Spotify首席执行官丹尼尔·埃克

完美执行这种风格的播客是不可能的。没错。而这正是它的美妙之处。你们列出一堆想聊的话题。是的。

It is impossible to flawlessly execute a podcast of this style. Yeah. And that's the beauty of it. You come up with a bunch of stuff you wanna talk about. Yeah.

最终你们会进行一场真正自然的对话，然后它变成了一件作品。这件作品与你脑海中设想的完全不同，但仍然可以很棒。

And then you end up having a real organic conversation, and then it turns into a product. And that product is totally different than what you envisioned in your head, but can still be great.

但我觉得最神奇的是，不像你接受记者采访那样，这完全是一场真正的对话。其次，有足够的时间去详细阐述想法和观点。而你必须用三十秒简洁明了地表达观点并准确传达，否则就会错失时机，记者们就想转向下个话题。布莱恩·切斯基就是个例子，他简直是这方面的大师。

But I think the amazing thing is unlike you talking to a journalist, etcetera, is it's truly a conversation one. And the second part is there's enough time to actually elaborate on the thought and the idea. Whereas you have to be so succinct in how you express your idea and truly get it across in thirty seconds, or like you lose the moment and the journalists want to move on. Brian Chesky is an example. He's, like, the master on it.

他能瞬间进入状态，表现得极其出色。不知为何，他和我总是被分到同一个讨论组。我心想，这还没开始就已经结束了。所有精彩内容都会被他包揽。是你吗？

And he just switches it on, and he's, like, so good. For some reason, he and I always ends up getting on the same panels. And I'm like, it's game over even before it started. You're gonna have all the great stuff. Is it you?

是你吗？是你吗？现在谁掌握了真相？是你吗？是你吗？

Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you?

是你吗？让我坐下。直说吧。又一个故事即将上演。谁掌握了真相？

Is it you? Sit me down. Say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth?

欢迎收听本期《Acquired》，一档讲述伟大科技公司及其背后故事与成功法则的播客。我是本·吉尔伯特。

Welcome to this episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

我是大卫·罗森塔尔。

I'm David Rosenthal. And

我们是本期主持人。这期节目，我们与丹尼尔·埃克对谈，这位在Napster和盗版时代摧毁CD产业后拯救了音乐行业的传奇人物。一些数据令人震撼：Spotify已累计向艺术家支付400亿美元，现已成为整个音乐产业最大的收入来源。

we are your hosts. This episode, we sit down with Daniel Ek, the man who saved the music industry after Napster and the piracy era killed the CD business. Some of the stats are mind boggling. Spotify has paid $40,000,000,000 to artists over their lifetime. They're now the single largest source of revenue for the entire music industry.

这太疯狂了。Spotify月活跃听众超5亿，其中付费订阅用户超2亿，这两个数字都堪称惊人。

That's crazy. Spotify also has over 500,000,000 monthly active listeners, over 200,000,000 of which are paid subscribers. Both of those numbers are bonkers.

今天的对话将探讨两点：一是Spotify如何通过多年叠加不同扩张策略达到5亿用户规模；二是深入分析Spotify当前阶段——其大规模进军播客领域不仅改变了用户体验，更重塑了公司商业模式与未来前景。作为Acquired节目的主持人，我们对这点尤其感兴趣，因为我们的节目在Spotify上的增长堪称爆发式。

And in today's conversation, we're talking about, one, how Spotify managed to get to this 500,000,000 number by stacking all these different expansion strategies on top of each other over the years. And two, we're gonna dive into the current moment that Spotify is in. They've entered podcasting in a huge way that has not only changed the experience for consumers, but Spotify's business and their future as a company, which is, of course, very interesting to David and I as Acquired's growth has really exploded on Spotify.

确实。正如我们与丹尼尔对话中提到的，Acquired现有超60%听众来自Spotify平台，而四年前这个比例基本为零。

Totally. As I think we referenced early on in our conversation with Daniel, over 60% of Acquired's audience is now on Spotify, which is up from basically zero four years ago.

这很不可思议。事实上我们对此话题如此热衷，当Spotify邀请我们飞往斯德哥尔摩在其录音棚与丹尼尔面对面录制时，我们立刻抓住了这个机会。丹尼尔还透露了播客的'表亲'——有声书领域的未来动向。

It's wild. In fact, we were so interested in having this conversation that when Spotify asked if we wanted to fly to Stockholm and record in person with Daniel in the Spotify studio, we jumped at the chance. Daniel also foreshadowed some of what's to come with the cousin of podcasting, audiobooks.

哦。

Oh.

我们迫不及待想听听您的想法。听完本期节目后，请来Acquired的Slack频道讨论，地址是acquired.fm/slack。您应该订阅我们的访谈节目——我们的第二档节目ACQ2。在任何播客平台都能找到，我们最近接连与Retool和AngelList的CEO进行了关于AI的精彩对话。闲话少说，本节目不构成投资建议。

We can't wait to hear what you think. Come discuss it after you listen to this episode in the acquired Slack, acquired.fm/slack. You should subscribe to our interview show, our second show, ACQ two. You can find it in any podcast player, and we've had some killer back to back discussions with the CEOs of Retool and AngelList, both about AI. Now without further ado, this show is not investment advice.

大卫、我本人以及嘉宾可能持有我们所讨论公司的投资或大量股份，本节目仅用于信息交流和娱乐目的。现在让我们开始与丹尼尔·埃克的对话。

David, myself, and our guests may have investments or many shares in the companies that we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Now on to our conversation with Daniel Ek.

我们想从一件播客领域堪称惊人的变化开始聊起。

We wanted to start with, like, something kinda incredible has happened in podcasting.

如果你看2019年1月1日的数据，我们在Spotify上的听众还不到一千人。

If you look at 01/01/2019, we had less than a thousand listeners on Spotify.

是啊，太疯狂了。现在它绝对是我们听众的主要来源。

Yeah. Crazy. And now it's by far the majority of our listeners.

除非像我们这样整天盯着数据，或是其他播客从业者，否则很容易低估自你们入局以来播客生态系统发生的颠覆性变革。我想用Acquired特有的方式，回到某个时间节点问问：这一切是如何发生的？你们又是如何决定转型为音频公司而非音乐公司的？

And unless you're us and you're looking at the data all the time or other podcasters, I think it's easy to underestimate how seismic of a shift has happened in the podcasting ecosystem since you guys dove in. And I just wanted to sort of acquired style, go to a moment in time and say, how did that happen? And how did you guys decide to become an audio company instead of a music company?

我常说这背后可能有过灵光乍现的时刻，但Spotify的情况绝非如此。很多时候事情就是机缘巧合。很长一段时间里，我都在抗拒这种转变，我们总提醒自己不要以己度人——当用户突破1亿后，你就会明白自己早已不是目标用户群体。必须倾听真实用户的反馈，这种思路确实有其道理。

I like to say that there was probably this genius insight at some point in moment, but that's certainly not in the case of Spotify, true. It is often quite serendipitous. And for a long time, I was kind of fighting the urge on this, but we were oftentimes trying to not think of ourselves as the users and customers, because once you got through kind of a 100,000,000 users, you're kind of like, well, obviously I shouldn't be the target demo. I need to kind of listen to what the actual users are telling me. And there's some part that's true with that.

但后来我越来越意识到，实际上在内部，我们可能拥有最能代表Spotify用户及其偏好的反馈渠道。我最喜欢探讨的话题之一就是人们如何频繁地‘玩弄’我们的平台。比如在德国，我们起初毫不知情，但后来发生了一件疯狂的事——人们开始上传有声书，原来这些音乐厂牌本身就拥有大量有声书版权。随着平台崛起，他们开始思考：‘还能往这个平台上放什么来获得优势并创造更多收入？’于是他们发现了自己库存的有声书资源。

But then more and more what I've realized is also that actually internally, we probably have the best sounding board of a quite representative Spotify user and what they might like. And so one of my favorite topics is how often people game our platform. For instance, in Germany, unbeknownst to us, but one of the sort of crazy things that ended up happening was just people started uploading audiobooks because it turns out that these music labels actually own a bunch of audiobook rights. And so as the platform was taking off, they realized what else can we put on this platform that gives us a leg up and creates more revenue for us. And they realized that they have this catalog of audiobooks sitting on there.

所以我认为这是个关键顿悟时刻——我们突然明白：这个平台上放什么内容似乎并不那么重要，人们就是喜欢消费内容。当时包括我在内的许多Spotify员工本身就是重度播客听众，我们热爱播客，但痛恨必须从日常使用的应用切换到其他播客应用。

So I think that was kind of one realization where we kind of realized, hey, this platform, it doesn't seem to matter all that much what we're putting on it. People just like consuming content. And then I and others at Spotify, we were big podcast listeners ourselves. And we love that. But we hate the fact that we had to switch app from our our normal one.

我们厌恶推荐算法无法互通，痛恨无法在车载音响或家庭音响上收听，所有这些我们为音乐行业苦心经营十年的功能。于是我们恍然大悟：播客创作者面临着与音乐人相同的问题，而我们本应能发挥重要作用。我们为音乐构建的所有基础架构——无论是内容发现机制，还是所谓的‘泛在播放’能力（即跨设备播放），都应该完美适配。当然，包括广告支持的免费模式和后续付费模式在内的整套商业体系也应该能协同运作。

We hate the fact that we couldn't get the recommendations working. We hate the fact that we couldn't get this to work on my car speaker or my home speaker, and all these things that we spent literally a decade building for the music industry. So it kind of dawned upon us that podcasters have sort of the same problems that the music creators have, and we should be able to play a pretty big role. And all the primitives that we built for music should work really well in terms of discoverability, in terms of ubiquity that we call, which is sort of our ability to play on on any device. And of course, our freemium model where the ad supported and eventually paid models as well should be able to all work together.

因此最初最疯狂的想法莫过于提出‘在同一个应用内构建播客功能’，这遭到了最强烈的反对。因为当时的普遍认知是：播客必须是个完全独立的品类。

And so the craziest thing in the beginning was probably when we started talking about it as building it in the same app. That was what the biggest resistance was. Because the common wisdom at the time was obviously, well, podcasting has to be a distinct own thing.

这就像...你之前提到过的现象，那种‘应用星座’理论曾经风靡一时——Facebook有全家桶应用，苹果也搞各种独立应用。

I mean, this was like the you've talked about this before. The constellation of apps was the, you know, oh, the, like, all the rage. Facebook's got all these different apps, and Apple has all these different apps.

除非我本身就是播客爱好者，否则我永远不会专门点开播客应用来尝试接触这个领域。如果内容全分散在不同应用里，你根本不可能扩大总体可触达市场。

And unless I'm a person who already defines myself as into podcasting, I'm never gonna click a podcast app to try and get into podcasting. You can't expand the TAM if they're all in separate apps.

这到现在依然是个极客味很浓的做法。

Which still is a super nerdy thing.

即便是商品化播客也与音乐截然不同。这实际上是我们仍在努力破解密码的领域之一。但这可能是最反直觉的观点，无论对内还是对外。但对我们来说，这或许是最显而易见的，因为我们已在德国目睹了这种行为的兴起。当我们亲自试用产品后，很明显这会是一种绝佳的体验。

Even merchandising podcasting is a very different problem than music. It is actually one of the things that we're still working on trying to crack the code on. But that was probably the most contrarian, both inside and outside. But to us, it was probably the most obvious one, because we had already seen the behavior happening in Germany. And once we had tried unloading it for ourselves, so that we could play around with the product, it was kind of obvious that this would be a great experience.

这对我来说可能是最有趣的部分——我常对其他创业者说：初期遭遇质疑时，你需要留意那些合理的担忧。但多数情况只是人们不习惯新概念，而时代终将改变。等变化发生时，人们反而会觉得理所当然。显然，我最得意的案例是音乐流媒体——起步时总有人反驳：'我为什么要租音乐？'

And it's probably been the most interesting one for me where, and what I often tell other entrepreneurs is like, well, the fact that people doubt you in the beginning, you kind of need to pay attention to that and hear what valid concerns they may have. But a bunch of that is just like they're not used to the concept, and it's going to change. But by the time it changes, it will have already passed over, and not that you were right, but actually, well, of course, this is kind of obvious. Right? So my favorite one, obviously, is streaming music, where when we we began doing it, I always got this sort of pushback of, like, why would I wanna rent my music?

我要拥有自己的音乐。

I wanna own my music.

当时'流媒体'这个概念还不存在。

And the phrase streaming did not exist.

没错。人们根本不讨论这个，更多是围绕'租赁'概念思考：'这对我有什么好处？太糟糕了。如果你们不想保留某首歌，它就会消失...'

Yeah. People were not talking about it, and and people actually conceptualized more around sort of renting things. And why is that good for me? This is horrible. And, you know, that means that technically, what happens, if you guys don't wanna have that song anymore, the song disappears and

人们对音乐有着强烈的情感依附，这关乎他们的身份认同。'我要拥有这些，我要我的唱片收藏'。

People just so much about their music, like, it's their identity. Like, I wanna own this. I want my record collection.

正是如此。我们当时对抗的正是这种观念——对我们这代经历过盗版时代的人来说，'你真正需要的是访问权'如此显而易见。但要让人们理解这个概念异常困难，毕竟整个行业花了三十年培养所有权意识。而科技界却花了十余年让人们习惯分散的应用程序生态。

Yeah. Exactly. And we were fighting against it where it was so obvious to us that because I grew up with piracy that, no, actually, all you want is access to it. And it was such a hard notion for people to get conceptually because we've been spending thirty years just getting people into that. And I feel like most of the tech industry had spent a decade plus learning about having separate apps.

我们当时的态度是：不，不，不。这其实并不重要。我们可以把它放在同一个应用里，实际上用户会更喜欢，因为我们解决的是同类用户需求。

And we kind of said, no. No. No. It doesn't really matter. We can put it in the same app, and actually people will love it even more because we're solving the same sort of user needs.

这个洞见是从哪里来的？是作为用户的你想到的？还是公司其他部门的发现？

Where did that insight come from? Was it you as a user? Was it elsewhere in the company?

其实更多是基于第一性原理的思考。如果你审视我们要解决的问题本质，就会发现分开处理并不合理——从消费者体验来看真有那么不同吗？不，播放界面相同，只是形式略有差异但完全可行。如果将其视为内容发现，那这本质上就是同类问题。

Well, it was really a lot more of a first principles kind of thinking around it. It didn't really make sense if you looked at sort of, like, what are we trying to solve for? And was it truly so different in terms of a consumer experience? No, it was the same playing view, slightly different sort of modalities, but totally possible. And if you thought about it as a discovery, okay, well, that's a similar problem.

Ubiquiti能在所有音箱上播放的功能印证了统一平台的合理性。搜索等功能都是我们可以利用的共享基础设施。再说，当你在YouTube搜索内容时，其实并不太在意形式差异——这边听着音乐，那边刷着短视频看体育赛事，这些行为并没有本质区别。

Ubiquiti being able to play it on all these speakers made a lot of sense of having the same thing. Search, all of these things were basically shared infrastructure that we could utilize. And again, if you're searching for content, why you don't really care all that much about it on YouTube. And on one end, you're listening to music on one side, you had all these other short form videos and sports and so on. You don't think that those are distinctly different behaviors.

所以为什么要区别对待呢？无非是觉得播客形式特殊。但说到底都是音频内容，对吧？

So why do you think about it that way? And it's because you really think podcasting is a different format. But actually, it's audio. Alright?

回溯广播时代，谈话节目、音乐和体育赛事都在同一台设备上播放。

I mean, you go back to the radio days, talk radio and music and sports, they were all on the same device.

没错。有声书也是同理。播客和有声书的区别？你可能会说章节划分之类的差异。

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing with audiobooks too. Right? Like, what's the difference between an audiobook and a podcasting? Well, you would say chaptering and some of those stuff.

我是说，我们认为自己正处在有声书和播客之间的那条分界线上。

I mean, we think of ourselves as, like, right on that line between a audiobook and a podcast.

Ashley，我们非常希望你能帮忙解决这个问题。我们最近意识到，《Acquired》关于NVIDIA、台积电或泰勒·斯威夫特的那些经典集数，更像是David和我之间的对话式有声书，而非传统播客。

Ashley, we we'd love your help trying to solve this for ourselves. So we, have recently realized that Acquired is the canonical episode, NVIDIA episode or TSMC or Taylor Swift. Yeah. Right. These are more like conversational audiobooks between David and I than they are podcasts.

没错，这些内容长达四小时，更新频率低。你觉得这类内容在你理解的音频功能定位中属于什么？它算是有声书吗？

Yeah. They're four hours long. They drop infrequently. How does that kind of fit into, what you imagine is the job to be done by audio? And is it an audiobook?

还是说它属于播客？

Is it a podcast?

我认为从形式上看，界限确实越来越模糊——这是好事。但更好的理解方式是：有声书和播客本质上是商业模式的差异。可以说播客是广告支持的音频，而有声书是付费音频。

My view, I guess, is the boundaries are from a format side, it's definitely being blurred quite a lot and and for right reasons. But the better way to think about audiobooks and podcasting is it's it's really around a business model mostly. So one way to frame it instead would be podcasting is ad supported audio. Mhmm. And audiobooks is paid audio.

嗯。

Mhmm.

就你们而言——我知道你们在内容研究上投入了大量精力——未来完全可以设想：常规集数走广告模式，而深度专题则作为订阅用户的专属内容。订阅机制可以很简单，比如加入我们的其他网络就免费解锁，或者设置完整付费墙。但核心区别还是在于商业模式。

So for you guys, I mean, I also happen to know you spent so much time and effort on the research of that side. You could imagine that in the future, you have the ad supported side of your podcast be certain types of episodes, and you'd have for your subscribers, the unlock where they get access to, you know, these kind of deep dives, etcetera. And obviously, subscription thing could be as simple as like, hey, you're part of our other network and it doesn't cost money, or you could pay gate it all the way through. But I think it's more of a business model. That's the big format differentiation.

正如我们所说，就质量而言，我们使用的麦克风与有声书相比，在这里没有任何区别。你们使用的是高质量摄像设备，也非常接近专业级别，而非那种自己动手的简易器材。剪辑等各个环节，界限正变得越来越模糊。

Because as as we said, like the quality, the mics we're using relative to an audiobook, there there's no difference here. You're using, like, high quality camera equipment, also very similar to more professional style than sort of do it yourself kind of equipment. Editing, all these things, it's getting more and more blurred.

是啊，这太有意思了。对我们来说，过去八年我们亲历了这个过程。播客释放的潜力，加上现在Spotify将大量原本不接触这个媒介的新用户引入，为小众产品创造了大众市场。如果我们作为作者写书——其实经常有人找我们出书——从商业模式来看对我们已经不再合理了。

Yeah. Which is so interesting. Like, to us, like, we've lived this over the past eight years. Like, what podcasting is unlocked and now with Spotify bringing so many more people to the medium that weren't consuming before is, like, a mass audience for niche products. Like, if we were authors and we wrote a book, and we get pitched all the time on writing a book, like, the business model for us does not make sense anymore Sure.

考虑到我们现有的受众规模及其特定类型。没错，通过广告支持的内容我们能实现更好的变现。但要实现这种突破，这个媒介必须成为大众化的平台。

Given the audience size that we have and a particular type of audience. Yeah. We monetize so much better with the ad supported content. Yeah. But like to make that unlock happen, it needed to become a mass medium.

对。有意思的是思考这个问题：如果有声书也能以同样方式触达大众受众，情况会改变吗？

Yep. It's interesting to think about would that change if audiobooks can access a mass audience in the same way?

没错。而且显然，我们的观点是最终有声书市场规模应该比现在大得多——达到数亿人真正在听有声书，因为内容本身足够优质，而不是现在的数千万人规模。

Yeah. And and, obviously, our our view is we eventually think audiobooks should be much, much larger than what it is today. Hundreds of millions of people who are actually listening to audiobooks because the content is great rather than today what's tens of millions of people.

现在市场规模是这个量级吗？

Is that the market size today of Yeah.

相信是数千万级别。这是增长最快的品类之一，所以很有意思。但归根结底，这既是商业模式问题，也是内容发现机制等问题。

Believe it's like tens of millions. It's one of the fastest growing categories, which makes it interesting. But, it's it's again, fundamentally, it's both a business model problem. It's, you know, again, a discovery problem and all those other things.

你要么得花一大笔钱一次性购买。没错。要么就得订阅一个相当昂贵的服务。确实。而这个服务你可能用得上也可能用不上，能否从中获得价值还两说。

You either gotta pay a lot of money for a one off purchase. Yep. Or you need to have a pretty expensive subscription Sure. To a service that you may or may not use that and get value out of.

这让我想起了音乐产业在

It reminds me of music in

2008年2月的情况。完全正确。

02/2008. Exactly.

你们说得太对了。而且这些领域可能确实需要不同的商业模式。但就拿你们来说，我猜你们现在应该已经有了相当明确的受众群体。并且很可能是高价值受众，这使得广告支持的变现方式对你们来说可能比普通创作者更有利，毕竟大家都想接触到这类受众。你们甚至可以考虑为某些深度内容

You guys are exactly right. And and there probably needs to exist a a different business model for all of these things. But you could even in your case, I mean, you guys have probably right now a pretty defined audience, I would guess. And and probably a very high value audience, which makes ad supported monetization probably better than the average creator for you guys, just given the type of audience that people wanna wanna get to. But you could even contemplate, like, some of your deep dives.

比如我听说，有些对冲基金投资者真的把这些内容作为他们整个决策流程的唯一依据。想想还挺吓人的。是啊。不过

Like, I've I've heard of, like, actual hedge fund investors literally have that as the sole input to their entire process. Which is terrifying. Yeah. Well

不构成投资建议。

Not investment advice.

对，确实如此。但我觉得这是我最感兴趣的领域之一。本·汤普森最近刚写了篇文章，好像叫《统一内容商业模式》。虽然我不完全赞同他的观点，但他核心想表达的是所有媒体模式显然都应该转向免费增值模式。

Yeah, exactly. But I mean, you know, it is one of the areas that I'm kind of the most intrigued about. I think Ben Thompson had this piece very recently. I think he called it like the unified content business model piece. I don't necessarily agree with everything he said, but I think his main takeaway is obviously that all media models ought to move to freemium.

一个十五年来一直这么说的人，我显然在那一点上同意他。但我认为这在所有形式中都是如此。对吧？就像我说的，我认为有声书和播客有什么区别？肯定有区别，但形式正在模糊化。

Someone who's been saying that for fifteen years, I obviously agree with him there. But I think that's true in all formats. Right? Like as I said, I think, what's the difference between audiobooks and podcasting? There are definitely differences, but but the formats are blurring.

但主要的区别在于商业模式，正如我所说。所以它只是谈话音频，但带有付费或广告支持的商业模式。我想给你们的建议就是，我认为你们应该某种程度上探索两者，看看在多大程度上什么是可能的。

But the main one is is the business model, as I said. So it's just it's talk audio, but with a paid or an ad supported business model. And I guess my advice to you guys would just be, I think you should kind of, like, explore both and see to an extent what's possible.

是的。好了，听众们。现在是感谢节目新朋友Koyfin的好时机。有趣的是，他们是新朋友，但实际上，我已经使用他们的产品好几年了。

Yeah. Alright, listeners. Now is a great time to thank a new friend of the show, Koyfin. And it's funny. They're new, but, actually, I've been using their product for years.

我每一期新收购的研究项目都涉及Koyfin。所以当他们联系赞助节目时，我想，这真是太方便了。确实。Koyfin是一款受到个人投资者和财务顾问喜爱的金融研究工具。个人用它进行股票研究、绘制财务图表和投资组合跟踪，财务顾问则用它构建模型投资组合和创建客户提案。

My research project for every single new acquired episode involves Koyfin. So when they reached out to sponsor the show, I thought, well, this is convenient. Indeed. So Koifen is a financial research tool loved by both individual investors and financial advisers. Individuals use it for stock research, graphing financials, and portfolio tracking, and financial advisers use it to build model portfolios and create client proposals.

他们有实时市场数据和强大的分析工具。

They have live market data and powerful analytics tools.

所以它有点像彭博终端，但没有那高昂的价格标签。

So it's kinda like a Bloomberg terminal except without the huge price tag.

对吧？

Right?

是的，本质上就是这样。它是一个网络应用程序，完全自助服务。实际上，在我使用它的最初几年里，我从未与公司的任何人交谈过。因此，Koyfin是一个更广泛的市场（比如所有Acquired播客的听众）都会使用的产品，而不仅仅是华尔街的投资银行家。

Yes. Essentially. It's a web app, and it's totally self serve. I've actually not talked to anyone at the company for the first few years that I used it. So Koyfin is a product that the broader market, like all acquired listeners, would use, not just Wall Street investment bankers.

我在这里获取我们研究的每家公司的增长率、毛利率、市盈率或收入倍数等数据。你可以通过历史图表或与其他公司进行比较来观察这些数据的变化。这也是我在研究私营公司（如劳力士、玛氏或宜家）时常用的工具，通过查看可比公司来估算这些公司如果上市会值多少钱。他们还有一个筛选器，可以让你在数千只股票中进行筛选，快速发现投资机会。

It's where I pull things like growth rate or gross margins or the PE ratio or revenue multiples for every company we study. And you can compare these things over time with historical graphs or against other companies. It's often what I use when we're studying private companies too, like Rolex or Mars or IKEA, to look at the comparables to estimate what these companies would be worth if they were public. They also have a screener that lets you filter across thousands of stocks so you can quickly surface investment ideas.

没错。所以总体思路是，如果你习惯于生活在数据中，那么在考虑投资时，你应该能够随时获取这些数据。

Yep. So the general idea is if you're someone who's used to living in data, you should have that at your fingertips as you think about investing.

正是如此。它拥有这些出色的数据可视化图表，围绕机构级数据构建。因此，如果你想了解当前股价中隐含了哪些假设，Koyfin就是为你准备的。

Exactly. It's got these great graphs for data visualization wrapped around institutional grade data. So if you wanna understand what assumptions are baked into the stock price today, Koyfin is for you.

我正想说Acquired的听众有一个很棒的优惠，但Koyfin的免费产品实际上已经非常强大了。

I was about to say that acquired listeners have a great offer, but Koyfin's free product is actually already really robust. Which

这就是我多年来一直在使用的。

is what I was using for years.

我知道，我知道。不过确实，对于Acquired的听众以及你，Ben，如果你访问koyfin.com/acquired并最终升级到付费版，第一年可以享受20%的折扣。

I know. I know. But indeed, for acquired listeners and also for you, Ben, if you go to koyfin.com/acquired and you end up upgrading to paid, you'll get 20% off your first year.

感谢Koyfin的支持。请访问k0yfin.com/acquired，或点击节目说明中的链接。说到播客的商业模式，它有可能在规模上比音乐流媒体更有利可图。显然，音乐流媒体平台抽取30%分成，70%分给唱片公司。而播客则具备真正的运营杠杆潜力，尤其是当你拥有内容所有权时，可以打造一个出色的广告网络，或以任何方式实现盈利。

Our thanks to Koyfin. That's k0yfin.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. Speaking of the podcasting business model, there's the potential for podcasting to be a far better business at scale than music streaming. Obviously, with music streaming, you take 30% and you share 70% with the labels. With podcasting, there's the potential for real operating leverage, especially if you own the content to, build a fantastic ad network or, you know, however you wanna monetize it.

但你实际上能利用听众规模的优势，这在音乐领域是难以实现的——成本很难被规模摊薄。我很好奇，在你们构想成为播客平台的早期阶段，是否就开始考虑这一点，还是纯粹由产品驱动的？

But you actually can take advantage of the scale of your audience in a way that it's sort of hard to outrun your costs in the music world. I'm curious how early in your sort of dreaming about becoming a podcasting platform did you start thinking about that, or was it purely product driven?

我认为两者兼而有之。当你像我们这样规模运作时，必须考虑这个问题，因为我们许多投资都是跨年度的，从市场信号角度来看也相当重要。公开市场投资者显然想知道：这最终会是门好生意吗？为什么这么认为？如果我说'我们收购了一堆公司，但不确定能做成什么业务'，这显然不是正确答案。所以我们确实考虑过这些。

Well, I think it was a bit of both. And you have to to contemplate that if you're making moves like certainly of of our size because many of these investments that we're making are multi year ones and pretty substantial from a signaling point of view too. And obviously public market investors wanna know like, well, is this ultimately a good business? And why do you think that is? And for me to have said, well, we've bought a bunch of companies, but I don't really know what kind of business it'll be.

但现实是，当你过于深入时，总会觉得'邻家芳草绿'。一方面，如果你处理大量授权内容（比如来自主流唱片公司，当然也有很多独立厂牌，但主要供应仍受限于几家大公司），自然会认为播客模式更好——因为突然有了更广泛的内容创作者群体。

It's probably not gonna be the right answer. So, obviously we contemplated that and we thought about that. But the reality is there's a lot of the grass is greener on the other side when you go too deep in that. So, obviously, on the one hand, if you deal with a lot of licensed content, and in this case from some major labels, and obviously a lot of indies as well, but still relatively supply constrained from from some big ones. The natural tendency is for you to think, well, this is much better because all of a sudden, you have this sort of much wider scope of different creators that matters.

这很棒。

It's great.

你可以整合碎片化市场。

You can aggregate a fragmented market.

是的，可以实践聚合理论。这些都很好。但我们没有过度纠结这些。显然，这种商业模式还存在其他挑战。

Yeah. You you can do the aggregation theory. That's that's all good and great. We we don't really contemplate all that much. It's obviously, there's other challenges for that business model.

内容审核突然变成了一个庞然大物。你必须建立一个实际可扩展的广告网络。所以理论上你是对的，这种模式长期来看可能获得更高利润。但本质上，你需要经历更多步骤才能实现。

Moderation, all of a sudden becomes a massive thing. You have to build an actual ad network that probably then scales. So in theory, yes, you're right. You may have an opportunity to gain more margin over time in this model. But fundamentally, you have to do many more steps along the way.

比如音乐领域就不需要过多考虑内容审核问题。我们当然不需要建立复杂的系统流程来界定言论与暴力的界限。我深知这一点，因为见证过太多类似平台。但这个问题很关键——从损益角度看，这些模型表面很完美对吧？因为毛利率极高等等。

Like we don't have to contemplate content moderation as much when it comes to music. We certainly don't have to have these very elaborate systematic processes about what constitutes speech and violence. And we knew that because I'd seen enough of these obviously platforms. But it is important because if you think about it from a P and L, so on the surface of this, these models are great, right? Because very high gross margins and so on and so forth.

规模效应下很划算，小规模运作则成本高昂。

Great at scale. Expensive small scale.

没错。但即便规模化后，成本究竟是增是减？当前AI浪潮来势汹汹，但别忘了Facebook（现Meta）曾雇佣超过10万名内容审核员。

Yes. But even at scale, if you think about it, is the cost increasing or decreasing? And if you think about right now, obviously, AI will come in and it will be massive. But I think at one point in time, Facebook or now Meta had over a 100,000 content moderators actually working for them.

多少？10万人？

What? A 100,000?

我记得是这样，具体数字可能更夸张。

I believe so. I don't know an insane amount of people.

所以人们很容易误以为这是固定成本，认为他们运营着毛利率高得离谱的广告业务。

So it it's tempting to believe that that's a fixed cost and that they're run running this, like, unbelievably high gross margin advertising business.

是啊。

And Yeah.

他们可以跑赢那些固定成本，没问题。但实际上，你说的是，他们还积累了一大堆可变成本，这些并不符合那种理想化的社交媒体商业模式的柏拉图式构想。

They can outrun those fixed costs. No problem. But in reality, what you're saying is, actually, they build up a whole bunch of variable costs too that don't fit into this, platonic form of ideal social media business model.

没错，确实如此。而且即便在今天，想想看，好吧，也许不再是十万了，因为他们已经能自动化部分流程。但这就像猫鼠游戏，另一方现在正使用相当复杂的工具——

Yeah. For sure. And and and even today, if you think about it, so all right, well, maybe that's not a 100,000 anymore because they've been able to automate some of that process. But it's kind of mouse game as well. So the other side is now using quite sophisticated They

他们也在用OpenAI。

use OpenAI too.

对，正是这样。这意味着你的AI模型必须更加精密，这依然会增加成本。所以我认为最乐观的情况是——我在看这个数据，虽然很旧了——我记得Facebook IPO时，获取一个用户的成本大约是每人一美元左右，包括硬件等所有成本，基本上就是用户的终身价值。那时候变现手段还不成熟，所以烧钱烧了很久。

Yeah, exactly, to do that. And that means that your AI models has to be a lot more sophisticated, and that still adds cost. So I think the best case scenario, I was looking at this, this is very old data, I believe at the time of Facebook's IPO, it was something like the cost for Facebook to onboard a user was like a dollar a user or something like that, in like hardware cost and all that stuff, basically to have lifetime value of a customer. And so at that time, obviously, the monetization wasn't as advanced. So that was what was burning cash for quite a while.

最终他们的增长率可能放缓到一定程度，变现开始见效并逐步扩大，这两股力量相互抵消后，他们变得非常盈利。但看看现在，我不确定具体数字，但如果今天创办社交媒体公司，成本可能高出一个数量级，对吧？因为现在要做的所有事情——广告平台必须构建得无比精密。

And then eventually, their growth rate probably slowed down enough where their monetization started kicking in and kind of scaled up enough where where those two effects kind of took out each other and they became very profitable. But if you look at look at it now, I would I don't know what the cost would be. But if I would guess, if I would start a social media company today, the cost may be an order of magnitude more, right? Because of all the other things you now have to do. The ad platforms are way more sophisticated that you have to build.

内容审核工具也复杂得多。好消息是——你可能会问，那当初是不是错了？其实我们早有预期，并非完全从零开始做广告业务。

The moderation tools are way more sophisticated. Now, the good news so so you may then come to this and say, well, was that a mistake then? Well, we knew a lot about that going in, and we weren't entirely new. It wasn't like we were starting an ad business from the scratch. Right.

所以我们早已

So we had already

与Facebook合作很长时间了。

with Facebook for a long time.

是的，确实如此。所以我们对于会遇到哪些类型的问题有相对清晰的认识。

Yes. That too. So we had relatively good idea of what type of problems we would encounter.

为听众说明一下背景，我认为当时你们推出播客服务时，可能有约2亿用户在使用广告支持层级而非付费订阅，大概1.5亿左右。但你们已经拥有规模庞大的广告业务，只是缺乏用户生成内容作为广告投放的载体。

And to give you some credit for listeners, I think at the time, you probably had maybe 200,000,000 people on the ad supported tier who weren't in premium when you launched podcasting, maybe something like a 150,000,000. But you had a gigantic scale advertising business. You just didn't have user generated content being the content that it was advertising against.

没错。而且我们当时货币化的广告库存量相对较小。现在关键的是，这甚至比音乐业务更重要——我们要为许多无法自行销售广告的播客主（当然不包括你们这样的）提供变现渠道。除非你处于...

Yes. That's accurate. And and the amount of inventory, obviously, that we were were, monetizing it against was relatively small. And and one of the big things right now is, obviously, this is a huge thing, perhaps even more so than music for us to offer monetization to a lot of these podcasters that perhaps unlike yourself can't sell ads. Unless you're in

像我们这样的细分领域，如果规模不足，你永远无法直接接触联合利华、宝洁、可口可乐或耐克这些大客户。

a niche like ours, if you're subscale, you're never gonna be able to access Unilever or P and G or Coke, you know, on your own or Nike.

我想就此请教你们，因为我看了你们和大卫·森拉的那期节目。大卫这个人很有意思，在我看来他似乎更专注于深挖自己成功的根源，完全不愿转向扩大受众面。你们对此怎么看？

So I wanna ask you about that because I saw the episode you guys did with David Senra, by the way. Oh. So David's man. He he's interesting because like, in in my opinion, he seems to almost dig in more in like what made him successful and like tries to not at all veer to broadening the base. So how do you think about that?

因为你可以更专注地服务好你的细分领域。或者你也可以尝试，比如说，引入其他形式的内容。你如何决定要追求哪种类型的内容呢？

Because you could just go serve your niche even better. Or you could try to well, let's try to include other forms of content. How do you decide what what type of content to go after?

哦，老兄。我们正在纠结这个问题。我的意思是，你一直说很久了，你宁愿不追求增长也要保持现有受众的纯粹性。

Oh, man. We are right in the middle of figuring this. I mean, you always said for a long time, you're like, I would rather not have growth and keep our audience who they are.

我不是

I'm not

确定我会那么极端，但我宁愿深耕我们的细分市场。是的。然后在某个时刻停止增长，而不是扩大这个细分领域。

sure I'd go that far, but I would rather saturate our niche Yes. And then at some point stop growing than expand the niche.

然后

And then

我认为我们在现有领域还有三到四倍的发展空间

Which I think we have three to four x headroom on our

确实。我们仍可以在当前领域扩张。但后来我们做了泰勒·斯威夫特专题，做了NBA，做了NFL，还做了LVMH，结果新增了四万订阅用户。哇。

current Yes. We we still can expand in our niche. But but then we did our Taylor Swift episode. We did the NBA, we did the NFL, and then we did And LVMH, we got 40,000 new subscribers. Wow.

我们当时就觉得，好吧。关于你说的这里有些东西被入侵了这一点。确实，这里正在发生一种新现象。

And we were like, okay. So to your point about like, something is hacked here. Like, there's a there's a new phenomenon happening.

所以自我们开始以来，基本上每年都不得不重新定义什么是收购。过去是技术收购，效果确实不错。后来变成了那些你知道的收购。

So we we have had to redefine what acquired is basically once a year since we started. It used to be technology acquisitions that actually went well. And then it was acquisitions that know.

如果我们还是那样的话。

If we're still that.

然后到了某个阶段，我们不再局限于技术创始人和工程师。后来风投人士也加入进来，接着是他们的有限合伙人。现在有一批大学捐赠基金的人也在听。现在我们意识到，只要持续制作这些深度、冗长且深奥的故事与分析，就能为聪明人创造不受特定行业限制的优质内容。我认为这就是我们的新方向——这就是核心理念。

And then it was, you know, And and and so at some point, we expanded beyond just tech founders and engineers. It became venture capitalists also, and then it became their LPs. There's a bunch of university endowment folks that listen. And now we're realizing as long as we keep making these really deep, really long, really esoteric stories and analysis, you can create smart content for smart people that is not scoped to a particular industry. And I think that that's our new sort of That's the idea.

对Acquired节目使命的最新定义。没错。

Definition of the the job to be done from acquired. Yeah.

我觉得你们既能满足自己的好奇心，同时尝试的某些想法也并非遥不可及，这很了不起。当然，我猜泰勒·斯威夫特那期可能比较出格，但LVMH那期给我的感觉简直超自然。有趣的是，甚至在我原以为不属于你们受众群体的人群中，这期内容也被广泛讨论。

I think it's brilliant how you're able both to satisfy your own curiosity, I guess. And at the same time, sort of it doesn't seem that far fetched, some of the ideas you're trying. Obviously, I would probably assume the Taylor Swift one was more out there than something else. But the LVMH one actually felt to me supernatural. And it's funny, you know, how well talked about it it's been even among like, what I would have not assumed would have been your crowd.

比如我认识一些非常老派的价值投资者，说实话我都不知道他们会听播客。他们一直在给我发消息问：你听过这期吗？这种情况真的很酷。所以我认为受众之间可能存在某种交集，但显然也吸引了新的人群

Like I had a bunch of like really old school value investors that I honestly didn't even realise listen to podcasts. They've been pinging me about it. And like, have you listened to this one? It's like, which is pretty cool. So so I think there's a way where there's probably some overlap between the audiences, but also kind of clearly attracts a new

我是说，虽然规模和业务类型截然不同，但这有点像Spotify在音乐中加入播客。我们拥有传统上非常关注科技的观众群体，已经打磨成熟的节目形式。现在我们在思考：如果引入其他内容，是否能扩大受众面？

I mean, it's kinda like it's a very, very different scale and different business, but it's it's a little bit like the Spotify adding podcast to a music, but like, we have this audience that is like traditionally very tech focused. We have this format that we've refined. And now we're like, well, okay. If we bring something else into it, is that gonna expand it?

没错。但我要指出，Spotify作为技术平台可以聚合不同受众群体，让他们在这个广阔平台上自主选择内容路线，这点与我们不同。

Yeah. But I will say, unlike Spotify, which you can by virtue of being a tech platform, you can aggregate a bunch of different audiences and then let them choose their own adventure on a really broad platform.

内容路线是由我们选择的。

We choose the adventures.

对。我们创作这些连续剧式的剧集。比如我们刚做了洛克希德·马丁专题（虽然播出时还没发布），本可以做八期，但我们精选了两个故事作为一集。

Yeah. Create these serial episodes. And so if we go on a bender and do, like, just did Lockheed Martin, and it hasn't hasn't come out yet as we speak, but we could have done eight Lockheed Martin episodes, and we chose two particular stories to tell. And we called that the Lockheed Martin episode. Yeah.

如果我们真的做了八期，就会忽视其他细分领域的内容需求。

If we went on a bender and did eight, then, like, we were were under serving a lot of our other niches.

我们做过两期半任天堂专题，两期任天堂加一期世嘉。制作过程很尽兴，游戏爱好者也很享受。但当世嘉那期播出时，对游戏历史不感兴趣的听众早就流失了。

We did two and a half episodes on Nintendo, two on Nintendo, one on Sega. And we had a blast, and people who love video games had a blast. But by the time the Sega episode came out, the people who don't love video games and video game history had stopped listening. Right. Right.

深入探讨这点的话，我很好奇：制作八期内容对你们来说工作量会大很多吗？还是说其实素材充足，只是从受众角度考虑不合适？

But sort of diving deeper on that, I'm curious then, would it have been that much more effort for you guys to produce the eight, or did you have the content, but it just didn't make sense from an audience point of view?

我认为我们脑海中已有八个高层次的概念，但事实证明，大部分工作都集中在最后的10%。

I think we had high level concepts in our head for for eight, but it it turns out, most of the work is the last 10%.

是啊，确实。

Yeah. Yeah.

这就像软件工程一样，前90%是一回事，后90%又是另一回事。对，而且我觉得大部分工作其实是

It's like that it's like software engineering where, like, there's the first 90%, then there's the second 90%. Yeah. And I think so much of the work is

最后的20%。

The last 20%.

没错。不过通常总有一件事会被搁置。所以我们正在尝试这个短篇的概念，就是之前为世嘉做的那种。如果大约一小时的话，我们能不能再塞进一个原本挤不进去的内容，再多讲一个故事？是的。

Yeah. There's usually one thing on the cutting room floor, though. So we're so we're playing with this idea of shorts, the what we did for Sega. If in approximately one hour, can we take one thing that just we couldn't squeeze it in and and and tell one more story? Yeah.

我刚才在想，稍微提一下我们之前讨论过的付费模式与广告支持模式的问题。我敢打赌，虽然受众可能很少，但确实会有人愿意听完全部八集。至于你是否愿意花时间制作这八集，那就是另一个问题了。在我看来，最优秀的创作者往往只追随自己感兴趣的东西。有些会成功，有些则不会。

I I was just thinking about sort of touching upon where we sort of were a little while ago about sort of paid versus ad supported. I bet you that there would be a very small one, but there would be an audience that would listen to all eight. Whether you wanna spend all the time doing the eight is a totally different question. It seems to me like the best creators just pursue whatever they're interested in. And some of it will work, some of it won't work.

他们似乎并不太在意这些。当然，他们会从那些引起共鸣的内容中学习。这才是最酷的部分。就像我们生活在一个互联网时代，一方面大家都在谈论那些15秒的短视频，深陷其中；但另一方面，你也可以进行长达三、四、五小时的超级深奥话题讨论，而人们同样热爱这些。

They don't really seem to care all that much. Obviously, they'll learn from what seems to be resonating and all. That's the cool part. Like we're living in an internet where on the one hand, everyone talks about this fifteen second kind of clips thing and everyone's sort of getting down in that rabbit hole. But then at the same time, you can have like three, four, five hour long conversations in super esoteric, very, very deep topics, and people love that too.

有趣的是，我们、乔·罗根、莱克斯，在短视频正迎来爆发时刻的同时，超长视频内容也在经历爆发式增长。

It's funny. Us, Joe Rogan, Lex, at the same time that short form is having a breakout moment, extreme long form is also having a breakout moment.

我们想听听你的看法。就我们这样的小规模而言，我们其实很挣扎。比如我们没收购TikTok，我们在YouTube Shorts上发内容，也在Twitter上发布。

We want your views on this. On our very small scale, like, we're struggling. Like, we haven't acquired TikTok. We're on YouTube shorts. We post on Twitter.

但这些平台都没能为我们带来实质性的增长。我们在TikTok上有几个视频获得了几百万播放量，却不知道是否因此增加了一个新订阅用户。对吧？对于——

And, like, none of that drives the needle for us. Like, we've had videos on TikTok get a couple million views, and we don't know if it translated to a single new subscriber. Right. To the

其实很多情况下，我们确实知道它带来了一个新订阅用户。

In many cases, we do know it translated to a single new subscriber.

一个新订阅用户。没错。

A single new subscriber. Right.

欢迎你们两位。

Welcome both of you.

是啊。欢迎你们两位。

Yeah. Welcome both of you.

感谢您一直与我们同在。同时，要知道，至少在播客领域，你们是长内容的大本营，而你们刚刚推出了新的华尔街播客，大家都在讨论这是播客的抖音化趋势。

Thank you for staying with us. At the same time, like, you get you know, you are, at least on the podcasting side, the home of long form content, and you just launched the new Wall Street all thinks it's the TikTokification of podcasts.

这是新的首页界面。

It's the new home screen.

新的首页界面。没错。是的。两种极端似乎都行得通。我认为在这个新兴创作者经济中，我们面临的最大问题之一是归属问题，对吧？

The new home screen. Yes. Yeah. Both extremes seem to work. I believe one of the biggest problems we have in this new creator economy is the one of attribution, right?

许多像你这样的创作者会尝试各种不同平台并使用它们。他们可以在每个单独平台上看到自己的表现如何，但很难真正理解是什么驱动了什么。我实际上看到了两种情况。有些创作者在其他平台上投入不足，可能过于单一，只因为在一个平台上取得了成功，就忽视了其他所有平台。我对这些人的建议是，这样做感觉有点危险。

So many creators like you have or try many of these different platforms and use it. They can see on each individual platform how well they're doing, but it's very hard for them to understand what actually drives what. And I actually see both. I see some creators who are like under investing in other platforms and probably too singularly, just because they have success on one, they kind of ignore all the others. Which my advice to all of those is that feels kind of dangerous to do.

因为如果发生算法变化或类似情况，甚至平台本身都未预料到，因为他们可能发现某些内容更受欢迎，观看时间与某些其他指标更匹配。这不一定是出于恶意。可能只是对用户真正有益的变化。但如果你把全部生计都建立在一个平台上，那对你来说可能是个大问题。所以我看到他们在其他平台上投入不足。

Because if there would be an algorithm change or any of the kind, even unanticipated by the platform, because they may see that something resonates, watch time resonates better with some other metric. It doesn't have to be skewed as an evil thing. It just could be something that actually benefits the user. But if you built your entire livelihood of that one platform, that could be a big problem for you. So I see them under investing in other platforms.

然后另一种情况也同样存在，就是他们在太多平台上过度投入，没有意识到其实专注于一两个平台可能会做得更好。因此，我认为存在两个不同的问题。对我们来说，我们关心这个问题，特别是为什么我们这样设计首页推荐，根本原因在于我们展示内容的方式对音乐、有声书或播客必须非常不同。如果你仔细想想，这很合理，因为一首歌只需要三分钟的投入，实际上你可能在前十到十五秒就能判断是否值得继续听下去。

And then the other one also be true, which is they're over investing in too many and not realizing that actually they probably would do better in just focusing more on one or two. And so, I think that there's two different problems. I believe that for us and why we care about this, and certainly why we designed the home feed the way we did is because fundamentally, how we merchandise content has to be very different for music than it is for an audiobook or a podcast. And if you think about it, it's kind of logical because in a song, it's a three minute commitment And of your you can actually probably tell within the first ten, fifteen seconds whether this is worth investing your time in or not.

除非是Radiohead的歌。

Unless it's a Radiohead song.

确实如此。确实如此。但你可能已经了解这个品牌，知道如何给予它时间和关注。是的。因为你会想，好吧，我喜欢Radiohead，我要给这首歌一个机会。

That is true. That is true. But you probably then know the brand and you know how to give it the time and attention Yeah. To it because you're you're like, well, I love Radiohead. I'm gonna give this song a chance.

也许不止一次机会。我会多听几遍再做决定。显然，如果把这种想法应用到播客上，比如我在听你们的节目，即使话题不一定是我感兴趣的，但因为这是你们的节目，我可能会尝试一下。因为我信任你们，已经建立了这种默契。

And maybe not just one chance. I'll I'll listen to it a few times before I make up my mind. And obviously, if you now think about that with podcasting, I mean, if I'm listening to you guys, and and even if it's a topic I don't necessarily know that I'm interested in, I might give it a shot because it's you guys. And I trust you because I built up this rapport with you.

但这需要更大的投入。

It's a much bigger commitment though.

确实需要更大的投入。但我可能会给它十、十五、二十分钟的时间，对吧？因为我有这种关系基础。但如果我从未听过你们的节目——

It is a much bigger commitment for sure. But I may give it ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. Right? Because I have that relationship. But if I've never listened to you guys before

是啊。

Yeah.

那个吸引我的钩子，有多少人知道，在营销中通常需要。早期Spotify时，我们需要八个人听说过Spotify才能成功注册一个新用户。

That one hook that gets me in, how many people, know, in marketing you usually had. And in early Spotify, we had eight people needed to have heard about Spotify before we were able to sign someone up.

哦，有意思。

Oh, interesting.

于是我们意识到，事件发生的地理密度实际上是时间线和关键因素之一。因此，我们早期的营销活动大多集中在美国的大学城。

And so we realized that the geographical density in which that happened was actually a key sort of contributor and a timeline. So much of our early marketing efforts were in college cities in The US.

有道理。

Makes sense.

那里的消费者可能更倾向于将音乐视为生活的重要组成部分，且集中在狭小的地理区域。所以我们采取了密集推广策略，尝试了多种方法，取得了巨大成功。

You have like consumers who are probably more attuned to music being a big part of their life, small geographical areas. So we we kind of bombarded it. We did a bunch of different things that was hugely successful.

现在回想起来，天啊，已经十五年了。当初因为唱片公司的谈判限制，不得不选择特定地区逐步推广，这反而成了优势吧？比如你们能先彻底占领瑞典、英国市场，然后再...

In retrospect now, you know, god, how long? Fifteen years later, was it almost like a benefit that you had to launch geographically specifically because of the label negotiations? Like that you could really saturate Sweden, The UK before moving to

噢，当然。人们总以为互联网公司就该第一天就全球化，觉得这才是正确方式。但我认为99.9%的情况下这根本不现实。创业者必须重新思考这个问题。

Oh, yeah. For sure. We all believe that these like sort of internet companies that go global day one, that's like the right approach. I I actually think 99.9%, this is just untrue and false. The entrepreneurs have to revise.

我们都受益于先限定范围寻找首批用户。这个范围可以是地理细分，也可以是特定人群。但更多时候，地理限制确实有帮助——把自己限定在一个城市、一个州或一个国家。这是非常重要的策略。

We all are benefited from constraining ourselves to finding what our first audience is. And it could be geographically niched. It could be that it actually is, you know, again, a subset of a demographic or whatever. But more often than not, it's actually geography helps Limiting yourself to a city, to a state, to a country, whatever it might be. And so that was a huge part.

我可以明确告诉你，如果当初我们第一站选择美国市场，Spotify今天就不可能存活。虽然当时觉得不能在全世界最大市场首发，对互联网公司来说简直是巨大退步。

I can tell you definitively, Spotify would not have been alive today had it not been that we couldn't launch in The US as our first market. And if you ask me at the time, it was like a huge kind of step back to say, well, I can't launch in the most biggest market in the world. And I'm running an internet company, like, come on.

你讲述了你所相信的故事，告诉投资者们，比如，我们大约三个月后将在美国上线。我们正在进行这些对话。而实际上那是三年后的事了。

You told the stories of you believed and you told investors like, oh, we're gonna be live in The US in like three months. We're having the conversations. And then it was three years later.

哦，是的。实际上，

Oh yeah. Actually,

压力一定很大吧。

must have been so stressed.

是啊。嗯，我经历过很多那样的阶段，每次都会伴随严重的体重增加和脱发。所以，基本上就是

Yeah. Well, I had many of those episodes and it always followed with enormous weight gains and hair loss. So, that was basically

你真的把头发都揪光了。

You literally ripped your hair out.

差不多吧。比如我开始时还有头发，两三年后，我就没头发了。

Yeah, pretty much. Like I started, I had hair then like two, three years later, I didn't have hair.

你创办Spotify的时候，还有头发吗？

When you started Spotify, you had hair?

是啊。哇哦。没错。我还留着些早年有头发时的老照片，大概第一年左右的，后来头发就慢慢掉光了。哇。

Yeah. Woah. Yeah. There's like old pictures of me with hair, like from the first year or something, and then it kind of all disappeared. Wow.

而我完全搞不懂原因。这是

And I don't know anything. Was it

值得的吗？这个交换值得吗？

worth it? Was it worth the trade?

嗯，显然我认为是值得的，但我也不能轻易推荐。这就像坐情绪过山车，你们创业者都懂。这不是胆小者能承受的。在我看来，每个真正成功的企业家都至少经历过三次公司濒临倒闭的危机，对吧？那种不确定公司能否存活、明天是否还能继续的感觉。我特别反感媒体如何描绘这种经历，有时把企业家塑造成那种从一开始就洞悉一切、气吞山河的形象。

Well, so obviously I think it has been, but obviously I can't recommend, It is an emotional roller coaster, you guys know this being an entrepreneur. It's not for the faint hearted. And I think every really successful entrepreneur, in my opinion, has had at least three near death experiences with their company, right? Where you just feel like, I'm not sure whether this thing is gonna work, not work, whether we're gonna be alive tomorrow or not. And I kind of hate how media portrays this and sometimes how entrepreneurs were supposed to be sort of like, we're so big, we're like, we understood everything from day one.

这绝不是我的故事。我的旅程充满了运气成分，疯狂工作才勉强达到今天成就的一半。整个过程确实是情绪上的过山车。你说得没错，但如果有人事先告诉我这会如此艰难，我绝对不会开始。

It's certainly not been my journey. Like my journey was, you know, I had a lot of luck. I worked insanely hard to get to even half of where we were today. And then it's been a true sort of emotional roller coaster. And it is true what you say, but like, for me, had you told me how hard this would have been, I would have never done it.

我很高兴经历了这一切，但若重来一次，我绝不会选择这条路。

I'm happy I went through it, but I would have never done it.

哇。好了各位听众，现在该聊聊我们最爱的另一家公司Statsig了。自上次报道后，他们有个激动人心的新进展——完成了C轮融资，估值达到11亿美元。

Wow. Alright, listeners. It's time to talk about another one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Since you last heard from us about Statsig, they have a very exciting update. They raised their series c, valuing them at $1,100,000,000.

是的，重大里程碑。祝贺团队。时机也很有趣，因为实验领域正变得异常火热。

Yeah. Huge milestone. Congrats to the team. And timing is interesting because the experimentation space is, really heating up.

没错。那么为什么投资者对统计分段的估值超过十亿美元？因为实验已成为全球顶尖产品团队产品栈中的关键部分。

Yes. So why do investors value stat seg at over a billion dollars? It's because experimentation has become a critical part of the product stack for the world's best product teams.

是的。这一趋势始于Web 2.0时代的公司，如Facebook、Netflix和Airbnb。这些公司面临一个问题：如何在保持快速去中心化的产品与工程文化的同时，扩展到数千名员工？实验系统是这个答案的重要组成部分。

Yep. This trend started with web two dot o companies like Facebook and Netflix and Airbnb. Those companies faced a problem. How do you maintain a fast decentralized product and engineering culture while also scaling up to thousands of employees? Experimentation systems were a huge part of that answer.

这些系统让这些公司的每个人都能访问一套全球产品指标，从页面浏览量到观看时间再到性能表现。每当团队发布新功能或产品时，他们都可以衡量该功能对这些指标的影响。

These systems gave everyone at those companies access to a global set of product metrics, from page views to watch time to performance. And then every time a team released a new feature or product, they could measure the impact of that feature on those metrics.

因此，Facebook可以设定一个公司范围内的目标，比如增加应用内停留时间，并让各个团队自行探索如何实现。将这种做法扩展到数千名工程师和产品经理身上，于是，你就获得了指数级增长。难怪实验现在被视为必不可少的基础设施。

So Facebook could set a company wide goal like increasing time in app and let individual teams go and figure out how to achieve it. Multiply this across thousands of engineers and PMs, and boom, you get exponential growth. It's no wonder that experimentation is now seen as essential infrastructure.

没错。如今最优秀的产品团队，如Notion、OpenAI、Rippling和Figma，同样依赖实验。但他们不再自行构建，而是直接使用Statsig。而且他们不仅仅将Statsig用于实验。过去几年里，Statsig已经添加了快速产品团队所需的所有工具，如功能标志、产品分析、会话回放，

Yep. Today's best product teams like Notion, OpenAI, Rippling, and Figma are equally reliant on experimentation. But instead of building it in house, they just use Statsig. And they don't just use Statsig for experimentation. Over the last few years, Statsig has added all the tools that fast product teams need, like feature flags, product analytics, session replays,

等等。

and more.

因此，如果您想帮助团队的工程师和产品经理找到提速构建和做出更明智决策的方法，请访问statsig.com/acquired，或点击节目说明中的链接。他们提供极其慷慨的免费套餐、5万美元的初创企业计划，以及面向大公司的实惠企业合同。只需告诉他们是本和大卫推荐您来的。

So if you would like to help your team's engineers and PMs figure out how to build faster and make smarter decisions, go to statsig.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. They have a super generous free tier, a $50,000 startup program, and affordable enterprise contracts for large companies. Just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

我们想问的是——不知你是否认为这是濒临危机的时刻之一。因为我们做过泰勒·斯威夫特专题，在节目中讨论了很多。1989专辑发布那周，泰勒撤下了平台内容。你觉得那是决定性时刻吗？那是2014年。

We wanted to ask about I wonder if you consider this one of those near death moments. But because we did the T Swift episode, you know, we talked a lot about it on the show. The week that 1989 dropped and Taylor pulled off the platform. Like, do you consider that one of those moments? This was 2014.

2014年。对，2014年10月。

2014. Yeah. October 2014.

奇怪的是，并不算。这正是最疯狂的地方。从外部视角看，这似乎是重大事件。但当时若身处Spotify内部，没人认为那是决定性时刻。我们当然担忧过——这是否会引发更多艺人陆续退出等等，持续了几天。

Weirdly enough, no. That that's That's the crazy part with it. It was one of those where if you'd asked us externally, it felt like this massive event. But if you were inside of Spotify at that moment, there was no one who thought that that was sort of the defining moment. We certainly worried about, okay, well, is this the beginning of like more artists sort of pulling out, etcetera, for a few days.

后来我与许多艺人交流，当时确实存在对Spotify的质疑。但总体而言，欧洲已有足够多案例证明这种模式可行——或许在美国尚未成熟，或许她这样做更合适。但当时已有足够多人相信，美国转向流媒体为主流只是时间问题。

And then, I spoke to a lot of artists, but I think there were certainly a lot of skepticism about Spotify at the time. But generally speaking, there had been enough things in Europe where people really saw like, no, actually this kind of works. Maybe it doesn't work yet in The US. Maybe it's better for her to do this thing. But there was enough people that believed at that time that it was only a matter of time before The US would be majority streaming too.

外界对Spotify的描绘常常是非此即彼的极端态度，但实际上我给艺人或创作者的建议从不如此。这其实很特殊——虽然人人都想自建平台，但我坚信开放才是核心模式。像阿黛尔这样的艺人（现在情况不同了）当时可能受益于实体唱片稀缺性，本不必登陆流媒体，本应采取窗口期策略。

The sort of way it's been portrayed oftentimes with Spotify in particular has been like this sort of dogmatic, it has to be all in with me or not. And actually that's not how I advise artists or creators. I always tell them like this kind of And it's kind of unusual thing because everyone wants to build their own platform so on. But my firm view is that truly I believe in open as the model at its core. And so my view has been like, there's some artists that at that time, I don't believe it's true anymore, but like the Adel's of the world, that probably benefited from physical scarcity, that probably didn't need to be on streaming, that probably should have done a windowing type model.

这类艺人的数量会非常非常少。但她确实是其中之一。

The number of those artists were going to be very, very small. Yeah. But she was certainly one of them.

这是因为她的听众 demographics 吗？

Was that because of the demographics of her audience?

我想是的。但她自己基本上能掌控时代精神，对吧？比如，她可以决定这是一个重大的文化时刻。泰勒·斯威夫特。

Or I think so. But also she, on her own, can basically control the zeitgeist. Right? Like, she can decide that this is a big cultural moment. Taylor Swift.

是的，确实如此。世界上没多少人能让全球数亿人等待一个时刻。

Yes. Yeah. It is remarkable. Not a lot of people in the world can get hundreds of millions of people around the world to to wait Yeah. For a moment.

而且她这次专辑发布也做得非常出色。

And she did brilliantly with this album launch too.

我熬夜到午夜。

I stayed up till midnight.

是啊。很多人——我不确定是否有数亿，但肯定有数千万人真的在等待，她几乎让所有人整点同步参与。每个小时都像是一份新礼物，她把这一切演绎得完美无缺。她非常擅长理解如何与听众沟通。

Yeah. A lot of I I don't know if it was hundreds of millions, but certainly tens of millions of people literally waited and sort of, she got them in on the hour. And it was like, each hour was another sort of gift. So, she played that to perfection. And she's really remarkable at understanding how to speak to her audience.

而且她做得很真实。她能做到这一点，当然也有其他艺术家能做到。但罕见的是，她能与粉丝群体建立如此深刻的精神联结——那种强烈而炽热的羁绊，规模如此之大，这才是独特之处。

And she does it authentically. So she can do that. And there's definitely other artists that can do the same. But what's rare is for her to have that kind of psychedelist and connection with that deep connection with that audience, the the fan base that she has, how vigorous and how intense they are at that scale. That's the unique thing.

对吧？2014年和她重返Spotify之间是否发生了什么变化，使得她在2014年不适合出现在这里，但到了2017年或她回归的那个时候，世界已经变得足够不同，让她回归变得合理。你们之间的关系是怎样的，比如，你真的和她谈过吗？整个过程是怎么进行的？

Right? Was there something that changed between 2014 and when she came back on Spotify, where it may have made sense for her not to be here in 2014, but then in 2017 or whenever that was that she came back, that the world had changed enough where it did make sense. And how did the relationship between, like, did you actually talk to her? Like, how did that all go down?

是的。我认为最主要的变化是流媒体在更大程度上成为了行业的主流。所以当时的选择就像是，嘿，我要不要上流媒体？你觉得她那时不上流媒体能拿到第一吗？答案很可能是否定的。

Yeah. I think the predominant thing that changed was streaming just became the majority of the industry in a bigger way. So if the option was like, Hey, am I on streaming or not on streaming? Do I think she could have reached number one at that point without streaming? Probably not, would have been the answer.

而且她非常聪明。所以她理解这一点。

And she's super smart. So she understood that.

就像你说的，甚至在2014年的欧洲，这种情况已经发生了，但在美国还没有。

And kind to your point, like, even in 2014 in Europe, that had already happened, but it hadn't happened in The US.

没错。美国肯定还没到那一步。我们当时早得多。我是说，那时候Spotify在美国才刚起步不到三年。流媒体的普及率相对较低。

No. It definitely hadn't happened in The US. We were much earlier. I mean, Spotify at that time was like shy of three years in The US. Streaming penetration was relatively low.

广播还是主流。那时候实体唱片销量仍然很大。我记得好像是Lil Wayne那年在Costco卖出了大约300万张专辑，在所有地方中偏偏是Costco。不可能吧。是的。

Radio was like the predominant thing. At that time, physical sales was still very big. I remember, I think it was Lil Wayne that sold like 3,000,000 albums in that year on Costco out of all places. No way. Yeah.

这背后是某种人口统计学的关联在起作用。

It's it's some sort of demographic connection thing was going on.

我太喜欢这个了。查理·芒格、李尔·韦恩和好市多的奇妙交集。

I love that. The intersection of like Charlie Munger and Lil Wayne and Costco.

好市多在美国——实际上是全球——销售的鸡肉数量无人能及。如果你能进入这个渠道，它就是个难以置信的分销平台。

Costco sells more chickens than anyone in The US. In the world actually. Costco just is an unbelievable distribution channel if you can get it.

我们之前讨论过，星巴克和霍华德·舒尔茨实际上是最大的CD零售商之一，这也是我最初结识他的方式。

And we were talking about it before, but Starbucks and Howard Schultz was actually one of the biggest retailers of CDs That's in the actually how I'd met him the first time.

哦，真的吗？

Oh, really?

没错。因为他们当时正要成为我们的合作伙伴。

Yeah. Because they were they were becoming a partner of ours.

对，你们和星巴克达成了合作。

That's right. You did a partnership with Starbucks.

正是在那时认识的，有机会与他共度时光。那时候的世界观与现在截然不同，后来发生了很多变化。自那以后，她一直与团队合作无间，而且极其聪慧。

Exactly at that moment and got to know and spent some time with him. So, yeah. I mean, the world just looked very different back at that time. And I think that changed. And and, yeah, I mean, ever since, she's been great with the team and and she's super smart.

那是我们从这期节目中得出的重要结论。就像她真的非常、非常聪明。

That was our big takeaway from the episode. Was just like she is really, really smart.

戴夫和我在录制这期节目前聊过。你还接触过哪些艺术家，让你接触后觉得他们的商业头脑比任何我见过的创始人或投资人都强？我们有点着迷于，比如，哪些人

Dave and I were talking before this episode. Are there other artists that you've gotten interface with where you walk away and you're like, better business acumen than any founder I've met, any investor I've met. We've kinda become obsessed with, like, who

既是各自艺术领域的顶尖人物，又是商业领域的佼佼者？

are people who are top of their game artists and top of their game business people?

这样的人其实不少。因为我认为如今，像那种级别的超级巨星，他们本身就是一家企业，而他们是这家企业的CEO。当然有人协助他们。但在当今这个层面，几乎没有人不在商业方面非常活跃，并且深刻理解他们的观众想要什么，什么对他们来说是真实的。采取X行动会如何影响这种关系？

There's quite a few of them. Because I actually believe these days, if you consider a mega artist of that stature, it's like they're their own enterprise, and they're the CEO of that enterprise. They certainly have people who help them. But at this level today, there's almost no one of them that's not very active as well on the business side, and understand deeply what their audience wants, what's authentic to them. By making move X, how does that affect that relationship?

最让我觉得酷的是，世界上有泰勒·斯威夫特这样的例子。然后还有像防弹少年团这样的现象，简直疯狂。

And what's super cool to me is that, you know, you have everything from the Taylor Swifts of the world. And then you have something like BTS, which is like insane.

他们有什么不同？因为他们都是同等级别的规模，对吧？

And how are they different? Because they're reason they're same order of magnitude scale. Right?

我不敢说了解泰勒·斯威夫特所有的商业运作和涉及的人员。但据我猜测，她可能带着一个相当精简的团队运作。

I don't pretend to know all of Taylor Swift's business sides and who's involved in everything. But from what I would guess is she probably runs with a pretty lean team.

这是我们制作这期节目时调研听到的说法。

That's what we heard when we were researching the episode.

没错。这也完全符合我们与她的接触印象，非常紧凑高效。而像防弹少年团这样的韩国艺人——其实很多韩流明星都是如此——完全就是工业化运作，规模庞大。

Yeah. And that's certainly been our interaction with her. It's like very tight, very lean. And then if you think about something like BTS, but actually quite a lot of the Korean artists, it is like an industry. It's huge.

单就歌曲创作而言，泰勒·斯威夫特团队的核心创作人员可能就两三个，最多四个。但某些韩国艺人背后有200名创作者参与。哇。而这还只是冰山一角。

Just on the songwriting side, it's the difference between if in Taylor Swift's camp, it's like two, three, four maybe at the top. In some Koreans, it's 200 Yeah. Writers Wow. Involved. And that's like a small part.

再加上周边商品开发等环节，又是好几百人的规模。

And then you have like everything from merchandising. There's another few 100.

还有人才培养体系。从进入K-pop体系到最终成为某组合成员，这条流水线确实...

The talent development too. Like the pipeline to go from you enter into the K pop system to you become a member of XYZ group is Yeah.

这完全可以成为你们下个深度选题。说真的，他们全方位运作的方式令人着迷——不仅最大化唱片收益，还通过自有程序员开发专属数字平台来培养粉丝群体，这种360度思维模式太酷了。

Well, that that that could be your next deep dive because honestly, it is fascinating how they do it and the three sixty, how they think about it, not just from sort of maximizing their recorded side, but actually thinking about sort of fan development, all the digital platforms. They have their own developers, programmers, building specific platforms. It's pretty cool.

有件事我特别好奇——昨天在斯德哥尔摩和Spotify团队交流时想到的。想请你从行业视角谈谈这几年坏兔子和雷鬼风潮。听你提过早从Spotify数据就预见到这股热潮，现在它已经是平台上最大的音乐流派了。

One thing I'm really curious on that we hadn't thought about before, we came here yesterday to Stockholm when we were talking with other folks on the Spotify team. I'm curious in this lens what the past few years have been with Bad Bunny and Reggaeton. And I've heard you talk about that, like, you knew from the data on Spotify that this was gonna be huge. And now I think it's the largest genre Yeah. On Spotify.

而且我们很多听众可能都不太了解你刚才提到的这两个术语。

And many of our listeners will not know either of those two terms you just threw out.

我认为这是一个更广泛的趋势。对吧？在文化层面，我们现在生活在一个非常全球化的世界里。但同时仍存在许多地方性的细微差异，对吧？这就是我们讨论的那种极端现象。

And I think this is a broader trend. Right? We're now living in a very global world when it comes to culture. At the same time, there's still a lot of local nuances, right? So it's this extremity that we talked about.

一方面，存在着这些超级小众的领域。但偶尔会有某个小众领域发展成相当可观的规模，你会开始意识到它可能还具有全球吸引力。以拉丁美洲为例，福音音乐相当流行，放克音乐也很受欢迎。

On the one end, you have this super super niches that exists. But then once every blue moon, one of these niches kind of develop into something that's actually quite sizable, and you kind of start realizing that maybe this has a global appeal on top of it. So in LATAM, as an example, gospel music is quite big. And funk music is also quite big. Okay.

这大概不是你联想到的流行音乐类型吧。但它们确实存在。显然这些音乐在其他地方也有小规模受众，比如在美国南部，福音音乐可能是更大的流派等等。所以并不是完全孤立只在那里发生的。

Well, that's probably not what you associate with popular music. Yeah. But there are real things. And obviously they exist in microcosms elsewhere, like you could probably guess in the South, in The US, gospel might be a larger genre, etc. So it's not like it's totally kind of isolated and just happening there.

但这些音乐风格能引发某种文化共鸣。再看看雷鬼顿这类音乐，通常开始时规模很小。实际上在每个文化集群中，它都会逐渐发展得更广泛。仔细观察就会发现，它在该区域之外往往也有相当大的散居群体受众。比如美国的西班牙裔群体就是个明显例子。

But there's something that creates a sort of cultural resonance with those types of styles. And then you have something like reggaeton, and it usually starts pretty small. And then actually in each cluster, it's kind of like starts developing more broadly. And when you really look at it, like it has oftentimes a pretty huge diaspora outside of that sort of near region as well. So, I mean, the Hispanic population in The US would be kind of an obvious one, right?

多年前我们就开始看到这些音乐突破原有的文化集群，成为相当重要的存在。当时在我看来，如果我们全球范围内投资这个流派，显然它会具有全球吸引力。

And so many years ago, we kind of started seeing them breaking out their natural clusters and becoming a pretty big thing. And it was, for me at that time, it was just pretty obvious that if we invested in that genre on a global basis, we thought that that would have a global appeal. And

没错。因为在这样的平台出现之前，虽然可能也有成功案例，但受众范围可能有限。现在很多非西班牙语系的美国人和世界各地的人，虽然不一定认识坏痞兔或了解他的歌曲背景，却能跟着唱他所有西班牙语歌词的歌。

Yeah. Because before a platform like that, obviously, like, it could happen and maybe there are examples where it did, but, like, that's like, it's just so may maybe the acquired audience, not as many people know Bad Bunny or, like, know the lyrics to his songs, but, like, a large portion of non Spanish speaking Americans and, like, non Spanish speaking people around the world know all the lyrics in Spanish to Bad Bunny songs.

他们可能并不理解歌词的含义，但无论如何。是的，那会是截然不同的情况。有很多本土文化元素，看起来就像，什么？

They they may not know what the lyrics about, though. But For better than worse. Yeah. That would be a very different thing. There's a lot of local cultural things that seems like, what?

他在谈论，你知道的，某人在这段关系中的背叛，以及这类情感纠葛。这就是那种本土化的微妙之处。但确实，我是说，这很迷人，对吧？同时，你可能无法想象MSG演唱会门票售罄，两万甚至更多人合唱着看似非韩语的韩文歌词。关键是，他们能记住每首歌的每个词——这才是最神奇的地方，不是吗？

He's talking about, you know, someone cheating with this one, and all these kind of relationship stuff. That's the sort of local nuances. But yeah, mean, yeah, that's the fascinating thing, right? But at the same time, you probably wouldn't have imagined MSG being sold out and like 20,000, if not more, people singing Korean lyrics that doesn't look Korean, by the way. Like, know every word to every And that's the amazing thing, right?

当某些事物流行起来时，音乐就是如此。它让人感受到艺术家身上有种特质，他们的表达方式能与你作为个体产生共鸣。这是最基础的故事讲述方式。我们始终在用音乐传递情感。艺术真的很难用言语描述，对吧？

Like, when things catch on, it's music. It makes people feel there's something about the artist, there's something about how they're communicating that resonates with you as an individual. And it is the foundational storytelling. We've always used music. It is so hard to describe art, right?

我们可以客观描述：哦，这是艺术。但你为何会对一幅画产生特定感受？为何听到某首歌会有某种情绪？这真的难以言表。而这正是我们所做之事的神奇之处。

Like, we can objectively describe, oh, there's art, but how you feel. Why do you feel a certain way when you're looking at a painting? Why do you feel a certain way when you're listening to a song? It's really hard to describe that. And that's the amazing thing about what we're able to do.

最酷的是，你能让那些原本可能无法成为职业艺术家的人，现在拥有了全球观众。除了说他们拥有某种天赋异禀，我不知道该如何形容——当他们能以这种方式表达，瞬间引发全世界共鸣时，这种天才的表现力，我只能用'天赐才能'来描述。这简直让人惊叹：他们究竟是怎么做到的？

And the really cool thing is you're able to take artists that otherwise, you know, perhaps may not even have been able to be professional, and now they have a global audience. I don't know how to express it other than that they have some sort of God given talent. That's the best way I can describe this kind of genius when they're able to express these things in a way that it just resonates with people all over the world. Just instantly, it's like, how how do you do that?

显然他们触及了人类某种超越文化的内在本质。如果没有数据支撑，若你问我：'你认为今天有人正在创造全新音乐流派吗？你觉得这会吸引相似群体还是全人类？某种程度上同等吸引？'我大概会回答：不可能。

It it's clearly they're tapping something innate to humans independent of culture, which absent data, if you were to ask me and say, hey. Do you think that someone is inventing a brand new genre of music today? Do you think it's going to appeal to people similar to them or all humans Yeah. Equally in some way? I I would probably tell you, like, no.

这更多关乎后天培养而非先天禀赋。

It's more about nurture than nature.

是啊。

Yeah.

没错。就像我们在任天堂那期节目里聊的，世界上永远只会存在少数几个宫本茂这样的天才。

Yeah. We it's like we were talking about on the Nintendo episode. Like, there are always only gonna be a handful of Shigeru Miyamoto's in

这样的人。

the world.

但直到最近，在游戏行业依然如此。你需要同时具备运气，恰好成为任天堂街机设计团队里的宫本茂，才能创造出马里奥和塞尔达这样的可能性。而现在无论是音乐还是播客领域，每个人都有机会。

But until recently, and in the gaming industry, it's still pretty much the case. Like, you need to also have the luck of being being the Venn diagram of a Shigeru Miyamoto who happened to be the arcade cabinet designer at Nintendo Yeah. In order for, like, the possibility of Mario and Zelda to happen. Yeah. And like in music and podcasting now in this world, like, everybody has the opportunity.

并非每个人都能成为宫本茂，也不是谁都能成为坏痞兔。大多数人做不到，但至少你拥有成为他们的机会。

Not everybody's a Shigeru Miyamoto. Not everybody is, you know, a bad bunny. Most people aren't, but you have the opportunity to be one.

这观点真有意思。我几个月前和董事会成员泰德·萨兰多斯讨论过——就像你说的，拍电影至今仍需要任天堂级别的资源来开发游戏，成本依然高昂。

I think that's so interesting. I was talking to Ted Sarandos about this. He's on on our board, this was a number of months ago. But, like, if you think about filmmaking, it's still as you said, one of the things about a Nintendo resources in able to build a game, and that's still not cheap. And it's expensive.

早年可能还得先造出整个游戏主机才有机会尝试。如今即便是3A级游戏，开发成本也要数亿美元。

And back in the day, maybe you had to build the entire consoles in order to even have a chance Yeah. Of doing it. But these days, you still like, a triple a game is Few $100,000,000.

是啊，非常重要的五年。

Yeah. Very big Five years.

都是大制作，对吧？当然你可以开发独立游戏等等，但能这么做的人仍然非常有限。即便在电影或电视剧领域，过去能担任节目制作人、制片或导演的人也属于相当小众的群体。

Very big productions. Right? And sure, you can build an indie game and so on and so forth. But it's still a very limited number of people that are able to do that. But even in filmmaking or in TV series, the amount of people that used to be able to be showrunners or producing or directing these things, it was fairly limited group of people.

对吧？

Right?

没错，社交关系网很重要，人们混迹在洛杉矶的片场后台，都是影视圈内人。

Yeah. Very socially connected, people hanging out in back lots in LA, part of the studio.

这很可能起了关键作用——并非贬低他们的才华——但人脉很可能是与才华同等重要的要素。所以你需要同时具备这两样东西。但最近几年随着预算膨胀，特别是网飞这样的平台，如果继续只用同一批制片人导演根本不可能，对吧？因为他们要制作的内容实在太多了。

And it probably mattered a lot, not to diminish any of their talent, but it probably mattered who you knew was an integral component and having talent. So you kind of had two different things. But in the last few years, as the budgets have expanded, and certainly in the Netflix case, it would have been physically impossible to just keep this same set of producers, directors, etcetera. Right? Because they're just trying to make so much more content.

有趣的是，现在拉美导演和制片人也在经历同样的事，他们不再只做本土作品，而是真正登上好莱坞舞台。我亲眼见证过，现在有大批瑞典编剧、制片人和演员进入好莱坞制作体系，看着很有意思。而且不只是熟面孔，更多不知名人才也崭露头角。尝试的人多了，机会也更多了。

So one of the interesting things is the same thing is happening now where there's LATAM directors and producers, not just doing sort of local productions, but actually now coming to Get to Hollywood stage. And then doing that as well. And I've seen it in my case, there's been a bunch of Swedish writers and producers and actors now that are getting into Hollywood productions, and it's been fun to see. And not just the usual names, but actually like some more unknown talent making its way as well. And there are more people trying, but there are also more opportunities.

正如你在播客里提到的，这个现象在播客领域同样存在。但疯狂之处在于供需双方都在扩张。当然竞争也更激烈了——我觉得当人们批评Spotify时，最大的误解就在于此。因为他们只看到无数尝试者没能赚到钱。

And then obviously, as you mentioned on the podcasting side, the same is true there. But it's true on both sides. That's the crazy thing. But there's also more competition, which is I think when people are talking about Spotify and criticizing it, that's the part I think is the biggest misconception. Because they hear so many people who are trying and it doesn't work where they're not making a lot of money of it.

他们自然而然地得出这样的结论：嘿，这个模型肯定有问题。这个模型行不通。但实际上，这两件事可能同时成立。

They're naturally sort of drawing the conclusion that, hey, there has to be something wrong with the model. This model can't work. But in reality, both things could be true at the same time.

没错。失败的人确实更多了，但成功的人也大幅增加了。就像，整个池子变得大多了。

Right. There are a lot more people who are failing, but there are also a lot more people who are succeeding. Like, the total pool is so much bigger.

是啊。而且我认为播客行业还处于更早期的发展阶段。所以我们可能听不到这种声音。另外，我不确定播客创作者是否认为——变现是理所当然的，必须从一开始就考虑。

Yeah. And and I think that's podcasting is like much earlier in its maturity. Yeah. So we may not hear it. Plus, we don't have this sort of I'm not sure a podcaster sees it as it's sort of given that monetization is there, and it needs to be there from day one.

而我认为，随着音乐行业的专业化，这显然成为了更主要的预期。但这其实在人类历史上只占了相对短暂的时期。要知道，录音音乐及其作为媒介存在的时间可能还不到一百年。但它却已成为版权体系的一部分，甚至被写入了某些重要法律。

Whereas I think, obviously, with the professionalization of music, that's a much bigger part of the expectancy. But that's actually a kind of a relatively limited part of our human history. It's not been, you know, it's probably the less than one hundred years that we've had recorded music and it being a forum. And yet it's part of the copyright regime. It's part of like some pretty important laws.

所以我觉得这带来了不同的预期。我并不是说这不对，只是从历史发展的角度来看。其实我正想接着谈谈你提到的关于创作的话题。每当回顾音乐史时，我常会想到——在莫扎特时代，如果我想创作音乐，现实是我必须是个音乐天才。

So I think it comes with a different expectancy. I'm not saying that's wrong. I'm just saying just the arc of history. And I was actually gonna latch on to something you talked about sort of being creative too. One of the things I often think about when you think about sort of the history of music, going back to it at the time of Mozart, if I wanted to create music, the reality is I had to be a musical genius.

因为我需要在脑海中听见每个音调、每个音符。我需要想象所有不同乐器如何协同演奏。我可以把它们写下来，但永远无法同时听到所有乐器的实际演奏。对吧？那个时代的作曲家们，往往只能在音乐会前几天才第一次听到自己作品的实际演奏效果，然后做些微调。

Because I needed to hear every single tone in my head, every single note. I needed to hear all the different instruments, how they would all play together. I could write them down, but I could never hear them all being played at once. Right? Many times, the composers of that era, they were only able to listen to their actual compositions, like, a few days before the actual concert that they were doing, and then making small tweaks.

但到那时，作品必须已经近乎完美。当然，他们可以在钢琴上试弹片段，但更需要的是——不是可视化，而是某种内在的听觉构建能力。

But by that time, it had to be pretty perfect. And so sure, they could play a little bit on the piano, but then they kind of needed to not visualize, but somehow internalize

最终呈现的结果。拥有一整个管弦乐团就像是游戏界的3A级大作。

what that ended up being. Having a whole orchestra is the triple A game equivalent.

没错，正是如此。显然，能做到这一点的人寥寥无几。但创作过程本身也极为疯狂，因为需要完成的工作量巨大。接着往前看，想想乐器演奏的时代，以爵士乐为例——那是高度技术性的，对吧？爵士乐队里的每个成员都是各自乐器的大师。

Yes, exactly. And so obviously, very few could do that. But also the process, the creation process was insane because you needed to do so much. And then, you know, you move forward and think about it sort of the era of playing instruments and take jazz, which is highly technical, right? Like, every single member in a jazz band is excellent at their instruments, right?

真正顶尖的水平。这非常困难，要达到那种音乐造诣并演奏爵士乐真的很难。再快进一些，以瑞典的Avicii为例，他就是个天才作曲家。

Like, really excellent. And it's really hard. Like, it's really hard to be that good of a musician and play jazz. And then fast forward a little bit more and take someone like Swedish Avicii as an example. He was a brilliant composer.

他确实是。但他其实并不会真正演奏任何乐器。

He truly was. But he didn't really know how to play any instruments.

事实证明，音乐技术造诣与创作伟大作品之间可能存在关联，也可能没有必然联系。

It turns out that technical musical proficiency may or may not be correlated with making great music.

正是如此。这正是我的观点。但他其实掌握了不同的工具——他拥有软件，对吧？

Exactly. Exactly my point. But he actually had a different tool. He had software. Right?

事实上他非常精通那些软件。他熟悉所有旋钮、插件之类的操作原理。如今很多音乐人都是这样——如果你观察他们的工作流程，会发现极具技术性，充满细节和微妙之处。

And he's actually He was really good at that software. And he knew all the knobs and, you know, plugins and all that stuff and how it worked. And a lot of musicians are that way today. Like, if you actually look at the workflow, it's very technical. It's very detailed, it's very nuanced.

就像，我有这么个习惯，可能不该承认——但就像我在YouTube上说的，晚上我会研究音乐制作人的工作流程。当他们深入剖析如何

Like, I have this thing that I do where I probably shouldn't admit this, but like I said on YouTube on evenings, I look at music producers, their workflows. And like when they get into the weeds of like decoding how they

完成作品时。我们当时满脸放光地走进录音棚，自以为算是技术流播客制作人，觉得属于顶尖的那0.1%

do stuff. We were we were like having just like our faces lit up. We walked in the studio and we're like, we think we are like highly technical podcast producers. We think we're, like, top point 1% of the

嗯，我觉得我们确实是。

well, I think we are.

我也这么认为。你更懂行。然后我们走进斯德哥尔摩这个录音棚，瞬间意识到这完全是超出我们想象的规模。

I think we are. You know better. And then we walk into this studio here, you know, in in in Stockholm, and we're like, this is just a scale beyond our imagination.

是啊，真的很幸运。这里也特别有趣，艺术家们都喜欢在这儿消磨时间，因为我们配备了所有他们需要的设备。但我想说的是，这种技术密集型工作流程确实需要大量时间才能掌握。

Yeah. Yeah. We're very fortunate. And it's a lot of fun because artists love just hanging out here too, because we've got kind of everything that they like to use and to do. But my point is, I mean, if you think about it, it is a kind of a very technical workflow that takes a lot of time to get into.

其中某些环节，你可能得看数百小时的YouTube视频才能搞懂入门方法。当今很多作曲家都是各自工作流程的专家，他们有固定的插件组合，用16种设备串联创造出标志性音效等等。所以门槛依然存在——如果你现在说想开始做音乐并做出不错的效果，这个门槛仍然相当高。当然它正在逐年降低。

And some of the parts of that workflow, you'd have to watch probably hundreds of hours of YouTube videos to even decode or how to do it and like start getting into it. And a lot of these today's composers are experts in their workflows, right? They've kind of had their plugin sets, they've got these 16 things that they CCHN together in order to create that one effect that defines them and so on and so forth. So the barrier still, like if you said today, I wanna start making music, and I wanna make something that sounds pretty good, it's still quite high, that barrier. And it's getting lower and lower, and it's it's getting easier and easier.

但...但...但我还是要说，想要做出专业级的高质量作品，仍然需要投入大量时间和精力。

But but but I would still argue the bar for you to sound make something that sounds professional, it would actually be high quality song. It requires a lot of time and a lot of effort.

而且可能资本支出和设备需求会更少。我是说，你听说过那些用笔记本电脑制作音乐的公寓音乐制作人吧。没错。但这仍然需要大量的自我训练、专业掌握和创造力。

And it might be less CapEx and less equipment. I mean, you hear the the rise of the, you know, apartment music producer on the laptop. Yep. But it still takes an enormous amount of self training, mastery, creativity.

我认为入门门槛还是有点高。比如，对于初学者来说仍然是个不小的障碍。当然，如果你只想做些超级简单的东西，其实不需要太多。有Smule这类应用，可能就能做出点什么。但从那之后，要真正作曲，理解工作流程、插件这些概念，需要掌握的东西相当多。

My opinion is it takes a little bit too much to get started. Like, it's quite a barrier to entry still. I mean, if you just wanna make something like super simple, it doesn't take a lot. There's all Smule and all these other apps, can probably make something. But from there on to actually compose something, getting into the idea of the workflows, the plugins, all that kind of concepts, it's quite a lot to master.

我觉得这正是AI这类技术的潜在力量所在，对吧？很可能会让事情再简单一个数量级。就个人而言，你可以类比编程，我以前写代码，但已经十年没碰了。可能有点尴尬要承认，但对我来说，重新入门的门槛太高了，什么node啊各种框架，甚至要为自己在Spotify生态里做点事搭建工作流程，估计得花上百小时重新熟悉这些东西。

And I think that's the potential power with something like AI, obviously, right? Which is we're most likely going to have another order of magnitude of simplicity. On personal level, you liken that to coding, I used to code, but I haven't now for about ten years. And so probably a little bit embarrassing to admit, but the barrier to entry or reentry for me was so high with all, you know, node, all of these different frameworks, even setting up my own workflow for me to be able to do something in the Spotify ecosystem. There's hundreds of hours probably for me to kind of re acquaint myself with all the stuff.

比如，我怎么安装PHP服务器？

Like, how do I install the PHP server?

是啊，你知道，我...

Yeah, You know, I got

有个坏消息要告诉你。

bad news for you.

没错。变化太大了对吧？神奇的是，就为了好玩想重新捣鼓点东西，我让ChatGPT帮忙。结果周日下午花了几个小时就搞定了。

Yeah. It's changed a lot. Right? And so the amazing thing is, just for the fun of it, wanted to like start doing stuff and I asked ChethGPT to help me. And pretty much on a few hours on a Sunday afternoon, I was up and running.

正因为有了这种入门帮助，我得以建立起自己的开发环境。我开始贡献代码，不断迭代改进。

And because of that sort of starter help, I had my my own sort of environment set up. I was contributing code. I was iterating.

你向Spotify的代码库提交过代码吗？

Did you contribute code to the Spotify code base?

没有。他们不允许我这么做。是的，所以我得先完成更多准备工作，才能获得提交权限。

No. They won't let me do that. Yes. So I I got a little bit more work to do before before they allowed

让我通过编码测试。

me the coding test.

没错。我觉得他们可能出于某种固执就是不会允许。他们以系统封闭为荣，我根本无法接触任何核心系统。但这种开放感太棒了，它让我的回归之路变得轻松愉快。我时常思考这个问题。

Yeah. I think out of spite, probably won't let me do that anyway. They pride themselves on not, I don't have any access to any of the actual systems. But it was such a liberating feeling because it made the reentry for me so much easier and so much more enjoyable. And so I think about that.

想想当今音乐世界，全球可能有数千万人在录制作品。但还有一亿甚至两亿人在演奏乐器、用音乐表达自我。没理由说这一亿多人就创作不出像样的作品。当然，这对音乐产业意味着什么？难道突然之间所有音乐都会变得廉价吗？

So if you think about the world of music now, there are tens of millions of people in the world that probably are recording stuff. But there's hundred, two hundred million, something like that, that's playing some kind of instrument and expressing themselves musically. There's nothing that says that it wouldn't be possible for those 100,000,000 plus people to make something that actually sounds pretty good. Now, again, what is that going to do with the music industry? And is it really going to be that all of a sudden everything becomes commoditized?

我不这么认为。历史反复证明，优质内容总会脱颖而出，在这样的环境中反而更具价值。以摄影为例——当Instagram出现时，人们说摄影要消亡了。但事实上，艺术摄影的价格不降反升。

I don't believe so. Because we've seen time and time again, the quality rises to the top and actually becomes even more valuable in that world. Photography being the sort of key reference point. When Instagram came, oh, no one's gonna want photography. But price of fine art photography actually increased, not decreased.

所以我的观点是，你会看到两种极端现象。中产阶级将被淘汰，更多人参与其中，但最顶层的价值可能也会提升。他们会想出利用这项技术做其他事情的方法。但对人类来说这确实很酷，我们讨论过这一点，能够建立联系并表达想法。每种文化理念的每一种排列组合最终都将得以表达。

So my view is you're gonna see both extremes. You're gonna see the middle getting wiped out, more people participate, but the very, very top is probably going to increase in value as well. And they'll figure out other things to do with this technology. But it is pretty cool for humanity, and we talked about that, being able to relate and like, you know, expressing ideas. Every permutation of every cultural idea will finally be able to be expressed.

我们从未生活在一个能实现这种可能性的世界。观察这对我们理解其他文化、与他人建立联系的能力产生何种影响，将会非常有趣，这些都是非常酷的事情。

We've never been in a world where that's been possible before. And it'll be really fascinating to see what that means for our understanding of other cultures, our ability to relate to other people, some really cool stuff.

我明白了。这有点像过去几年播客领域已经发生的情况。对吧？比如那里...我不太清楚，你可能比我更了解。

I see. This is kinda like already happened over the past few years in podcasting too. Right? Like there I don't know. You probably know better than me.

现在有数百万个播客对吧？肯定超过200万了，我确信目前是这个数量级。

Millions of podcasts out there. Right? 2,000,000 plus, I'm sure at this point.

现在差不多是这个数字的两倍多一点儿。

It's about a little bit more than double that now.

真的吗？

Really?

是啊。

Yeah.

哇。所以这就像是，你提到的这些数字。有大约四到五百万人在想，我可以做个播客。是的。然而最顶尖的那些依然保持着极高的质量门槛，而且还在不断提高。

Wow. So like, it's kind of like these are numbers like you're talking. There are four to 5,000,000 people out there that are like, I can make a podcast. Yeah. And yet the very, very top ones are still like of a quality bar that is so high and getting higher.

没错。但我听你们讨论过，现在可以根据数据识别特定语言、特定地区的节目，这真的很酷。是的。然后还能将它们推广到全球其他观众面前。

Yep. But like I've heard you guys talk about this that you now can take shows that are in a specific language, in a specific region that you can identify based on the data, there's something really cool happening here. Yeah. And then bring them to other around the globe to other audiences.

是的。目前这显然是个手动过程，我们需要聘请配音演员重新演绎，稍微调整脚本使其符合文化背景。当然这对你来说不是新闻，但可能有些听众还不知道——我的意思是，以现在的技术，虽然质量可能不够高且成本昂贵，但从技术上讲，我们完全可以用中文声音制作这期播客。

Yeah. And right now, obviously, that's a manual process where, you know, we have to hire voice actors that reenact that, we have to kind of tweak the script a little bit to make it culturally relevant. And obviously, this won't be news to you, but perhaps to some of your listeners that, I mean, already probably today, it won't be as high quality and the cost would be too expensive to express this. But there's no reason technically why you guys and I, this podcast couldn't be done right now in Chinese with our voices.

我刚想说，你们现在有那个AI DJ对吧？能说多种语言的那个？

Well, I was gonna say as a so you have x now, the AI DJ Yeah. That speaks many languages?

我们确实让他说过瑞典语，虽然他显然不懂瑞典语。但目前仅限英语内容，因为语调还有些不自然。说实话这可能只是个训练问题。

Well, we've had him speak Swedish for sure. And he obviously doesn't know Swedish. But but it's only today available because the intonation is a little bit off. So it's it's really only English language content. And honestly, that's probably just a training problem.

如果我们针对特定语言训练模型，而不仅仅是XBOYS这类通用模型，我认为这完全可以实现。目前最大的问题是每分钟成本对大多数播客来说太高了。你们的模式或许能支持，但普通播客主负担不起。不知道你们是否注意到，像MrBeast就有西班牙语频道，可能还有法语等等，但他确实有西班牙语版本。

So if we were training the models on specific languages, and not just XBOYS per se, I think that would have been totally possible. And again, the largest problem today is the cost per minute would be too high for most podcasts. I think you guys could actually support it probably with your model, but the average podcaster couldn't. I don't know if you guys seen seen this, but like, mister beast has like a Spanish language channel. Know I if he has like a French one, etcetera, but he certainly has a Spanish language.

是机器翻译还是人工重新录制？

Computer translated or or humans rerecording?

我认为目前是人类在重新录制，但这规模很大。可能新增了约20%的订阅用户，是额外增加的，并非超过英语频道的订阅量。所以这确实是件大事。我觉得这就是下一步发展方向，对吧？比如在你的案例中，为何不把LVMH那期节目全程用法语制作呢？

I think it's humans rerecording it at the moment, but it's huge. I think it may have, like, 20% more subscribers, additional subscribers, not more than what the English language one So it's like a really big deal. And I think that's like the next step, right? Like, where, you know, in your case, like, why wouldn't you take the LVMH episode and make it all in French

或者原本就是法语版的？没错。

or whatever? Used to be in French. Yeah.

现在正是感谢节目老友ServiceNow的好时机。我们曾向听众讲述过ServiceNow精彩的创业故事，以及他们如何成为过去十年表现最出色的企业之一。但最近收到听众提问：ServiceNow究竟做什么业务？今天我们就来解答这个问题。

Now is a great time to thank good friend of the show, ServiceNow. We have talked to listeners about ServiceNow's amazing origin story and how they've been one of the best performing companies the last decade, but we've gotten some questions from listeners about what ServiceNow actually does. So today, we are gonna answer that question.

首先，近期媒体常用一个说法：ServiceNow是企业的"AI操作系统"。具体来说，22年前成立的ServiceNow最初只专注于自动化，将实体文书转化为软件工作流，最初服务于企业内部的IT部门。随着时间推移，他们在这个平台上逐步构建更强大复杂的任务处理能力。

Well, to start, a phrase that has been used often here recently in the press is that ServiceNow is the, quote, unquote, AI operating system for the enterprise. But to make that more concrete, ServiceNow started twenty two years ago focused simply on automation. They turned physical paperwork into software workflows initially for the IT department within enterprises. That was it. And over time, they built on this platform going to more powerful and complex tasks.

其服务范围从IT部门扩展到人力资源、财务、客户服务、现场运营等部门。过去二十年间，ServiceNow完成了连接企业各个角落所需的所有基础性工作，为实现自动化铺平了道路。

They were expanding from serving just IT to other departments like HR, finance, customer service, field operations, and more. And in the process over the last two decades, ServiceNow has laid all the tedious groundwork necessary to connect every corner of the enterprise and enable automation to happen.

因此当AI时代来临——从本质上说AI本身就是高度复杂的任务自动化——而谁早已搭建好支持这种自动化的企业级平台和连接架构？正是ServiceNow。要回答"ServiceNow现在做什么"这个问题，他们自称"连接并赋能每个部门"绝非虚言。

So when AI arrived well, AI kinda just by definition is massively sophisticated task automation. And who had already built the platform and the connective tissue with enterprises to enable that automation? ServiceNow. So to answer the question, what does ServiceNow do today? We mean it when they say they connect and power every department.

IT和HR部门用它管理全公司的人员、设备和软件许可；客户服务部门通过ServiceNow检测支付失败并路由至内部对应团队处理；供应链组织用它进行产能规划，整合各部门数据确保协同一致。不再需要在不同系统间反复录入相同数据。最近ServiceNow还推出了AI代理，任何岗位的员工都能创建AI代理处理繁琐事务，让人力专注于更具战略性的工作。

IT and HR use it to manage people, devices, software licenses across the company. Customer service uses ServiceNow for things like detecting payment failures and routing to the right team or process internally to solve it. Or the supply chain org uses it for capacity planning, integrating with data and plans from other departments to ensure that everybody's on the same page. No more swivel chairing between apps to enter the same data multiple times in different places. And just recently, ServiceNow launched AI agents so that anyone working in any job can spin up an AI agent to handle the tedious stuff, freeing up humans for bigger picture work.

ServiceNow去年入选了《财富》杂志全球最受赞赏公司榜单和《快公司》最佳创新者工作场所，正是源于这一愿景。若您希望在企业各个角落充分利用ServiceNow的规模与速度优势，请访问servicenow.com/acquired，只需提及是本和大卫推荐即可。感谢ServiceNow。

ServiceNow was named to Fortune's world's most admired companies list last year and Fast Company's best workplace for innovators last year, and it's because of this vision. If you wanna take advantage of the scale and speed of ServiceNow in every corner of your business, go to servicenow.com/acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Thanks, ServiceNow.

直到现在，我仍对在播客中使用任何形式的AI处理音频片段感到不适。比如我们常试用Descript替换某些词语，但从未真正投入使用，因为我总觉得效果不够自然，所有内容都应该手工精修。然而最近一期节目中，我们首次使用了编辑推荐的AI工具，它显著提升了嘉宾麦克风录音的音质。一旦开始尝试，你就会思考——

I've been uncomfortable until now, using any sort of AI for any seconds of audio in our podcast. Like, we always played around with the Descript replacement of certain words, but then we never shipped it to production because I was always like, it doesn't sound quite as good, and, you know, everything should be hand mastered and acquired. And then for the first time on a recent episode, we used an AI tool that our editor found it dramatically increased the quality the sound quality of the episode based on the mic that the guest was using. And once you start doing that, you're like, well, I mean

那么，问题是——

Well, what's

AI难道不该对我们的音频做各种优化吗？

Shouldn't AI do all sorts of things to our audio?

没错。显然我们才刚刚起步，这对你这样的创作者来说非常激动人心。但同时也令人担忧，对吧？因为未来完全可能出现整期节目内容都被AI篡改的情况。

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we're only in the beginning, obviously, and that's hugely exciting for creators like yourself. But it's also scary, right? Because it's totally possible for us to make an entire episode where we're saying totally different things than what we're saying now.

发展到某个阶段，伪造内容可能与真实录音几乎无法区分。

And it, at some point in the future, might be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

确实。平台方或许需要承担真实性验证的责任。这反而提升了平台价值——像Spotify、YouTube这类平台可以确证内容出自创作者本人，并加盖认证印章，建立可信溯源体系。

Yeah. And and platforms probably have a role to play in verifying authenticity. Like, that that actually raises the value of platforms because platforms like Spotify, YouTube, you actually can point to, we know for a fact that this was created by the creator, and we can stamp it and say that this, you know, you trust by

创造者。

the creator.

对，对。不，不。我觉得你完全正确，这就是为什么围绕埃隆·马斯克和订阅者问题有很多争论。

Yeah. Yeah. No. No. I think you're you're entirely right, which is why, you know, there's been a lot of sort of debate around the Elon Musk, the subscriber thing.

实际上，像往常一样，当你深入探讨时，这个争议中有很多不同的问题。但或许最有力也最有趣的是关于‘质押’作为一种减少机器人账号手段的讨论。我感觉很多讨论最终变成了‘我现在必须付费才能触达我的观众吗？’这种反转。但我认为更有趣的是，先别管是否付费，关键在于提高垃圾信息的成本，同时提升验证质量，最终能真正分辨真伪。

And actually, as usual, when you tease it out, there's many different things in that controversy. But perhaps the most potent and most interesting one has been the one around the notion and idea around like staking as a way of reducing the bot thing. And I feel like so much has just ended up being sort of, hey, do I have to pay in order to reach my audience now? That kind of switcheroo. But I think the more interesting one was kind of like, well, forget about if it's paid or not, but just increasing the cost of spam, but also increasing kind of the quality of verification and being able to truly understand what's what in in the end.

推特太有意思了，我们刚和一个同为创作者的朋友聊天，但他的主阵地是推特。而推特无法变现。是的，没有收入分成。

Twitter's so interesting that we were talking with a friend who's a creator peer, but his platform is Twitter. And you can't monetize Twitter. Yeah. Like, there's no rev share. Yeah.

传统社交平台大致如此，你可以把它们放在光谱的一端。另一端可能是Spotify播客，再远些是Spotify音乐

Traditional social platforms like that, you've kinda got them on one end of the spectrum. You've got Spotify well, maybe Spotify podcasting and then Spotify music at the far end