Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q What would that look like? My partner Rob was running through Central Park this morning listening to Spotify, so he was exercising while using your app.
A Okay, so this is going to come out in a few weeks, so I'll tell you kind of what we're going to talk about at Investor Day. Um, I'm a runner, I'm passionate about running, and we see a lot of people running with Spotify, and they make their own playlists. One of the things I want to be possible that's going to be possible Very soon is that you go into Spotify, you just tell Spotify, this is one of the good use cases of AI. I think you say to Spotify, you know, I want, um, running playlist for like an eight minute mile and I want it to be in my taste, but I want it to be on the downbeat, either on my, on both my feet or just one of my feet.
AI assessment note: “you just tell Spotify... I want running playlist for like an eight minute mile”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q So tell me how you think Apple's run, then?
A What I think is interesting about Apple is, when you look at it from the outside, it's, it's a functional org, right? And functional orgs, I used to work at Yahoo for a while. At where? At Yahoo. I sold one of my companies there. And I thought I didn't learn anything there, but I learned a lot about what not to do. It was a completely messed up company back then as well. I think I had four COs in like two and a half years or something. But all the EVPs and SVPs, they fought each other to the death and tried to hide information from each other. So supposedly on paper, I think Apple should not be very well positioned to be able to build that kind of product. I was marveled at why aren't those Functional leads just fighting each other. That's what usually happens. The only answer I've come to as I've spoken to people there is that it actually has to do with tenure of leadership, which is one of the principles I've also tried to internalize Spotify. So they have very long tenure at the, at the senior leadership, which means that these functional leads have found a way to work together to synchronize. So sometimes it's, it's the hardware function that innovates and takes the lead. And then, you know, Software and services follow, and sometimes it's a software function that takes the lead, and they follow. That only works if you have super high trust in the leadership, which I think …
AI assessment note: “it's a functional org... has to do with tenure of leadership”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q What's the thing that keeps you up at night? Like, what do you think the weakest spot for Spotify is right now?
A I think the thing that keeps me up at night is not surprising What, what AI truly means in the limit. I'm pretty sure that media habits are going to change because of AI. And so I don't think it's an option to just sit still. But the way I think about it is the world moves in macro waves. You get some new technology. It often causes a bunch of havoc. Then there's some new business model that emerges and then things change, right? This was the original Spotify. We kind of rode on the microwave of cheap broadband and PCs, right? And then all of a sudden they were so ubiquitous and the, the broadband was so fast. You didn't actually need to own files anymore. You could just stream them, right? We realized that we built a business model around it that became very disruptive to the, to the, uh, download industry and so forth. And then you wait a few years, everything looked great. Then the smartphone came along, and now everything changes again. You have people that don't have a computer. We only had a free tier on the computers. We had no free tier. Turns out that while the PC and the internet, the desktop was, had such low latency that you could stream it. If you try to stream a song over cellular back in 2008, it wouldn't even start. It was 20 seconds to start. It would chop. So, like, everything changed again, and then we had to adapt to that, and we managed to. We came up with …
AI assessment note: “I think the thing that keeps me up at night is not surprising What, what AI truly means”
Answered raw tape
D 4 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.55
Q when he's 25. He talked about insanely great products when he was Dying Insanity Great products. You want to make Insanity Great products? Then you come with me. Well, you knew what was important to him. And I feel, I don't know if you guys do this internally, but I've talked to, you know, Alex and Daniel and you a bunch. I feel your organizing principle is time well spent.
A If you look at what we focus on and what we optimize for, you have a strategic lens, then you have sort of a A business lens and an emotional lens. So the strategic lens is really that we saw a long time ago that the biggest challenge in the world is going to be distribution. You know, when, when the iPhone came out, it felt like distribution was free. People went to the app store every day and looked for like, you know, what's the top charting free and paid app. That, that stopped working. There was a lot of distribution through Facebook with all the install ads that all went away. So from a strategic point of view, When we were going into podcasts, which was like the first, second product we did, we looked at that and said, okay, again, it's all a trade-off. We could do a separate app. It would be easier for us as an org, because we can divide the org, and people can run in parallel, and so forth. But is that the biggest problem, to design the experience? Or is the biggest problem actually getting distribution? And then we looked at, in the App Store, and I think there was maybe, um, it was probably Probably 10, but at least seven really good podcast apps in there, like Overcast and all of these apps. And when we looked at their usage, I think Apple podcast was still like 98 and a half percent. So like the problem wasn't that there wasn't a good enough podcast product. The pr…
AI assessment note: “If you look at what we focus on and what we optimize for”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q about a podcast, but you were taking it. You could read it though. Before, right? It was like stripping out all like the crazy shit that happens on X or the people fighting over politics. And it's just like that. What are the people I care about? What are they talking about? It's not going to induce me, like not going to raise my cortisol levels or make me sad.
A So I literally asked my agent, uh, filter for rage bait, filter for, for click bait, uh, filter for, uh, you know, politics. I just asked, this is the kind of user control that you can have now that very few people Understand that you can have yet, and it's too complicated, but you can have all that control. So what, what I think is most people kind of know what they want, but you know, you get captured in the moment. You know, it's like you, you want something and then someone puts candy in front of you, you're going to take that candy. So what is interesting is, can you give people the chance to decide their own future ahead of time? This is the idea behind like the taste profile and behind these agents. Like I'm not better than anyone else. I get captured all the time. So, so my specific pet peeve is road rage. I'm so fascinated by it. I just go down dark holes of road rage because it's the weirdest thing. Like these supposedly, you know, fully normal, smart people, they waste their entire lives and go to jail.
AI assessment note: “So I literally asked my agent, uh, filter for rage bait, filter for, for click bait”
Answered raw tape
D 4 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q People like you and I will probably want more control, but like you're of seven hundred million users, like what percentage of them do you actually think? I feel like people just want you to do it for them.
A No, you're not wrong. I think there's, everything in the world is sort of a power law, right? Of whether it's music listening, some people listen a little, and then some people listen extremely much. Everything is a power law. But I think what is interesting, what Spotify's gained from, if you look at playlisting, for example, some people playlist a lot. Most people have one playlist. Maybe they're liked songs, maybe two playlists, you know, some indie favorites. Some people have, like, hundreds of playlists. So sort of the story of Spotify and why we got good at personalization and recommendation in the first place was that we had like, I don't know, ten billion user playlists, which is people carefully saying this track goes well with this track goes well with this track. It's an incredibly valuable data set, but to your point, it was heavily skewed. It was a few use, not a few millions, but not hundreds of millions that did a lot of work that benefited the others. Those people saying these tracks go well together meant that the others who weren't that into music, they didn't keep up with the new With the new releases of the back catalog, they got amazing recommendations from the work of these people. And so I think that's going to be true here as well. And, and in fact, I know it is true. We see some people engaging a lot, talking to Spotify all the time saying, no, that's w…
AI assessment note: “No, you're not wrong. I think there's, everything in the world is sort of a power law”
