. They're buying something that tells the world who they are, what you belong to.

Ai cannot manufacture what it feels like to stand in a crowd of people who love an artist just the way you do. These moments of human connection, they transcend technology uncertainty. I firmly believe that any more generating content through human connection actually becomes more valuable, not less. And I'm not just making this up. We already see this play out in the more than one and a half billion dollars worth of consultators that we saw.

It's just growing in world of AI and personalization. Live events like come on we're at right now are bigger than they ever been, and they continue to grow. But we also believe that AI can create a lot of value for artists and the industry, and our job as Spotify is to ensure that the economics reflect that value, whether it's musicians and songwriters making original music or making letting fans remix and interact with their sitting IP. We're working with the music industry to make sure the right compensation frameworks are in place. We solve this with viruses, and we are going to solve it with AI, because at the end of the day, scholars mission is to deliver creativity to the world, one note, one voice, one idea at a time.

That's our commitment, and we believe that we're still in the early days of doing just that. Okay, so now you understand our journey. I'm excited to give you a first look at one of our next steps, Facebook. This new feature gives you, the user, a comprehensive look at just how exactly Spotify AI models your mistake across music podcast modules we think you are and more importantly, it helps you edit it directly. Here are some real examples from internal users.

One said, finally, I think that Spotify to just ignore those two artists that my kids always play, they used to ruin all my recommendations. Another example. These are new examples. When I was young, I used to be very big on possibilities, but after a lot of it, I just told Spotify to start putting a classical shelf on my homepage, which in turn made me start to lose weight. We're watching this and pay that in New Zealand soon.

But if you're a Spotify Premium user here today, scan the QR code behind me accesses. It's going to be very good. So 20 years have told us that every time we left the comfort of the local maximum, we took a jump, made another climb. The view from the New Beat was even better, but not just for Spotify, but for every creative industry that we built, every listener, every time. Thank you for joining me at the base camp of something new, and now I'm excited and privileged to invite lady Wilson and.

Stage for conversation on the many exciting things happening. All right, set up notes. Maybe you be welcome. All right, let's take a seat. Yes, perfect.

Thank you, sir. All right, I'm very excited for this discussion, but before we get into it, I just want to mention a couple of sentences on each of you. So lady, you have nearly 10 million monthly active users on Spotify. You have multiple number 100 hits. You want their CMAs ACM, pretty much done it all in usage.

But in addition to singing, and by the way, my life is a big fan, in addition to that, though, to sing it, you're also fulfill an entrepreneur, and you partner with native brands like Wrangler, who owns multiple businesses of your own, including your own fashion jewelry lines. And if I understand correctly, thank you for coming, David, you're a founding member of the code team at Google. We started 2004 he let us solve the climate cooperation in 2013 I think, and in 2016 he launched a production board which holds investments across tech, including agriculture, decompensation. You're the co founder and CEO of a genetics and you follow that, but I'm very happy about it, which consistently ranks as the top business and tech podcast. So welcome.

Thank you. Thank you for not making a political category podcast. All right, let's get into it, ladies, starting with you, Southwest is really about the intersection of culture and tech and people who live and work in a world where ideas and artists travel around the world instantly. And being here in Boston, I don't think anyone is surprised that counter music talks to the charts here. But all of you may not know is that counter music is one of the absolute fastest growing summers globally, and it's become hugely popular in markets from the UK to Australia, where you just back from, our data shows that four by four by you Yes.

So I would love to hear how you think about building an audience in 2026 and beyond, yeah, change and changing every single day. But for me, it is just connected as much as I possibly can with my touring, with just, I mean, whether it's releasing music touring, I put out a documentary here in April that's going to be on Netflix. I think that's going to be a good way for me to really stay connected with the fans that I've made, but also get to know some new ones. And we're also just always looking at the beta. We're just trying to see what's working, what's not working.

And for me, it has always been about that just family interaction be submitted correctly to them. And so whether that's face to face or to the camera, that seems to be the thing that works for me. So it's just about connecting as I as much as I possibly can. And you know, cutting through a lot of the ones can I ask you, I told you when we spoke backstage here that country music is big globally. But more than that, almost Texas country is big globally.

Land man is one of the top stories in Sweden. What is it about country music and Texas? It is growing and blows my mind, because every single opportunity I get to go across the pond to play music. People are singing every word. They're wearing their cowboy hats.

We're gonna get you a cowboy hat and some cowboy boots too, and you too. We're here in Austin. That's what I'm doing. But I really do think that. Well, I'm partial, but I think country music is a very special genre.

I think that it takes you home when you are nowhere near it. I think it's about that storytelling. I think everybody's a good sucker for a good story, and if you're not, I'm confused, but I think that's what it is. It's just people are craving often. Authenticity, and I think country music offers that authenticity is key.

My kids told me it's not as well. All right, David Allen is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. The show name is a hat tip to the poker games and one conversation that you and your colleagues were already having, right? And on this show, there's a lot of time spent on Eva's interests, but you still have a very quickly growing global audience. Were you surprised by that?

And was that your intention? Well, we didn't have much of an intention. They were very randomized, random situation that the podcast came out of covid on Zoom, I would say the original conversations were all about the tech industry, business markets, what's going on? How are we all reacting to and responding to the change in the world around us? How crazy is this?

Shit was kind of like a pretty common theme during covid. And you know, what should we do? What could we do? So I think for anyone working in the tech industry or starting a company or investing around the world, it became, you know, something to listen to. Lot of people described it, hold it like being a fly on the wall.

There were people just literally having a conversation about these topics. And I think that's kind of why it resonated globally. There are investors, startup founders, builders, Texas, anything that inspired you with this? I don't know if there was any other such the concept of this recording in general conversation. Did you find the wall?

No, that wasn't the design of the show. I think there wasn't much of the design, because the one guy wanted to be interviewed by the other guy every week. That was the original show concept. And then they kept talking about finding time to go in the studio to do that show, and they couldn't find the time to go into the studio do that show. And then covid hit.

They were all stuck at home, and they're like, Hey, let's get on Zoom and talk to each other and put that out as the show. And they asked me to join for the first episode, so I did, talking about covid and tech science and what was going on. And so that's how the show started. So there was no design, and I think that may be why it worked, because it's also like there was no real reason that we would care whether it succeeded or not, and so we just maybe didn't give a shit enough, and you just do what comes natural and what feels right, and then it just kind of worked. So for both of you, AI is obviously transforming creative industries right now, opening up huge possibilities, but also raising some big concerns.

So I'd love to hear about what you do. This means New York Times as some artists and creative if you saw you, Megan, you mentioned backstage that you and your team are building your own AI, impersonation, Detective detection system. Talk to us a little bit about that for sure, sure. Well, I'll just first say that I think that technology has has done a lot for the music business. I think that it has always pushed creativity forward.

But I will say it is a scary world we live in, because you just never know how they're going to use your face or your voice. And the truth is, like we're just talking about that genuine connection, it's really important for me to feel like anytime my fans see something that they feel like it is really like evils, and saying it to them, I want them to feel like that they can trust me. I have partnered with a company called Looney that is constantly working on pulling down these imposters or these social media posts, whatever it is that is not coming from me or my team, and that is a full time job at this point, and it is really, really crazy. And the scary thing is, is even when your family members think it's actually you, you're like, Oh Lord, they're getting really good at this. But, but, yeah, we have, we have found a team of people who are taking serious just like you are.

And I just want to keep that, that relationship with my fans, the way that, the way that I wanted to be genuine and pure and authentic you're coming into this. But I suspect that every creator is going to want something like this, and maybe eventually every human, as we go into this world where it's always understand, it's probably to understand, if you can actually trust David, you're the president, it's a very broad topic, but if you just pick what the documents are you most excited about? So have you transition in AI can be sort of like an up leveling of creative potential. I'll just start with that statement. There's certainly risks associated with impersonation and theft of IP and whatnot, which I think will get worked out as it was YouTube and Spotify in the early days.

Then we'll get there. But I got my first Macintosh computer where six. Years old, the Macintosh original, and I was on that computer learning how to use MAC Paint. And eventually I got to go to Photoshop. I was doing graphic design at the age of 11 or 12 as a service to people.

I got making money, making business cards and flyers and stuff. And so I was early on when Kai's power tools came out. Does anyone remember that? No one in this room that is so depressing. Okay, there's a couple, but Adobe Photoshop, right?

You can put like images on and edit them and manipulate them, and power tools have these filters. And you would do a filter to the image, and it was like, Holy crap. You could make the image sharper, you could make it blur. You could do all. You can create depth.

You can do all these things that people were like, That's cheating. Like, that's not fair. Like, how can you do that? You're the cameraman supposed to do that, or the guy who learned how paintbrush is the one who should be doing that. And so there's always and then later on, I did, like, you know, made techno music.

Don't make fun of me for it. But, you know, you and I talked about, I used to have, like, a Juno 106, TV 303, and then I got all the synthetic sequencers on my computer, and there were all these plugins that came out, and the plugins became, I mean, just like a music industry today, it was a question of, like, Are you cheating? Like, is that really fair? And what ended up happening is creators, whether graphic creators or music creators found extraordinary ways to leverage these new tools to create new soundscapes, new visual features, new types of film. Today in Hollywood, a lot of the production houses are and I've spent some time with some of these companies, they're using like second units to do fully AI rendered like second units, unit.

So the cost comes down, but the stuff you can do goes up by, like, 100x because you couldn't, you didn't have the budget to go and, like, recreate a trading floor from the 1970s and now you can do an AI in a couple of minutes. And so the creator, the director, has this ability to make a landscape that they otherwise wouldn't have the ability to make. And so I think that there's a leveling up that's happening in terms of what creators can do, and we're just starting to see people tinker with these things, and the stuff that I've seen, especially in video, and I'm sure over time, we'll see more and more happen in music. It's just incredible. So I think that the second big wave that's probably still to come is non linear content.

And what I mean by that is, like today, whether it's a video or music track, you just press play and it goes linearly from beginning to end. I think that creators are going to unlock like in video games, the ability to maybe have some difference in how that track plays or how that movie plays out. Whether it's like, click and choose your own adventure, which I think may be a little annoying to consumers, or it's like, what if you could listen to your favorite house music track and make it a little bit faster, little bit cooler, a little bit shorter, add some vocals, add some jazz, but the Creator, not the user, but the Creator can set all those parameters. So now the creator is almost like coming up with all these ideas, but in different dimensions of how they can create music. And if you don't have to have one final track, and you can say, hey, we could make a couple different ways that this track can play out, and then the actual playback for the consumer, whether it's in a video or in music, could be a little bit different.

And so I think we're likely going to see like, progressive creators come up with incredible ways of using these tools and these capabilities, where people are going to be watching movies differently. Like, hey, we all watch the same show, but I saw a little different view that you saw, like I saw from the bad guys view you saw from the good guys view, or we all track a little bit differently. So that's the sort of stuff that I think would be really cool with the AI unlocked sort of different experience. So as the creator and control search on these guys, I creator, if there was a framework for your fans to be able to work with the music, where everyone was greatly compensated, because it is your music, for sure, I think it's fun to be creative, but, you know, I think, Like, that's why I started doing this to begin with. So I would love for my fans to be able to do something, if it's fair for the person who wrote it, proposed it, created it.

I'm down for that. I want everybody to be able to like color outside of the lines and try new things. So like I said, if people are compensated for it, Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Well, okay, are you guys doing anything like this?

It's fun. Well, I'm looking at my comments. There is this one feature working on that touches on this that absolutely love, which people have been asking for forever. So you know, in movies, you have like, I am the game. You can go in and see, like, who's the director, who's producer.

You're really nerd up in music, that hasn't often been the case. You often know who the performer is, but most people have no idea who wrote it or produced it. So this is leaked a little bit already, but we are. We're rolling out this. This feature called Song DNA, where we meticulously go through to understand exactly who played a role on each song.

You can see that song writer actually like that sample is actually from this original song. So we'll see, I think, and I think it's really important that there are all these creators around the performance that there are that's something I'm very excited. It's really odd. That. Okay, all right, another question for both of you, the CEO, if environment.

Now for both of you as the old my partner, Alex and I have stepped into the roles of those deals. We're spending a lot of time talking with artists, with podcast creators and with authors. I love the books. I'm very excited about this all around the world, and one of my favorite questions is, what can be building for you as a creator or as a user, by the way, yeah, well, into speaking and as a creator and a user, I think would be cool to build something based off of demons that day, you know? Because, I mean, the truth is that we're all going through something at different times, and it'd be really cool for my fans to feel like that day that they were going through something hard.

I was speaking directly to them, that they didn't have to, like, listen through the whole album to figure out, like, Which song is resonating with them for that specific thing that they're going through. So very cool. So you were like, That's interesting. You can So, I mean, you could go into a Spotify and type in a little down here from your fans, because there are so many of them in some sort of aggregated way. Yes, I think that would be cool too, to know how your fans are feeling, too.

I mean, so many different people from so many walks of life have like, it's crazy the story that people and telling me, but one of the three lines for me that I've noticed this evening in meet and greets is they are willing to share like where they are in life and where they are going through and so I don't know, just be able to, like, cater to that even more, to even just have, like, a deeper connection like that with your family. Because my goal always is for them to feel like I'm speaking to them in their story, in their life. But if they're going through something, and I'm singing a song about, let's have a part, you know? I mean, they might not, that might not be the thing that helps them get through it, the musician, you only get data on how many plays there were and what the average listen kind of was, that's that's all the only feedback you get. It's true.

Yeah, you do get statistics about who is listening, ages and where they listen. You can find your tours, but you're completely right. You have no idea how they're feeling and looking at AI. I just talked about how AI allows people to speak in English at scale. That is a really cool thing, to actually understand more about their demographic.

Well, a couple years ago, there was a guy who took all of our episodes, like, right when AI was kind of getting going, and he ingested them all, and then he created, like an AI character with each of the four of us, and then it was like, each of the four of us said a bunch of stuff, and it was so bullshit, like that sounded awful. He's gotten so much better now. But then someone else made a chat interface where you could ask each of those questions they could answer, as if it was trained on the data from our show. And it was like, Wait, that's actually kind of interesting. Like, very often I'm trying to find something that I heard on another show, like Friedman organ or something.

I'm like, Where was that? And so to find what was said by guests, or find really guests and protection was very hard. Today I got to go, like to YouTube and do transcript search. Or nowadays, I can do Gemini, and Gemini like, search through all the transcript data for me and pull stuff out. But I think every podcaster should have the opportunity to create like Lex chat, or Joe chat, or something where you as a user who's a big fan of the podcast, like, the thing I realized about podcasting is it's people want to, like, get really developed.

They come to these live events. Like, we've been on a live event with like, 1000s of people in LA every year. We've got one here tomorrow night. And they want to, like, absorb more the content, get into the community. Applicant.

Engage, engage, engage, because that particular content vertical is something they're really into. So to have a chat interface where I could ask Joe Rogan questions like, Hey, Who was your favorite guest? Which was the craziest shit you ever heard. You know, tell me about that guy that talked about, like there were pyramids under the ocean and we found them. Like, who was that guy?

I would love to be able to have that dialog with my podcast that I love. I think that would be a really cool feature. You guys can train it off on the transcript data, and theoretically, you could actually make the audio sound like the host. And I could have a dialog through the Spotify app and all of these that creates more engagement for you guys, and all of the I should be your kind of product. So yeah, anyway, because I would love to chat with Lex Friedman and then be like, Hey, tell me about that great Hancock interview.

And then our users could just ask David to talk to digital I got enough of that. But I do worry about, certainly, this thing of, like, digital representation. It's gonna happen. It's happening to a point, and they get it better. They get an opt in.

Yeah, people that I think, I think podcasters are different than these issues. So podcasters are creating content. They're not creating these, like, you know, tracks, the songs that are kind of their product out, but they want to protect the value of the song and so on. Podcasters more content they're creating, I think the more engagement they get, the more depth they get. So there's something about re engaging in that content that actually brings a lot of value for the podcaster.

And it doesn't need to be pure it doesn't need to be how I said the thing at the time. I said it per se, but generally, like, the things I said, like, I'd be fine for AI chat interface. Just be trained on that and want to answer questions. Interesting when music is interesting as a content category because it has so much repeat testing, people listen the same track hundreds, 1000s of times. But in podcasts, you mostly don't the same episode again.

This would be a great value from the back catalog as well, right? But people do listen to the back catalog, like acquired Rogan Lex, like some of these are very timeless episodes, because they're interview shows with someone on particular topic. And so, like, I mean, you know the stats on acquire business podcast, once people listen to an acquired podcast, they go back and listen to the whole brain library, and they're like, this show's awesome. I wasn't all of these, and there's a bunch of pods like that. So I think to have some sort of engagement mechanism around that stuff could be very cool.

Okay, we got some product ideas. My first virus here, amazing lady, you're not just an artist, you're also founder and investor of fashion, jewelry and gaming. So we talked about how you think about your arts career, but how do you think about building a business alongside your music career? Well, like I said earlier, I just really like to be creative, and I want to make sure that my parents feel like they've been they can like that into the work of my music as much as I possibly can or as much as I want to. And, you know, I look out at my shows and I'm seeing people who dress just like me, wearing the bell bottoms in their hats and the jewelry.

And this is it. Yeah, we should have put you in some Bill bottoms too. But, yeah, it's just another way for me to connect with my people and with my fans, and, like I said, for them to be able to, like, live in that world as much as they want to. And it's fun. You know, when you're all under like, the same roof and you're like, looking out there and everybody kind of looks like you, it's a especially like with a little girls and stuff, it makes me feel like, man, like, I better watch what I do and say, because I have a lot of little people watching me.

But also it, it gives me this sense of just like responsibility. To feel like, okay, I need to be a leader. I need to, like, set an example. And yeah, it's a good feeling. It's a good feeling to I feel blessed with like have this platform and be on that stage, and I just Yeah, I want people to feel like they know me.

I want to feel like I know them. But we spoke backstage for so long, I did not have any opportunity at all. I've been at this a long time. I've been living in Asheville for 15 years, and the first 10 I should have packed up, I went home, but I just couldn't. This is the only thing I know how to do.

It's the only thing I want to do is just to tell stories. And yeah, I feel like the last few years have just been such a blessing to me and my life and my team, like I have finally found the right people to surround myself. With that understand my vision and don't want to change me for anything, and if anything, they just want to elevate me and get me to that next step. And it's getting really fun now. So now we have all these opportunities.

There's only so many hours in the day, but I do want to take them all. You know, if it feels right and it feels like it's going to move the needle, then let's do it. You told me you're from this tiny, tiny town 170 and you moved pretty further on. Yes, I did. I'm from Baskin, Louisiana, a little town of 170 people.

I'm very proud where I come from, but honestly, I compare. I was telling you this in the room too, that I compare a lot of what I do to what my dad does. My dad is a farmer, and he farms corn, wheat, soybeans, oats, and gets up every day and busts his tail doing it, and he does the same thing every single day. I mean, it looks a little bit different for me every day. But, um, you know, at the end of the day, it's your livelihood, if it's in you, then you just get up and you do it.

A storm could roll through, and you just get up and do it anyway. So I call myself a song farmer, amazing. Amazing. David spoken is a big movement podcast in 2019 and you and your girls started, as you said, during covid in 2020 Could you talk a little bit to us about the growth and evolution that you've seen and sort of where you think it's going next? You mentioned some of the ideas you have.

But what do you see podcasting? Well, podcasting kind of became what blogging used to be. Everyone that had blogs prior to that, everyone so in the business world, like, if you've got, you know, I think one of the problems is a lot of this stuff got solid, and maybe we're part of this problem as well. But like people selling shit, like, like, I'm trying to like people doing podcasts because they're trying to, like, heighten their profile because they have stuff to sell. I don't know if that intention really resonates and works.

Well, maybe, maybe we're part of maybe we should be blamed for that as well, I don't know, but I feel like there's an aspect of that where, like, everyone's got podcasts now, and the market will sort itself out. People listen to what they want to listen to and stuff for. So it's very crowded. It's very noisy out there. And I think to some extent, we're seeing folks step it up, right?

So the visual stuff matters a lot, I think more than people are realizing, but a lot of the stuff will hold its own as audio. But Chris Williams said, I don't know if you guys know that this guy is podcaster. He did anyone see the episode? They built a set on the same kind of sound stage and set stage that they use for the Mandalorians, like this LED wall that, like, wrapped around it's so and they built Interstellar, like the guy's house with Interstellar, with the trailer and the driveway. It's freaking insane.

I recommend you watch it on YouTube, just to see what they built. The YouTube thing, I'm so sorry. I so this is why I think the video on Spotify doesn't matter a lot, because I do think a lot of the folks are differentiating by improving the quality of the video content. And it's not just me having a chat and then obviously the podcasts are more creative, like all the murder crime industry stuff. It's so cool, like it's a totally different level.

It's not just someone sitting at the table having a conversation. Joe Rogan can hold his own having a conversation for two hours, and we'll get great content. But most people cannot. Most people need it. So the good creator they're gonna need to go to, like murder crime history, that might be a better format.

So I think there's a lot of this differentiation that's going to start to happen, which, by the way, will like it fundamentally improve the quality of the experience that the consumers, the listeners are like, the viewers are like, this is awesome. Now, like that Matthew McConaughey episode, visually, it's just like, I don't care what McConaughey is saying, this is just so cool. Pretty cool. And ask you, one of the things that I think people like about listening to you numbers is that you have a positive view of the future. And there's a lot of stuff here right now, and you're going to start a podcast.

Well, we'll see. But I do think the thing that troubles me the most is just kind of how techno pessimistic we are, right? And I think, like, everyone's just like ai humorism, like AI is the most unfavorable thing right now in the country. There's some survey that came out it was like Iran, like Iran is more favorable than AI. Like, the sort of thing that happened where AI just became the new like, whether it was climate change or.

Or whatever, there's always this, like looping threat that we latch on to. And I think we've had this, like this shift in our psyche, particularly in the West, meaning the US and Western Europe, probably since the 1970s like 1969 we landed on the moon and we had Woodstock that same summer, and I think that was the summer when we became techno pessimists, where we were like, worried about chemicals in our water, radiation killing us. Nuclear energy could burn, melt down and wipe us. Nuclear bombs are overhead. So we simply became way more concerned about tech.

But if you look at like, how tech is progressing, human lifespan, human health span, how many hours people have to work, the number of hours that people have to work is going down the quality of life. I know a lot of people are struggling. Still in America, there's a lot of less behind differences in what's going on, but a lot of people are moving up the ladder because of the advances in technology. We all got a freaking super computer in our pocket. There's just so much that I think we take for granted.

And when I look at the technology that's being developed and is like real today, and I think about, holy shit, what this is going to do tomorrow? Like, we're all going to live forever. We're going to have free friggin energy. We're going to be in flying cars moving around the point, like, oh, wait, finally, forever. They launched yesterday.

They got FAA certified yesterday, by the way, nobody did. So these are the sorts of things that are happening that I think don't get enough attention. And we spend all this time thinking about how we're going to die and what's going to kill us and what's coming next, and we don't talk enough about how exciting tomorrow is going to be. And so I want to kind of change the message a little bit and spend some time on it. And that's kind of why I do this show.

It's why I do and considering doing the pre show, which will just be focused on the science and tech of tomorrow, and just kind of get deeply excited about it, that's great. I do think it's important. Everyone can follow along with that future, especially, for example, in music, but I'm very positive. I will say one more. I think the fear of tomorrow is what makes everyone turn against each other, because as soon as you're about tomorrow, you have a reason to blame someone around you, and that's why we are all like this all the time.

And I think it's very bad. It's very unhealthy. Go to a dark place. And so I want to all be optimistic about tomorrow and be realistic, but be optimistic about tomorrow. That's why it didn't matter.

Okay? I could keep talking about him forever, but Thank you so much for coming. Thank you so yeah, I Guess you have A better How about.

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*Source: stt · Language: en · Model: claude-opus-4-6*

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