EP 67: Daniel Ek (CEO, Spotify) on the Creation of Wrapped, How Apple Blocks Innovation & Growing Up in the Projects

28:31Not one of these finer five-star hotels or even four stars. I think I had minus one-star hotels. um so and and uh there's funny stories in the beginning where i and the guy who helped negotiate the licenses we even shared bed um and and uh bed covers because literally and he was snoring horribly so we didn't sleep very much um so so that's uh sort of painting the picture but what was true is i literally sat outside of the office waiting for opportunities to arrive where i could come in and pitch because they wouldn't take the meetings. And so I took whatever slots I could get. And the best way was to sit.

29:15They had a Starbucks just outside of Broadway, in this case, in New York. And I literally sat outside of that Starbucks, which was right on the border. and I befriended the assistants to the point by giving them enough free coffee and free gifts and other things that I, whatever I could do to bribe them basically so that they would tell me when the CEO was about to leave or about to enter or if they had sort of a spare moment where I sort of just by accident would be next to the coffee machine as they were getting the coffee. So it was directionally true, although it wasn't technically true that I slept outside of the office.

30:00What kept you going through that period of time? Because I know there was like two and a half years of chewing glass, essentially. And was it just that you were uniquely passionate? You knew that your life's work would ideally combine music and technology. And so, hey, I'm going to keep going ahead on this. Or what really kept you motivated through that period? Well, I think a combination of really several things, but the most important thing is it was totally logical to me that whether I succeeded or someone else has succeeded, people would want to access music and they would want a better experience than piracy.

30:39And if there was a better experience than piracy, people would start paying for music again. That was just so obvious to me. And this whole idea of people wanting to own music that the whole world believed to be true just felt to me like, no, it's kind of obvious that the better products should be access to music. And so I believe that at the core of my bones. And if we weren't going to succeed doing it, someone else would. That was clear to me. And that gave me a lot of just mental fortitude to go on because I believed it to be true. And it was a lot of ups and downs. And the truth is, I believe every startup journey is a mental roller coaster.

31:24And I believe now, perhaps more than ever before, that what really sets apart the great entrepreneurs from the average ones is really how you handle that mental roller coaster. And I believe so much more now that most people just don't want to do what's necessary to succeed at that level. It is really hard. And I don't blame them, but it's like you have to give up birthdays, friendships, family relationships, all of the above oftentimes are required. And it's very hard. People talk about balance. I don't believe that to be true. You should absolutely strive to have healthy relationships because you'll perform better and you should strive to obviously having love in your life because I believe you'll be a better person.

32:18But to have balance of equal time on everything, that's not been my experience. In fact, I oftentimes even today feel awful because I'm down prioritizing something in my life because I'm pretty extreme. Sometimes that's my health. Sometimes that's a friendship relationship. Sometimes that's work because I'm prioritizing a personal part of myself. But I always feel almost inadequate because I'm constantly putting so much effort into so many parts in a pretty extreme way. And that's two and a half years of my life, I gained probably 45 pounds in weight. So I really wasn't feeling very well. I lost a lot of hair, still haven't been able to grow it back.

33:10Like, it was just an awful, awful, awful time. And I wanted to give up several times, but I also had my team. And my team was fighting, and they were making the product more and more amazing. And I was able to try it out. And I was like, wow, we really have something special on our hand. And I didn't want to fail or disappoint them. and it so happened to be that again I retrenched from those U.S. offices back to Sweden and kind of managed to find the wedge by one foot in the door where we basically guaranteed the entire profits of the entire Swedish recording music industry with our own money for a year and said And you really don't have anything to lose.

33:57At best case, you double your money in one year and we fail. And by the way, on top of that, we have something that's ongoing. At worst case, you double your money for this year and you have at least a little bit more time to figure out what the right solution is. I didn't realize that. So piracy was such, and the original deal you made with the labels was, hey, because Sweden was so upside down with piracy and people just stealing music. You said to the labels, hey, we're going to guarantee for the first year the revenue for you all to make back. And worst case, it doesn't work. Best case, we have a new business.

34:37Pretty much. Pretty much. I think it wasn't one-to-one, but it was like 80 cents on the dollar or something. So it was basically totally no downside for them. And so they eventually kind of like, I don't know whether they actually believed in it or whether they were just cynical and realized that, you know, heads I win, tails I win. Both are kind of fine. But we succeeded. And what I do know is we succeeded way more than anyone thought, including ourselves. and really through that period of time, we then kind of quickly expanded in another eight markets and started growing really rapidly from there on too and then it took another sort of two, three years to unlock the US because it was the number one market in the world and they had still a lot to lose and a lot to win and that's why it took so much time for the same behavior and for the same sort of model to be proven out so much in the rest of the world that they were willing to take the same risk in the US.

35:39Speaking of success, so you've paid out close to$40 billion to the music industry. Is that right? And you're the biggest driver of monetization in the industry. And you've almost single-handedly pulled the industry towards a model that works. And now, at least on a dollars basis, maybe not inflation adjusted, but dollars to dollars, the industry has now passed the peak of what it was in 99, 2000 from those days, the good old days. But does it bother you? You're still kind of vilified at times from people that don't understand what all you've done. Does that get under your skin? It does and it doesn't to be very candid.

36:26So I think on the one hand, obviously, I did this not because I thought we could make a ton of money doing this. We've actually widely surpassed what I thought in that regard. But I did this because I cared about the problem, right? I cared about music and I cared about compensating artists fairly. And I cared about giving consumers what they wanted. And so obviously it hurts when you have artists who I deeply respect and admire for doing what they're doing, say that they think that I somehow, or that we somehow want to cause harm to them because it's just not the truth at all. And we're doing that.

37:12But, you know, I also have, you know, in this process, I mentioned that earlier, but I think a lot about the mental game these days. And oftentimes, whenever I see someone who's lashing out to another person, I try to have empathy with what they're going through. And there's always someone who's hurting. There's always someone whose story exists on the other side. And you don't know that. You don't know what they've gone through. You don't know what their reality may look like. And so I try to have empathy with that. And the reality of the music industry, It's a very complex narrative. And the narrative is, as you rightly said, the music industry overall is doing well.

38:01It's doing better than it's probably ever done before. Certainly the recorded music industry. And it's at its all-time high and its all-time profits from these record companies, et cetera. And more artists than ever are being invested in. So that's the good news. but we're also dealing in a reality where if you look at 1999 or or year 2000 which probably arguably the two of them was the peak of the recorded music industry in terms of the the last peak you had probably 10 000 or so albums being released in the u.s that year i don't know the exact numbers, but order of magnitude, that's probably right.

38:45And then if you contrast that today, Spotify has about 10 million artists on our platform. And so the best way to put it is there's more success now than ever before, but there's also more people than ever trying to make it in music. And so both of these two things can be true at the same time. There could also be more people being successful, but there could be in relative terms, more people failing also. And so, or in absolute terms and even in relative terms. So I think that there's a lot of people who may have in the past made it in music, but are no longer, you know, doing as well. And they obviously feel bad about that situation.

39:31And there's also a lot of people that want to make it in music that for whatever reason may not be successful in music. And because we're the number one player in music, obviously a lot of responsibility falls on us, rightly or unrightly, for the role that we play in the music industry for them to succeed. And these are people who may have spent 10, 20, 30 years perfecting their crafts. And many of them, by the way, are great at that. And it's really hard, but it's a very hard game to succeed in, right? I sometimes make the analogy to another one of my favorite sports, soccer. You know, it's a very popular sport.

40:18Several hundred million people around the world are playing soccer in one shape or form, but there's probably only tens of thousands of them that are professional, right? So, you know, on the one hand, we have a lot of artists here that are trying to make it in music. More so probably than ever before in the history of time. There are more that's succeeding, but there's still a lot of people that are not. And so those are usually the ones that are unhappy. And I get it, and I understand it. And many of them are also very talented, by the way. And so it's really tough when they feel like they can't make it.

40:58And obviously, we become a big part of that debate because we're so big. And there's two components, I guess, just to give people a quick primer on why these complaints maybe come out is one back in 99, 2000. It was a lump sum payment from a CD, right, versus you guys are paying out like an annuity over time. And so your long tail, that's why you're seeing people sell back catalogs is because they want to monetize it up front. But an investor is willing to wait for the next 20 years to monetize that. So one is the cash flow cycle. The other one is you pay out a percentage of your revenue to the labels, which is mostly the three majors.

41:41And that's based on the number of streams and your business model, right? And that's a percentage of your revenue. And then the labels pay out whatever their deals they cut with their artists are. They pay out that to the artists. And so you've negotiated this thing with the labels. The complaint is ultimately, to some extent, it's with the labels, right? Of like the deals that they cut with the artists individually. You cut the deals with the labels. And so it's like there's this middleman in the middle that people are pointing at you when in truth, this is the deal that the artists have often cut with the labels themselves.

42:21Is that fair? Well, that's sometimes part of the story. And it's very complex, right? Because there's all sorts of other things, too. With songwriters, it's even more complicated because you may be assigned to a publishing company or there may be a collecting society in a certain market. And some collecting societies takes 18 months before they pay it out. So you may think you have a certain amount of streams, but in actuality, and you see no revenue, but the revenue comes 18 months later, as you said. So there's all sorts of very complicated dynamics from an industry that for legacy reasons been built up over many decades.

42:57and that's hard and that's a hard part of the story. The other one is pure optics, right? Oftentimes, even though exactly as you said, we don't pay out per stream, we pay out on a percentage basis. But quite oftentimes what people do is in order to figure out, well, how much was I getting was they take the number of streams and take the revenue and divide it on a per stream basis. And then the number seems very low because it's point something, something, you know, sent per stream. But I think the failure there is like, this is the equivalent of CPM. And this is probably where we could have done better from an optical point of view.

43:39You know, originally you were probably getting paid for every single impression, but we don't in the ad world, you know, measure it based on what you're getting paid for every impression, but we, we bottle it up to a CPM and that CPM could be variable. So it's thousand impression that sort of adds it up. And so we still optically screw it up in the sense that we make the number seem lower than what it perhaps is. And so there's all the, all of those things that kind of add up to it. But I would still say the number one problem that's the most confusing to people is, you know, there are more people successful than ever before in music, but there's also more people trying.

44:22So therefore, there's also more people failing at becoming successful in music. And so both of these things are true at the same time. And that's what people are having such a hard time because they see these anecdotal things on Twitter and artists saying, well, I only get paid X for what seems like a large amount, a million streams. But a million streams is actually a very, very low amount of streams. Like the most successful artists on Spotify are literally a Miley Cyrus that can get a billion streams in the matter of weeks, right? So a million streams over the course of a year is just not a big number in the case of Spotify.

45:04And so that's also, you know, it seemingly seems a big number, but it just isn't. So that's the optics. And those two things are why it's such a difficult problem to explain to people. Now, I've heard you say you spent time trying to copy different elements of iconic CEOs, Gates or Jobs or Musk or whoever it was. But ultimately, you realized you needed to be yourself and that it didn't really work internalizing elements of other people. How do you think about taking elements that you've heard from how someone that's super successful has operated while also following your known North Star or what is authentic to Daniel Ek as a leader, as a CEO?

45:48Yeah, I mean, I think about quite often this quote by, I believe he's a philosopher, Kwame Appiah, and he says, you know, most people are spending time figuring out to basically, I'm going to butcher the quote, but it's basically trying to learn the rules of the game instead of figuring out which game they're playing. and that was the most important realization for me you know we all obviously take impression from the the gates the mosques the bases the zuckerbergs of the world of tech and they've been remarkably successful and they're very very good at what they do but they're also in many instances playing a very different game than the one you're playing right And that's what I realized is you can't just copy someone's tactics without understanding what game they're playing and what game you're playing.

46:55And trying to go to sort of first principle of just understanding who do I want to be and what's important to me, back to that sort of mental side of things. And who am I at the core of an individual? You talked about sort of social media. one of the big things for me that I see time and time again is that at the end of the day, people see right through when you're not authentic because you can't stay consistent in whatever game you're playing on social media if you're not authentic to who you are as an individual. And that's really hard because people obviously game you in the sense that they'll give you feedback of what they think works.

47:39And we want to be liked as individuals. So we try to amplify those behaviors. And social media does that even more. And at the core of it, I think it's a very easy way for young people and honestly, all people to get very unhappy about life is because you keep seeing these rewarding pictures of the perfect life that everyone else is leading without actually understanding that the authentic story probably isn't that. The authentic story is probably that they have a bad hair day sometimes. They have argued with their significant others. They have kids that are screaming and refusing to go to bed, all the normal stuff.

48:20But what we see is this perfect thing. And that's what people are reacting to. And more and more, I think that authenticity is the only thing that will allow you to persevere for not just a year or two, but a decade or two. And so the big realization for me was just working with myself, my own mentality, my own psychology, my own being, back to that point about me believing I wanted to be popular, me believing I wanted affirmation from these girls that could never get to pay attention to me before. I realized that that just wasn't who I was as an individual. I'm a nerd. I like reading. I don't like spending time with lots of people.

49:09I like a few friends that I have intimate relationships to. In large crowds, I get inwardly focused or it drains me of energy. Not that I don't think it could be fun, but I have to lie down and rest after doing it. And there are other people, obviously, that get energy from being in crowds and love meeting other people. And I think those are the realizations that you have to work with. And so, of course, I take elements and I learn from all the greats, not just in technology, but more and more from all over the map and in other fields as well. but um i i tried to um most of the time think from first principles about what it is i want to achieve and then turn whatever don't copy them exactly but kind of take the spirit of of um what it is that you're trying to do and adjust it to my game and and that's how i think about it the Remix, the Danielek remix.

50:15Yeah. One of the more poignant things I heard you talk about is being very self-aware of your role within a company and as a leader and within meetings and being cognizant that if someone's presenting to you, it might be the one time a year that they get to meet you, or maybe their entire tenure of Spotify. This could be the only time they get in front of you and your role in meetings and also in social gatherings that you used to maybe gravitate to a handful of people that you knew just because you were comfortable there, but realizing that you actually had to go talk to the people you didn't know because that was your role.

50:59How do you think about your natural bias to do some of the things that come naturally to you versus your role either in meetings or leading and doing the unnatural because it's going to be very impactful to the individuals in that specific meeting or in that room or at that party or whatever it is. Yeah, I mean, I think the important part, again, is on the one hand, as I said, staying true to yourself and the polarity of that obviously is in what way can you be the most impactful and constantly kind of sort of peddling between those two extremes. But it actually started when I was really unhealthy.

51:44And I was lucky enough that one of my neighbors became, or is at this point still, a very famous hockey player. His name is Matt Sundin. He was an all-star NHL American, team captain of Toronto Maple Leaf for 13 seasons, always playing in the All-Star game. And we were talking one night over dinner, and he talked to me about sort of training. And it got me to change my perspective because he talked about the reason why he trained so much and why he could keep at the level where he was for 13 seasons wasn't to get better. It was to make sure that his worst was consistently better than everyone else.

52:36And so it was like basically raising the average bar rather than sort of raising the bar of the extreme. And I thought about that a lot. And so for me, what I realized was that there was times when I had a lot of energy when I was great in meetings. But there was also times when I was completely drained and I wasn't adding anything to the meeting and probably I was grumpy or all of those different things. And I started taking my own well-being, not just mental health, but physical health, eating, exercising, all those things for learning from maths. Basically, just making sure my worst day, I would still be better than most.

53:20and showing up in that meeting with more energy, being able to make people feel good. Because so much of what it is that I do, I have many thousands of employees here at Spotify. It is them that's doing the works. It's not me. And my job quite often is to get to the positions where all the good options are out the window. And we only have decisions where huge trade-offs are needed in. and to bring that A team mentality out of people in that moment by getting their best ideas, getting them to be there, but feel seen, feel heard, and feel like they can participate. And I'm not always succeeding with that, by the way.

54:07I'm failing quite a lot of the time, but I realized I'm not the smartest person in the room. I'm definitely not. And I realized my goal is to bring the smartness out of other people in those meetings. And that means creating an environment where people can be direct, where people feel seen, where they feel validated. And so I've learned so much about leadership from that. And I just referenced, again, from the world of sports. So it's not always from people in business, but I think it's my game. And I know other leaders, by the way, in business people, that the sole goal is for them to be the driving force and lightning rod in a meeting.

54:57And most of the time they're having a group meeting with 10 people. It's actually them interacting with one people at a time. And the meeting is really for them, not for the people around them. And I don't say that that's wrong. I'm saying that could work for them and their individual. But in my case, I look at myself as the bottom of the pyramid, helping everyone else get things done, not at the very top of the pyramid. Even though obviously, from a hierarchical sense, I am obviously at the top. But I'm trying to enable other people to do their best work. And it's through that that I think we'll achieve amazing results.

55:35I know as a CEO and a leader, you have a philosophy around missions, both for yourself and also for your executives, and that people might be the right people for a certain point in time, but that they may not be the long-term person. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about that for yourself in reevaluating what you need to be for the mission that you're on at that moment in time? And also how you have that conversation with executives or direct reports saying, hey, this could be the job for you for the next two years. But after that, we might need to bring in someone else. Yeah, sure.

56:08And maybe just to level set. I'm not saying this is necessarily true for all companies, but I certainly think it's been true here for Spotify. So I believe one of the very unique things about startups is the rate that you have to learn, basically. So a startup founder, CEO, in many instances, are trying to learn on the job things. And maybe sometimes they have six months to learn what other people learn in two or three years at a time. And because of the nature of growth in their business, the challenges that get thrown at their table happens much faster than it would take a business that's growing 5 % or 10 % a year.

56:50They may have plenty more time to accumulate those experiences and learn on the job than the startup CEO does. And I shamelessly stole this concept from Reid Hoffman, where he at LinkedIn supposedly had this concept called tour of duties, you know, based on the US military. I didn't really like the military reference, so I called it missions instead. But my belief was that if you really think about it, as a CEO, as a CFO, as a VP of products, certainly in a startup, but it's very rare that whatever requirements you have for your jobs are going to last for more than two or three years. And the problem you end up having is by not being clear that it's not the person's fault.

57:43And this can go both ways. The person can develop and the job develops in a different direction. And obviously the job can develop and the person wants to keep doing the same thing. Both in a world of startup is actually a big problem. Because if you have the expectancy that the job is mine for all eternity, no matter what the job spec actually requires, even though the title is the same, that just feels wrong. And it is not in this instance that you as a CEO, if you have an employee where you have to have that tough conversation, that you're necessarily forcing that on them. It could be the startup in itself that just requires something very different from you as a leader.

58:24So I think that's been a helpful mental framework to explain to people why that is and why the job changes, but the titles remain the same. And the harder thing though is culturally really enacting that because it's so unusual. And I think the best way to do that is obviously by role modeling that yourself. And so in my case, what I often say is I've had the same title for now close to 17 years. It's pretty crazy. But I'm on my probably eighth job at the moment. And actually my newest job started in January. so I handed off the reins from much of my day-to-day responsibility to my core people Gustav who runs product and technology and Alex who now runs the business side and so my role is vastly different than it's been and I'm actually still trying to learn on the job what I'm supposed to do and what I'm not supposed to do in my new role description and that's two benefits I think it means that new opportunities will be created So in Alex and Gustav, they've been with me 12 and 14 years, respectively.

59:39So they've been with me for a very long period of time. I am 100 % certain that if they were really doing the same jobs like they were when they got to the company, they wouldn't have stayed. So this creates growth opportunities for them, but it also creates a very clear path where you can have very honest conversations with people and talk about what they want to do in their career. and whether or not that matches what that next evolution of that role looks like at your company, or perhaps it might be other roles at the company that's always beneficial. So I like to think about, let's see if we can create the job internally first.

1:00:18And then only if that doesn't work, then you start looking at maybe it's time to look sort of externally for the same job. And the harshest way to do it would be almost asking people to reapply to the same job again. I don't formally do that, but I like checking in with people to kind of say, do you really still want this job? And does that make sense? And yeah, I mean, I think it's a huge part of why I'm here 17 years later, because my job keeps changing. And yes, it's been the same title for quite a while, but my day-to-day responsibilities today is very different. My first job was kind of being the janitor, screwing together tables and chairs and all that stuff.

1:01:05There's a whole team at Spotify that does that now. So I'm lucky enough to just show up and the whole space looks beautiful. And I sit down in furniture and IT equipment that just works. But my job today is like engaging with regulators, with all the different stakeholders, dealing with very complex stakeholder problems, whether they are employees and unions and all what it requires, dealing with very complex, what does it take to run a platform with 500 million consumers and tens of millions of creators? Very different challenges where even a small change in that platform, you can't make that thing when you have an entire music industry that's totally dependent on every single tweak that you make.

1:01:51So you can't sort of move fast and breaking things in that regard, where obviously when you were a startup, that was kind of what you needed to do. So very different job, very intriguing and intellectually challenging. And I probably wouldn't have been ready for the job I'm having now 17 years ago. But it's kept it interesting and I've been able to grow with the company. Now, you've been fairly outspoken about Apple and the App Store practices in the last couple months. I know it's been an ongoing thing for you all. How much has that been something that you feel for your own business, you have to speak out about what they're doing and favoring their own products and all the maybe monopolistic tactics they're doing?

1:02:39And those are my words, not yours. I don't want to put words in your mouth. That's my perspective. versus you're in a unique position to be able to speak out for all the companies that can't because they're so beholden to Apple. Well, I think it's both, right? So obviously, we believe that our business would have done tremendously much better if we would have fought on a level playing field. And it feels like we are instead having to innovate and fight for our business with our hands tied behind the back. Now, we're still winning and we're still kicking their ass. And I feel good about that. But we could have succeeded and we could have benefited the music industry and creators a lot more.

1:03:20And there's still lots of innovation that we're constantly being hampered by. So a great example is when we wanted to innovate on behalf of authors in the audiobook industry. And truthfully, what we had in mind was something that was a lot better than what we ended up launching in the end because Apple kept blocking us. So that's on one end. We're constantly, we're succeeding in music anyway, but we're all the future innovation is being hamstrung by this. But more importantly, as you said, not just for the entire ecosystem, but coming back to my 14-year-old self and the principles and values that attracted me to the internet and wanting to build things on the internet was that it was this completely open place.

1:04:09It was this place where this kid from basically the projects in Sockholm was able to compete on similar terms that everyone else was able to do. And I truly believed that because of things like net neutrality and all those things that we fought for in the late 90s, I believe the best ideas won. and it was very hard for someone to use their size as an advantage. We saw it all the time. Startups was constantly beating the bigger companies. It happened all the time. It doesn't happen as often anymore. And that's, I think, really problematic. And part of that reason is because of the situation that we're in.

1:04:59Basically, in this case, we have most of the internet now is being accessed through smartphones, which is two different platforms by two different companies. And one of these companies have decided to basically tax that entire ecosystem with 30%. And in our case, that happens to be more than what we're currently making. So if we really followed what they would like to, we would have two options. We would either be loss-making business in perpetuity with negative units economics, which means we would be bankrupt, or we would have to raise prices. And if we raise prices, they would take more than we would from that price increase.

1:05:41But more importantly than that, they also have a competitive product, which they obviously don't have to pay the same price points, so they would be able to bleed us dry. And so I look at it and I think I'm not just fighting for Spotify's case, but I'm fighting for what type of future of the internet we want. And I want one where the best ideas win. I want one where everyone's competing on equal terms. And to be clear, I don't mind that Apple has an app store. And by the way, they can charge whatever fees they wanted to if it was a possibility to not be on the App Store and still have an app, right?

1:06:19So they can charge 30 % or 50%. If there was another store, I would be like, great, we're just not going to be on your store, then we'll be on another one. But maybe for some developers or something else, that price is worth paying to be on Apple Store. But that's not a possibility, right? And that's what we're fighting for. And imagine now all the innovation, like we wanted to sell NFTs on behalf of artists today, we would have to use Apple's IEP and pay 30 % for it. That's just one innovation that just honestly makes it almost not worth trying even because of all the cumbersome and all the problems.

1:06:58And there's so many more examples of this, what we could do, but it'd be really hard because we'd run afoul of Apple's draconian rules. I have one last one for you, and hopefully we can get it in under the wire here, but speech. I don't want to talk about specifically Rogan or R. Kelly or anything like that. But how do you think about speech just as a platform that can host these different conversations on? What do you think your responsibility is in all of this? And how do you approach it? Yeah. I mean, again, I come back to it. We talked about the internet, right? And for me, the amazing things is we want to enable as many voices as we can.

1:07:46Because again, Spotify is a global company with creators in more than 180 markets. What's acceptable in some markets may not be in others culturally. Doesn't mean it's illegal, but just in terms of socially acceptable things. Our view is we want to enable more of these amazing creative people. If you look at something like hip hop, they use foul language to talk about things, but it's a cultural expression. I don't always personally understand everything, the cultural references that they do, but I think hip hop culture is so important for development in our society. It's been such an important cultural thing for us.

1:08:30So imagine if we started censoring hip hop based on the lyrics it's been. That's just unthinkable to me. And so our view is we want to enable more voices, not less. And obviously, with that said, we do care about safety, right? So we do try to keep the balance by enabling more voices by obviously creating a safe platform as well. And that's a hard balance to follow. And it's not a clear answer. And it's really based on the situation. But I think speech is really important. I felt like we as a society went from having sort of no rules in place for a long period of time. And then as more and more people got on the internet, we realized we needed some rules.

1:09:17My personal view is we went too far in the other direction and limited very important voices and speech on topics that's super important. and that's why in our case, we take the approach of enabling more creative voices, but obviously take our responsibility of keeping our platform safe as well, very high. Daniel, thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Really appreciate it.

1:09:55Thank you.