Welcome to the Virgcast, the flagship podcast of Machine Learning

Based Recommendation Systems. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am on a walk.

So I've been trying this thing where instead of sitting in front of screens all day, which I do way too much of, my back hurts, my eyes hurt, it's just bad times, I try to get out in the world once a day and just kind of wander around. A lot of smart people say that if you want to think

something through or be creative or process something, there's really nothing better for

you than to just go for a walk. Leave all your technology at home

and just walk until you figured it out.

It's a kind of romantic idea.

I really love it.

But so far in my experience, I found that I spent

a lot of time just like walking, singing one 21 pilot's song to myself

over and over again and then I get home and I'm like did I actually just accomplish anything?

I don't know maybe it's like meditation where you have to do it a lot and you get better at it but I feel like when I go on a walk and I'm like I'm going to think deep thoughts

It's not going super great so far, but at least the walking is nice and it's definitely good to not look at screens for at least a little while every now and then.

Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today.

The first person I'm going to talk to is Gustav Soderstrom, who's the co-president of Spotify. He also ran product for Spotify for a long time.

And he is the person I most wanted to talk to about what Spotify is trying to be.

It's trying to be this incredible AI recommendation system that knows exactly what you want to listen to

and exactly what you're doing at exactly the right time. It's also kind of trying to be

Tik-Toc and it's doing audio books and it's doing podcasts and I'm trying to figure out how you do all of that all in one place

without making a total mess out of Spotify. So that is what Gustav and I talked about. He's very open and very smart about all of it and it was a really fun conversation.

After that I'm going to talk to Alex Kranz, who is my favorite person to talk to about all things streaming.

We're going to talk about Disney and Hulu and

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