DAVID SENRA: Daniel Ek, Spotify

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, I'm excited to share the launch of a new podcast that I've helped create and produce. This new podcast is hosted by David Senra. For those of you not familiar with David Senra, he is the expert in all things greatness. He studies greatness and he understands it, mostly in the domain of business, but also creatives, athletes, and other world-class performers. In this new show, David sits down with the best of the best business founders and extreme winners to understand their drive, their process of creation, how they overcome failures, their lessons in leadership, and other tools for achieving success. This first episode of the podcast is with Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify. It's an absolutely spectacular conversation that I'm certain you'll enjoy. If you'd like to listen to future episodes of this new podcast, please be sure to subscribe to it. It's simply called David Senra, and links to it are in the show notes for this episode. Again, the podcast is called David Senra. Episode 2 of David Senra will be with the founder of Dell Technologies, Michael Dell. So again, make sure to subscribe wherever you're listening now. And now, episode 1 of David Senra with the founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek.

**David Senra** (1:15)
So I want to consider this conversation like a continuation of the conversation we had last year in New York. It was by far the most impactful conversation I had the entire year.
It is in large part the reason we're sitting down and actually recording this conversation. And what I loved was, I thought about how the advice you gave and the stories you told really fundamentally changed my approach to my work. And then also my philosophy of how I'm living my life. And because you, it's very rare, this year I'm going to hit over 400 biographies read for the podcast, right? And somebody asked me recently, do you ever uncover new ideas? It's like, no, I feel like I'm telling the same story, the same personality type over and over and over again. And you'll get a new idea or a novel idea every once in a while, but certainly not all the time. But you shared something at the dinner that was a truly novel idea. And then a few months later, I read this interview and I was like, I'm not the only one that Daniel's advice changed the career. So I'm going to read something. There was an interview given by the CEO of Uber, who's a friend of yours, Dara. And I'm going to read this excerpt, which was absolutely perfect. And he was talking about contemplating should I take this job or not? Like this is a huge opportunity, but also like kind of scary. And this is tied to your idea that you should optimize for impact over happiness. I haven't heard anybody else articulate that. And so Dara says, I was reading about all the issues happening with Uber in the news, the various challenges that were coming up there. So when I first got the call to be the CEO, I said, heck no, I'm not crazy, I'm not up for this. But I had one particular conversation that really shifted me, which was with Daniel Ek, who's a good friend. And I still remember, I was talking to him about my career at Expedia and how happy I was. And he looks at me, and he did this to me too. And he looks at me and he goes, since when is life about happiness? It's about impact. You can have an impact on Uber, which is a really important company in the world that's shaping the future of cities. And I thought to myself, my God, this is so obvious, I've got to take a shot. I knew it was going to be uncomfortable. Can you just explain how you think about optimizing for impact over happiness and why?

**Daniel Ek** (3:24)
Well, first off, it's incredibly kind of Dara to say that. You know, I think about this. I think happiness is a trailing indicator of impact. And I think you can be, you know, you can feel happiness in small bursts, in small moments, and you can have a lot of variance in your life. So you can choose to have that part, which is the ups, the downs of life, et cetera. So I'm not saying you can have happiness. But I think truly sustained happiness comes from impact. And impact is something that's deeply personal to you. Only you can define what impact means for you. So I think it means different things for different people. But I do think it's a trailing indicator. So the way, you know, I would put it in this case is, you know, what was obvious for me with someone like Adara was he was content. He wasn't happy. And, you know, he had gone through a phase knowing him for a while where he had a lot of ups and downs with Expedia and all that stuff.