Daniel Ek: Life After Spotify, Broken Healthcare Incentives, Catching Disease Early & AI's Potential

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the all-in interview show where we, the all-in podcast, and dedicate an hour to just some of the great thinkers, creators of our time. And today will be no different. Daniel Eck is with us, you know him, the co-founder of Spotify, which he started 20 years ago and he ran it for those two decades to an extraordinary state of affairs today, well over 700 million active users, over 300 million premium subscribers. But on January 1st this year, he shifted and became the executive chairman with me and David Friedberg today. Daniel Eck, how are you, sir? Welcome to the program. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's good to be all. Yeah, it's good to see you. We've even known each other for 20 years. I remember the first shack your partner leaned into me at Internet something and said, "Hey, check this out." And he showed me Spotify. But this was at a time when nobody had a subscription service. So we're going to talk today about your new startup, which is incredible in the healthcare space. But take us back to the launch of Spotify and how the crazy idea got started. And then how hard it was to break through with the music industry, which are also known as the hardest partners in the world. As your wealth grows, have you noticed how much more complex things get between investments, tax strategy, and estate planning? Managing in all is a full-time job that you didn't ask for. Creative planning can help. Their coordinated team of investment managers, CPAs, and affiliated estate attorneys can do much of the heavy lifting so you don't have to. Creative planning where wealth works together. Go to creativeplanning.com/all-in. Yeah, well, I usually start off by sort of saying whenever anyone asks me about the story, it's like, "Well, I had hair when I began this and by the end of this I obviously ended up being bald." So you can see that it wasn't an easy journey. All jokes aside, I mean, just to kind of set the scene. I started Spotify in 2006. I was 23 at the time. And the world looked a little bit different. So this is pre-iPhone, pre- -- I mean, Facebook existed, but it was college-only. YouTube didn't exist. So just like that kind of dates me, but this is before all the things we now take for granted. And the world at that time and the music industry at that time was in freefall because a music piracy was kind of rampant. So we had a Napster, we had Kazah, we had all these things, and there was an organization called the RIAA that went around and actually sued individual consumers in the US for illegally downloading music. And so I was sitting in Sweden and I was thinking to myself, this is wild and this is crazy. There's no way to put the genie back in the bottle. And me, my co-founder, Martin, we were kind of sitting in spitballing, start-up ideas at the time, and Martin asked me like, well, if you could do anything you'd like to do, what would you do? And I said, well, my real passion is music, but that seems like a really stupid idea. And he's like, well, why is that a stupid idea? And I kind of told him about, it's really hard because you have to do all these deals with the record companies, you have to then figure out how to do licensing and copyright and you have to do all of these different things. And he said, well, what if you did this? And then he kept asking these, what if questions? And eventually I ran out of reasons to say it's I said, well, I guess you could do something. And if you did something, it would feel like it had all the world's music at your fingertips. And he's like, well, that sounds pretty good. And I said, well, okay, well, let's give it a try. We started trying to license music. Originally, the idea was to try to go global from day one. And everyone was just laughing at us when we were originally saying that. But I sort of lucked out because it turned out that one of the worst music markets in the world was my home country Sweden. And part of the reason why it was one of the world's music markets was because we had super fast broadband already from the early 2000s. So we were kind of living in the future where people had such quick bandwidth connections that they could download pretty much whatever they wanted. So they were doing an iTunes actually wasn't even available in the marketplace. There was literally no legal options. So I think the music industry had lost like 80% or something of its revenues. And so it was like, it was kind of this crazy of, you know, coincidence and kind of all of these things, the conflicts of events where we figured out, you know, that me and my apartment, we basically took all of our own money that we had made from prior startups. And we said the record labels, what if we would guarantee you that basically you'd keep your bonus for the next year and you'll make your budget for the next year. You know, if this really is as bad as you think it is, then you just shut it down after a year, but you still made the bonus. And if this actually works, you win as well. So you win no matter what. And they're like, okay, well, this seems kind of like an interesting idea. And the eventually after a few years of negotiation agreed to it. So we launched in late 2008, and it instantly became a huge hit. We then took it to the UK and made a huge hit there. And then in 2011, 15 years ago now, we launched in the US. And yeah, I mean, and the rest is sort of a history. I mean, it's not amazing. Forever five years in the laboratory just to get to the to the US market is quite a, quite a journey. That's a lot of pain and suffering. Yeah, but, but you know, you know, the crazy thing is I'm on the same journey now again. Yeah, here we are. Neko actually, as crazy as it is, we started the company eight years ago in 2018. And we started it in Sweden in 2023. So it took us five years to develop the product, tried out in Sweden, and then once we proven it in Sweden, we took it to the UK and did it there. And then from there on, now we're launching in the US. So it's an exact Spotify playbook again, but this time in healthcare. One of the afflictions of great entrepreneurs is your entrepreneurial, right? I mean, you just can't stop. Or maybe I just have a high pain tolerance. I'm not sure which one. Yeah. Once things got smooth, you had to get back into it. But at what point did you start thinking about doing other things, Daniel, were you like actively angel investing at Spotify over the years as CEO? The business is building hundreds of millions of users, public, successful things are growing nicely. You've got a great leadership team. We've obviously met a lot of your team over the years. How did you start to do these other projects? I know you've got a few others and focus on Echo. Yeah. It's kind of crazy. I'd forgotten about it. But my team now showed me very recently, like I apparently did this lunch with the FT interview in I think 2012 or 2013 or something. Just after the US launch of Spotify, where I was talking about healthcare already back then. So I've been thinking about healthcare specifically for a very, very long time. It's just been, I think a lot of people just talk about all the stuff that's going bad in the world. But my view is that actually most things are going pretty well. It's kind of up into the right on the technology curve and all the things that we're getting. But I try to focus on the problems that aren't going that well. One of those happens to be healthcare. So I've been kind of interested about this. It's like, you know, how is it that we're spending more and more money on healthcare, but getting worse and worse outcomes? And what can we do about it? And so that really kind of got me into the space. I think healthcare is kind of unique and kind of special. I honestly didn't have any money until Spotify went public. So I wasn't a prolific angel investor. What year was that? That was 2018. We went public. Yeah. Yeah. So I probably started doing a little bit of investing in 2018. But I had no money before then. So, you know, it was literally just kind of all-in, focus on Spotify for, I guess, you know, the better part of 12, 13 years before I made any investing in anything else. And then, you know, you and I, we were talking about it at this dinner, like a week ago or something. But, you know, I then tried to do a little bit of investing. I'd actually already started a neco at that time. And I kind of just realized that I love building way more than I loved investing. And so right now I came to the same conclusion. It's so painful to watch companies you invested. This was our whole dinner conversation. You know, I get mismanaged and you can't do it. Well, you spend time on boards. That's why I don't join boards anymore. You're sitting on a board. You advise a CEO and they don't listen to you and you pull your hair out. Like, I would have done something different. Why didn't you do this? And, you know, and if they are listening to you and you're effectively instructing them on what to do, it also doesn't work because they're not leading. And so I became pretty committed to this idea. Like, you find amazing entrepreneur founder CEOs, give them money and never look at it again and you'll be fine, generally better than not. And And then, you know, the flip side is, if that's really what you're passionate about and you have the activity or the agency, it's to step in and do it yourself. - Yeah, the more instruction they need, probably the less chance they're going to succeed. - So Daniel, maybe you can just give us the overview on Neco, kind of what the-- - Yeah, and how you came to that idea, right? - Yeah, how did you come to this specific idea? - I started researching the space a very, very long time ago and maybe just as a quick primer for the audience. The US is spending 18% of its GDP on healthcare. It's a single largest line item in the budgets right now. And if you take heart disease alone, it's in the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being spent on that disease group alone in the US alone. I mean, it's just insane. It's larger than Fortune 10 companies revenues, just one disease group. So it's a gigantic problem, as I mentioned. And so I started looking into everything from like, drugs to, can you make more efficient drugs? Is it about cancers and basically started like targeting, like what are the real reasons why it looks that way? And I think the real conclusion ended up being there's lots of reasons not one, we see, but we see a few really big ones. Cardiology or heart health is a major one. We see skin cancer, melanomas being another big one. So there's a few sort of major groups of illnesses that is over-representative. But the major one is really chronic disease overall. And the crazy thing about chronic disease when you read about it is that if you discover these things early, they're totally preventable and the cost of dealing with them is very small and is suffering for the person that are having it and their family and community is very small too. So the key thing is if you discover things early, you're actually good. And so then the question is, well, why don't we discover things early? And it happens to be that we don't have enough data. So everyone in the entire healthcare industry is in the agreement that we have to take healthcare from reactive to preventative health. And, but then they're now all they disagreement starts, which is how do you do that? And our view, my co-founder Yelma and I, our view is really that it all starts with having better data. If you have better data, you're gonna be able to discover things much more easily and that in itself then lead to have a chance of discovering those things much earlier, which then creates this virtuous flywheel of then changing healthcare. - So predictive data that allows you to be predictive about future adverse health outcomes and course correct ahead of time. - Yeah, that's a holy grail is to get to that point. And essentially our view is that the way you get there is that you need a lot more data than you have today, both from each modality that you gather data but also across multiple modalities and you need it longitudinally, so you need it over time. So if you had a lot more data and you had it over time, you'd be able to have a lot higher likelihood of doing those kind of predictive analysis. And then what we then said is, well, okay, how do we do that? And it so happened to be that if you think about really what's happened in the last 20 years, one of the biggest innovations, of course, is the smartphones. And we've had more and more sensors packed into the smartphones. So there's more and more sheep sensors and sheep electronics that's available to us. So our view was like, okay, well, we should be able to utilize this to build a lot more sensors than what's been able to be built before. And then the other thing, we started pre the LLMs and everything like that, but it was then called machine learning, but today we talk about it as AI. We should have a lot better intelligence. So if we have all these massive data sets, we should be able to make really good predictions about it. And obviously, again, similar to that, this is exactly what we learned with Spotify too. The more data we were able to gather, the better predictions, we're able to give you about what song to play next. And so this is exactly the same thing that you now need to do in healthcare, but obviously it's across multiple modalities and now across longitudinal data sets as well. >> Is there evidence today that some of this early observational data can affect ultimate health outcomes? I mean, I can see this working for metabolic conditions, things related like exercise, depletion, rates, and blood sugar and sleep. But ultimately the correction there is typically diet exercise. What are some other examples of major diseases that we can kind of identify ahead of the curve course correct? >> And maybe just explaining what Niko is for people who don't know. >> Yeah, maybe I'll start there and then we can get into it. So in a very simple way, the experience of Niko today and in Gen 2 is it's $499. It is reinvented healthcare experience from the ground up. A vertically integrated, we do everything for building our own facilities to having our own nurses and doctors on staff to building our own diagnostic equipment and doing everything on our own on the software side. So it's really kind of an end to end solution that we've designed from the ground up. And we designed it with the goal of creating the most valuable hour you can invest in your health. That's the mission that we have and that's where we come into work to do every day of the everyday really at work. The experience is really you come in. The first thing you typically tend to do is that you draw blood from us. So we then measure 53 blood markers. You then go through our skin rig where we have a camera system that takes over 6,000 super high-res images across your body where we index every mold and lesion and all of the possible rashes and rednesses you may have as well. That gets indexed. We then look into your heart and blood circulation. We look at grip strength, all the sort of traditional markers that we have very good scientific evidence are valuable indicator as you think about sort of health. Then at the end of this visit that lasts for about an hour, you get uninterrupted time with a clinician and you go through all of the results, including the blood works during that hour. So you have a complete set where you can go through your values within that hour with your doctor and the doctor will answer any questions you may have, but you will also with that clinician sit down and go through results about things you may even want to improve as well when it comes to your health. So that's the experience that we're launching with today in New York, in the US. And obviously we'll launch in many more places across the United States over the next coming months. And just the identification of things ahead of the curve? 'Cause I've heard of other, there was one medical, there was forward, I mean, there were a few other kind of attempts at making these integrated centers where you go on and get preventative checkups with their own instrumentation. And I think I've heard the thesis a little bit before, what have you identified that may be the novel Daniel that we haven't seen in the past? - I think first and foremost, the important thing to mention is as I mentioned, we started this in 2018. So this company's been around for eight years, we've done more than 100,000 scans already. So we've actually published data every year. So we've just published our third year data survey where we go through the health outcomes that we have across our members. And around 1% of our members have a serious underlying medical situation that is undiagnosed that we discover. So again, the good news is many of our members are healthy and we're just talking about improving their current health status. And as you correctly pointed out, a lot of that ends up coming around stress, around diet, around sleep, and those things. But the most encouraging thing we're finding out is we've done these studies for three years in a row is that the people with the worst health status are the ones that are improving the most. So it turns out that this ability of having a clear, visual understanding of where you are in your health journey currently today, and having a clinician that sits down with you explaining the situation and possible remedies to that is a huge benefactor for getting people to start improving things around lifestyle. So we've seen members that have gone from year where they've been smoking to not smoking as part of them having to do this echo and prioritizing their health. We've obviously seen people with severe medical underlying illnesses that have gone from discovering those and then treating them and having much better overall health as a result. So it's really kind of all across the basis, but I'll give you a very concrete example. So take dermatology as a great example. The average person at Necklet today has 950 moles. - The average person has 950 moles. - Yes. - That's amazing. Did you can't tell I guess is the punchline here? They're like not detectable by the human well if you really went through your skin you'd be surprised how many you'd fight I mean it's a big dispersion some have you know many many thousands of some of them have perfect AI application for AI obviously yeah exactly so if you think about it across a normal doctor's visit how likely is it that that doctor will check out all the 950 moles that you may have it's not going to happen so normally what happens in a normal doctor visit would be you may say look I have a mole or the doctor sees hey let's take a look at that mole it looks a little bit funky and then they bring out their their tool where they inspect it they usually these days have a software the checks against whether this mole they take a camera across many different frequencies to then discover both the the size of this mole but also the texture of the mole and so on and so forth we literally do that and we first have an AI system the flag possible risk factors and then we have a human clinician that then goes through and reviews those as well and should we even at that point find something we then have expert dermatologist on staff multiple of them that then also reviews that results so that's just one indicator of like what happens in one visit but let's now presume the scenario that we'd have multiple visits and maybe one year it's actually we don't discover anything but because we cataloged and indexed every single one we can actually now in a longitudinal base look at them from one year to the next year so it may be growing abnormally these are things that if you think about it even the best doctors in the world can't possibly remember how your mole may have looked like from one year to another so again back to your point this is a perfect application of AI right but we look at this as like this is a perfect application of how healthcare should look like it should seamlessly be both AI and amazing clinicians in a great package experience so that's essentially what we're trying to do with neck up that's great and are you actively running it a CEO Daniel or are you operating part time yeah no so similar to Spotify these days where I have two great CEOs I have an amazing co-founder and partner Yalmer is really the brain child of necko and he's the one who's doing most of the work even though I'm sitting here and taking the most of the credits at this point but yeah he's the real brain right you know what I'm struck by the cost of this is so cheap $499 you also have function health and super power to other great services about three fifty four hundred they just do blood work but if we look at the spending right and it's right now it's healthcare number two so security number one and fast your favorite coming up is the interest payments very very well overtake our healthcare spend you can actually have folks come to this every year or every other year for four or every American four or eight percent of the cost of the total we spend on healthcare and I'm I'm curious is this something you expect people to do yearly or something every other year and what impact do you think an investment of every American getting this done every year or every other year maybe every three years even which would be down to two percent of our budget what impact would that have on the forward looking budget and before looking spend if you and have you done those kind of calculations yeah I mean look we obviously have a view but I think it's too early to say so I don't I want to sit here and say that we know conclusively what will happen but I think that the what we do recommend our members is to try to do this on an annual basis and the way I kind of make this analogy is most of us today are trying to go to a dentist on a yearly basis for some reason we don't do an annual health checkup most of us on an annual basis so for me this this should be as as regular as going to the dentist or doing anything else like and it should be an amazing experience this should be you know again as I said what we're really doing is a mission here is is trying to create the most valuable hour you can invest in your health and and you know we know a lot of people are busy so we want to be brutally efficient with people's time so you can actually if you don't have any questions and you're just interested in really doing the test results you could probably get by in 30 40 minutes and and do it so we're not talking about a lot of time to do that and obviously 500 dollars is still a lot of money for people but I do think it's a great investment if you can't afford it to do starting business usually means juggling a bunch of different services just to look legit not anymore with northwest registered agent you get a complete business identity all in one place a business address domain website phone number and more with privacy production built in from day one don't spend hundreds or thousands on services you can get from northwest for free visit northwest registered agent dot com slash all in free and start using free resources to build your business today that $500 you lose money on every visit or break even and then like there's some profit that comes from maybe the upsells it take us with the economic model here and then how that will work with the insurance industrial complex as just functional as it is here in America yeah well so the benefit of being vertically integrated is that we've been able to build you know everything ourselves which means we can also cut costs in a pretty dramatic way so within that $500 a year we are the unit economics are positive and we have clinics today that are profitable that we're operating already today so so we think this is a good price point to enter in because it's a great value for people but because we do all the things ourselves we're able to still make this you know economically viable for us to to create a great business and to be able to grow and invest in that business so that we can spread it to more places as well so Daniel are you focused exclusively on this project you have other stuff you're working on? I'm not exclusively focused on it but it's obviously one of the things that are taking a lot of my time and rightfully so it's one of the biggest problems in the world but I'm still spending time with Spotify I'm exec share there so that's still you know my baby even though I'm not involved in it on everyday basis and we have a few other companies with pre-momateria which is company I I created together with Shaq to just mention earlier where we're trying to really do you know what I mentioned before which is like how do we how do we pay it forward and kind of almost be like the greatest co-founder you could possibly find that's that's what the ambition of pre-momateria. The healthcare thing really perplexes me I kind of look at the the biggest issues for affordability for people in the US right now it's you know buying a home dealing with your educational costs and then healthcare costs is what the top three I feel like we can solve education costs and we can solve home costs with certain market incentives that have been distorted but healthcare is much more complex as you look at the US system beyond just kind of preventive care the cost for servicing patients in a hospital like why is it $15,000 to get stitches at an ER you know why is it $20,000 to get a drug that costs 30 bucks to make you know why when the doctor is making 200 grand a year does the doctor seeing me for eight minutes cost my insurance company $6,000 I mean what is going on from your view that extends beyond like get in front of all of the catch up problems and so on but what's structurally going on with the healthcare system in the US and if you were emperor of the US for a day and you got to say you could do anything you wanted what are the top kind of three things that we're missing that maybe Neco doesn't necessarily address today but are kind of things that you would recommend we fix. Well I mean again I'm definitely not an expert on the US health care system but for me it is like the show me the outcome I'll show you the incentive it's one of those classical problems and if you really really think about it at the moment the entire system is predicated on and the healthcare system was built around a time when we were dealing with infectious disease that was how the healthcare system was built and dealt with so all the incentives are really around that which means we're fixing you acutely when there's massive amounts of symptoms so where we have to go is we have to go to the healthcare system being preventative that means it has to be way more long term today so I'll just mention one of the problems that exists is because normally your healthcare is tied to your employment in one shape or form and because the average 10 year of your employment is not that very long it means that you may have only two three years at one employer and then you switch and when you switch you switch insurers too so one of the questions then if you're that insurer should you invest in something where the payback time may be 10 or 15 or 20 years to do that those are just some of those sort of incentive things like what how do we How do we look at the ROI of some investments that may be 10, 15, 20 years into the future? And who takes those investments? These are not easy things to answer, and I don't claim to have all the answers to them. But one of the things we're trying to do in that case, we're just trying to bring the cost down so that the ROI doesn't have to be that we have to invest or the insurance industry have to invest or employers have to invest millions of dollars, speculatively hoping to get it back in 20 years time with very little data. So our view is like if we lower it, so it may not be a million dollars, it may be, you know, I make it up tens of thousands of dollars. Even if that payback time was 10 or 20 years, I think that there would be a higher propensity and likelihood for a pickup on that. And then the second thing we're trying to do, obviously, is we're trying to add more data to the system. And if we had more data, then it's much more likely with these multimodal longitudinal data sets to be able to actually see, well, what's the efficacy of these things over time? This is also part of the reason, by the way, why we are investing in releasing our data every year of what we're finding so that people can see, okay, well, what happens both on an aggregate necopopulation, which is also super cool, because normally in healthcare systems, they're very country specific, right? And so this is one of the few healthcare companies that are, it's not global, but at least multi-country systems straight away. So that's also super interesting. Like what are we finding in the UK that may or may be similar or dissimilar to the US? That's going to be super fast. What did you find between Stockholm and the UK, I mean, I can take some guesses, but I'm guessing people in Sweden were much more fit in the UK. You probably had more cardiovascular disease and diabetes, yeah. And those are the two, I believe, you tell me if I'm right, Friedberg, aren't those like the two biggest spends in terms of healthcare spending as, I think diabetes is number one, I could be wrong, but cardiovascular diabetes seems to be the big two. So what did you learn between the two populations? Well, I mean, it's really early and it's still relatively small base, it's 100,000 scans, as I mentioned before, but I don't know that I think we're ready to speak about sort of population level health outcomes, but as we grow in Echo, I think we will. And that's going to be super cool. And then, you know, we're already today doing lots of clinical trials. We've done four already. We have two underway. We have another four we're going is we're partnering with the research community as well, deeply around these data sets that we already have today and that we will gather more on tomorrow too. And I think my point with all of this is really just to say, look, we actually, it's for people in tech, the amount of data that exists in the healthcare system is actually not as, the data sets are not that large. That's a crazy part. And so, you know, I think it's a pretty safe set that if we can 10X or 100 X, the amount of data that comes available, we're going to be able to draw super interesting conclusions about that, not just Echo, but the whole healthcare system. Yeah. That's really the bat we're making. Put in the wereables in there is going to be really interesting with the ore is the whoops, the fit bits, you start Apple watches, you start correlating that data with the blood work, I noticed group offering labs now through quest and I don't think maybe you can sink, you know, you are a fool with some of those, but we don't, I've never seen any data, you know, we have sleep, we have recovery, we have heart rate, but I don't think anybody's put the blood work together with that. And then your system, I mean, this could really change everything in terms of healthcare. If we can correlate that, maybe you could speak to the impact you think wereables are going to have. And do you think you partner with them or you just have a, a, a Neco wearable, you eventually just make part of the subscription at 995 because it does seem like there's, these are commodified for the basic 80% of it. I'm sure. Yeah. So what are your thoughts there? Well, already today we, we do allow you to import your Apple health data. So if you do have a wearable data, we will take that. Is there anyone who, in a lot of the big, or a, uh, whoop, et cetera, do, um, allow you to write a lot of that to Apple health as well? That's just one, one sort of example of that. So yeah, we would, we would love to have, of course, more data, um, because that enables us to, again, when the clinician sits down with you to be able to give you a much more 360 perspective about your current health status. So that's one of the things that we encourage, but I do want to say also that I think that this is just like the, the, the service that we're launching today, it is very rare in itself that, um, you know, when you create a diagnostic product normal, the normal way of doing that in this space is you created that spend X amount of years doing R&D, uh, for that thing, then you literally spend the next 10 years selling exactly that thing. But with NECCO, within this three year, what we launched and now launching in the US, we're on Gen 2. So we've already upgraded our, uh, diagnostic infrastructure. And so I think where you should expect with NECCO is that we're launching with one thing today, but we're going to keep adding more and more and more value and we'll keep adding more and more, um, you know, valuable, um, diagnostics that we can find and we can put in at, uh, the price point, um, you know, so, so that's kind of the goal. So this is just the beginning and, and the goal is obviously to make this even more valuable so that we can deliver against our mission of having the most valuable hour you can spend on your health. Daniel, do you want to take a step back and talk about what's going on broadly in the tech industry right now and AI, you know, what's your view on pacing up from here? I want to hear these questions. Yes. Do we, do we need to pace the frontier? I'm struck by the fact that if, if we kind of look at the, the, the world, um, and certainly over the last few years, I, I kind of always, I'll always say, you know, uh, we're walking into, uh, COVID and everyone of us became a virologist. We were all the sudden, uh, supply chain experts, uh, after the first, uh, you know, uh, oil tanker and the Hormuz Straits got stuck somewhere, um, you know, um, and then with Ukraine war broken out, we were all military experts and military, uh, you're talking about the oil and podcast right now. Uh, I know. I'm just talking in. And sorry. It's actually the, we, we're named it the all in laboratory pod. It's the all lab because we are just, we're, we're just a lab. We need to be regulated because our opinions are so dangerous, you know, that maybe Spotify's podcasting can regulate us. We are. So crazy. Yeah. And my, my point is just like everyone expresses these things with such extreme confidence and it turns out most of the time we ended up being completely wrong, even the biggest experts. So I'm not sure I have much value to add, except to say that I believe that we're still in the innings where we can alter the impact, uh, for how to use these technologies, um, um, you know, my view is that every great technology, um, has extreme positives and extreme negatives and is really up to us now to steer this towards the outcome that we want. Um, I think it's great that the debates are being had, but honestly, I have no, um, sort of strong opinion. One way or the other, if we should pace it or if we should not, I, I just know that if I look at healthcare and I look at what we're doing at Spotify, like it is truly amazing. I mean, I, the, the perfect music product, um, is one that, um, you know, I, I, I've described as many times and I think we're getting closer to it now, which is, which is awesome is right now, you know, you can put together a better playlist yourself than what the system could do. Um, but I think in the future, uh, downrightly, we can soundtrack every moment of your life in an amazing way, uh, where you just feel more like the, the power of great music is that you will feel more if you're happy, you'll feel happier, if you're, you know, uh, uh, wallowing and then feeling sad, you know, you'll feel, feel, feel feeling more, uh, wallowing sad in that moment. And, you know, that, that's thanks to AI and then, uh, if I look at, you know, the example we talked about with dermatology, like, you know, 950 moles being able to track them over time, keeping you safe, like, these are positive, amazing examples with AI and yeah, we talk about this thing as us, we, we tend to amplify that, but I want to see more positive examples of AI. Uh, I, I think we as an industry have done a terrible disservice of not talking about all the really, really, um, crazy positive stuff that we can use AI for that actually greatly benefits everyone. And, in that sense, do you also think about the benefit and the value of open source AI, open weight models where I think you can now look at like a 13 cent per million token output cost versus 30 dollars, that's an incredible difference that unleashes this technology across a broad spectrum of businesses and individuals that there is no, you know, concentration of value or wealth amongst a handful of businesses or individuals that if we can really make these open weights and open source models proliferate. But obviously, this regulatory conversation may restrict the expansion of open source and open weight models. And if you have a view on kind of the importance there. - I think technology's always gone between open and close, right? Like we had Windows versus Linux in the first iteration, you know, iOS versus Android. Like we've seen this play out so many times. And where we tend to net out is we tend to have both. And, you know, to the extent that I have a view of about it, I've very positively advocated for open source models before. And I will keep on doing that because I think that that brings a lot of innovation that will be really helpful for the ecosystem as well. So I completely agree with you Dave, that I think that, you know, if you look at these now and certainly what we're seeing, you know, let's take Spotify as an example. We're obviously using a lot of the frontier models, but we have a bunch of fine tune models ourselves too. And we tend to do both. And that is actually making us more innovative. And that's actually allowing us to do certain things that we couldn't do with the frontier models either because of cost or inefficiency reasons or sometimes because we just couldn't tune in the way we will want it. And so I personally think it's like, it's going to be both. But one of the things I heard that is a perspective I haven't heard before, that maybe I would encourage people, not that I am sort of an expert in all these things, but I'm surprised that people haven't talked about sort of the amount of computes. So if you think about it is, for me, this isn't the amount just the intelligence itself of a single model, but it's still, you know, of the basis of, you know, the amount of computes you're doing can indicate something, right? Like so if I'm using 100,000 GPUs for something, that's probably going to be a lot more powerful than if I'm running an open source model on my home PC. It's probably very unlikely that I'm going to be able to do an enormous cyber thing. Certainly if the companies have mythos class models to try to, you know, protect themselves that I should be able to with an open source model in my home PC do a lot of damage. So, you know, I just find it to be a fascinating thing to just think about if there's a way of looking at the amount of computes as well and as one sort of factor in that. - Right, assuming model equivalency compute as a key metric of defensibility and that's really where we can start to build guardrails around who can have access to the most compute and how do you get certified for compute as opposed to certified for software? - Wasn't that the original, like two years ago, one of the original concepts of limiting this was how many terraflops or how many GPUs you had. - Well, no, what they did, that was how they wrote the regulatory laws around regulating models. So, they basically set a model that was trained on a number of terraflops and it was like, this was like a California genius assembly got together and said, we figured it out, we know how to classify, you know, scary models and bad models. - How many ethernet cables are in your data center as they proxie for how far it was? - How many watts of power went into making this model? But I do think your point of compute as a roadblock, it's probably a good one. This is what it used to be, you remember when Cray Supercomputers came out and there was a limited access and they were considered like a security risk and you had to get approved in order to get access to a Cray Supercomputer because you could use them to design nuclear weapons and you could use them to crack codes and do all the things and people worried about that. - Yeah, today a Cray Supercomputer, I think, is less power than a washing machine or something, some product, we probably have in our kitchen. It is a really great point, actually, Daniel, because if you've got strong compute installed as a defense capability, assuming model equivalency, you're gonna be hugely advantaged. - I haven't seen it in the debate at least and I'm surprised, but maybe it's something I'm missing. - Hey, before we let you go, I guess two questions for you, take them whichever order you want. What's the strategy and how to spotify, look at something we care about deeply, podcasting, which is built on open standards and you guys have become a major player in it. Open standards are kind of moving one direction and spotify has got a lot of proprietary stuff. I've talked to you about this and some of your team members like, hey, can we keep supporting the open source part? And then the second piece, people don't know this, but there was this incredible company, Star Doll. It was one of the first companies in Stockholm, Sweden, to ever get funding from American VCs. - You were the CTO? If I remember, were the intern for a couple of years? - Well, I was the intern in CTO, whatever. - It was probably one of those. People don't know, this was an incredibly innovative company in terms of many variables like digital trends and restrictions and all that stuff. So maybe take us through either both of those questions 'cause that's just two personal things that I would love to hear about if we were at dinner. - Yeah, I mean, look, again, as I said, I think the open and closed are going to be two things that are going to exist side by side. So the interesting thing about spotify today is like on the one hand, of course, we're a huge platform in podcasting and we have a destination that are certain things that we're doing that general podcast may or may not be doing. One of those will be how we're handling comments and so on their specific to the platform. But we actually do have tools. So what a lot of people don't know is that we also through our platform aggregate and distribute podcast onto a lot of the other podcasting platforms. So there's a bunch of podcasters that are using our tools to then distribute to some of the other platforms too and we're obviously doing that through open standards. So I don't think the answer for us is like one way or the other. We think both can coexist. But obviously if you wanna innovate within a standard and the key is to have other people agree to that standard and that can sometimes take you longer so it might be harder to innovate. So Spotify's approach has been let's support both intent. So that's that, and then there's two features. I'm just wanted to make sure I ask you about. There's one for going live. So this is part of the new standard. So having that on our page, so when we go live, it actually respects the RSS feed and sends that note out and then there's another one called value and donations where the person who has like, if they happen to be doing donations on whatever platform or they do them to pay for those to the podcast OGs and the underground really wants Spotify to support. So I'm just doing my job and representing as a 17 year podcaster. Please add those two or support those two. If you think it's worthy of doing. All right, well, it's no longer my decision alone, I should say. But I will certainly bring right to the chair and why I got them on the line. Yeah, of course, of course. But yeah, I'll definitely bring the feature across to the team. Tell us about Stardol, where you wrap up, who we should learn there when you were 20 years old, 21, 22, whatever it was, it's Stardol. Yeah, you know, it was a great experience. It was, it's kind of a, you know, it brings me back memory lane. You know, I, I did Stardol just before I started Spotify. So there was a entrepreneur called Mattias, who was kind of one of the OG entrepreneurs in the Swedish ecosystem. He had been around since the Dothcom bubble. And he had, it was originally the site called paper doll, heaven in Turco, Finland, out of all places, by this old lady and her son. And index ventures had invested in it and taking kind of a majority stake to help doing this because they had no idea of scaling their sites. And actually, you know, an index of Mattias kind of came in with the idea of rebranding it and building it into Stardol. And so they came to me one day, and they, they sort of asked around for people who knew attacking could be technical enough to help build it. And I had already decided I wanted to go build Spotify, but Danny Rimer is very good at convincing people to do things. And so as a favorite to him, and sort of me hoping that he would come and fund Spotify, which by the way, didn't end up happening. But, you know, I, I kind of said, okay, a final help you for, I think it was six to 12 months, something like that. But then so I went over to Finland and I checked it out. It was kind of wild and crazy because I think the average page load time at that time was like four minutes. So it took four minutes to render a simple page. So it was basically the server was completely breaking down by it seems I was like, holy s**t, this is crazy. I wonder how much more traffic you can do if you actually made this work like in a snappy way. And so we basically re-architected the website. I hired an entirely new technical team and brought it down to under a second of load time and obviously the traffic exploded, so co-invested, you know. And I said, okay, well, I've done my part, thank you. And then I left and built Spotify. It's amazing, these orange stories, like what happened right before the thing is always interesting. to me, listen, Daniel, continue success. If people want to try Nico and EKO, where can they go? - So we launched the first one at 300 Lafayette. So go sign up on Nicohealth.com, wait list, and we'll try to get to as soon as possible. - And this is in New York, 300 Lafayette. - Yes, so only in New York so far, but we're expanding quickly both the number of entities we have in New York. We're launching in Florida as well in Miami, and we're launching in DC, and we're gonna try to launch all over the US in the coming 12 to 24 months. - Yeah, it's great, right on house and sheet. Let's say, back in the day when Sudo had their big studios, they were right around the corner from you, a lot of talk about memory lane. All right, continued success. Everybody go to Nicohealth.com and sign up for the wait list. We'll see you next time, bye-bye. ♪ I'm doing all it ♪ ♪ I'm doing all it ♪