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Podcast 13 min read

Why Sound Changes How We Feel w/ Oscar Höglund, CEO - Epidemic Sound

with Oscar Höglund, CEO - Epidemic Sound

Chris Do and Oscar Höglund, CEO of Epidemic Sound, examine how music shapes emotion and changes a story.

Chris Do

Founder, The Futur™ · July 10, 2025

A finished picture can still feel unfinished

A story can be perfectly understandable and still leave its audience cold. Oscar Höglund, CEO of Epidemic Sound, makes that distinction central to his work: the company deals in music, but he describes its purpose in terms of emotion. Speaking with Chris Do in Austin, he argues that sound deserves attention not as decoration, but as part of what a piece of content actually communicates.

The distinction matters because comprehension is an incomplete creative ambition. An audience can follow the sequence, recognize the subject, and understand the message without experiencing the feeling its maker intended. Höglund’s concern is that gap between receiving information and becoming invested in it.

His preferred analogy comes from food. A meal without taste can supply something necessary while offering little pleasure; sound, in his account, supplies content with its equivalent of flavor. Music, a sound bed, or a carefully chosen effect changes the experience rather than merely adding another layer to it.

The analogy is deliberately forceful. His claim that content without audio cannot be felt is better understood as a creative provocation than a rule covering every image or audience. The useful proposition is narrower: Sound is part of the meaning, not just the finish.

Do does not let the commercial interest disappear. Höglund runs a company whose business depends on creators valuing music, so his enthusiasm is hardly disinterested. Rather than treating that as a reason to dismiss the argument, Do asks for a comparison an audience can experience directly.

He proposes watching a film clip without sound, then listening to the same clip without its picture. The point is not to crown one sense the winner. It is to notice which parts of the experience survive and which parts change when an entire channel disappears.

“Watch it without sound,” Do says. Then: “See how you feel.”

That is a more demanding test than checking whether a track sounds polished. It separates what the image explains from what the audio contributes, forcing a creator to examine work that normally arrives as a single package.

The broader concern belongs alongside The Futur’s Storytelling Is A Superpower: a story’s power cannot be reduced to the facts it contains. Here, the focus is the relationship between the visible narrative and its audible treatment.

Höglund and Do approach that relationship from different directions. Höglund starts with the emotional function of music. Do, a designer describing himself and his wife as primarily visual processors, starts by questioning the dominance of the picture.

The productive tension is not between sound and sight. It is between making content that communicates clearly and making content whose emotional choices are equally deliberate.

The song ends, but the appetite remains

Höglund’s opening puzzle is about repetition. He can love an episode of a television series and feel almost no desire to watch it again. A song he loves produces the opposite response: hearing it creates an appetite for another listen.

He uses his own relationship with Game of Thrones to explain the difference. Once an episode has delivered its story, he wants the next installment. Familiar music does not need another installment to remain useful; recognition itself becomes part of the attraction.

This is a description of his experience, not a universal ranking of media. Films have devoted repeat viewers, and Do acknowledges that hearing the same song too frequently can become irritating. Their interest lies in why repetition feels so natural in one setting and less compelling in another.

Music can reward familiarity without requiring a new plot.

Do’s explanation turns on how much interpretation a work leaves available. A film generally presents a sequence with a beginning, middle, and ending. A storyteller shapes that sequence to produce particular responses at particular moments.

Music, in Do’s account, allows a looser relationship. A listener can enter through a lyric, a note, a rhythm, or an existing feeling. The work stays the same while the listener’s frame changes.

That distinction makes repetition less like consuming identical information and more like returning to material under different conditions. A line that passed unnoticed before can become the center of the next listen. A piece associated with comfort can accompany concentration instead.

Höglund identifies several reasons someone returns:

Recognition offers comfort.
A track catches an existing feeling and makes it stronger.
Music soothes a feeling the listener wants to quiet.
A familiar piece helps establish a desired state.

These are functions rather than genres. The same listener does not need the same emotional outcome every time, and the same track does not have to serve only one purpose.

Do supplies a practical example from his own work. When preparing a deck or doing focused writing, he listens to instrumental music and returns to Spotify’s Brain Food playlist. The playlist becomes part of a routine rather than an event that demands his full attention.

For Höglund, this difference also raises a business question. He contrasts the expense of visual storytelling with the repeated use a single piece of music can receive. The conversation offers rough production-cost guesses, not a sound basis for a financial comparison, but the underlying question remains useful: how does a creative work continue providing value after its first encounter?

The answer they develop is not simply that songs are shorter or easier to replay. Music can accompany the listener’s life instead of asking the listener to enter an entirely separate narrative.

Familiarity is not necessarily the opposite of discovery. Sometimes it is the condition that makes another kind of discovery possible.

A classroom becomes an emotional map

Höglund’s clearest illustration does not come from a studio or a marketing presentation. It comes from his youngest son’s classroom in Stockholm, where he arrives for a parent visit carrying a speaker and a Spotify playlist.

He remembers facing roughly 25 seven-year-olds with only a short window to explain his job. Instead of beginning with the company, he begins with an assertion: “Music is the language of emotion.”

Then he plays something associated with Christmas and asks the children to identify the season. Their response is immediate. The music has supplied a recognizable setting without a picture of a tree, a calendar, or a written explanation.

Next comes music from Frozen. The children respond with more than a title or a character’s name. Höglund recalls associations with Elsa, popcorn, parents, television, and joy.

The detail matters. The soundtrack does not merely retrieve a piece of entertainment. In his telling, it brings back the circumstances around watching it: company, food, familiarity, and feeling.

This is an anecdote, not a controlled study of how music affects children. Its value is the specificity of the responses. Höglund does not have to tell the class what the music means to them; the children volunteer the connections.

A soundtrack can carry the experience around the story.

For a creator, that complicates the idea of a neutral track. A piece of music enters a listening history. Its effect can involve associations that the creator did not write and does not control.

The classroom story also sharpens a distinction Höglund makes throughout the conversation. Music can meet an emotion already present, or it can help someone move toward another state. Those are different intentions, even when both begin with pressing play.

Amplifying an existing feeling: Höglund describes music catching an emotion and strengthening it.
Changing the desired state: He describes moving from feeling giddy toward focus, or from focus toward joy.
Soothing an unwanted feeling: Music can quiet an experience rather than intensify it.

Do’s instrumental work playlist belongs in that second category. He is not selecting music simply because it is his favorite. He is selecting an environment that fits the work he wants to do.

The distinction changes the creative question from taste to purpose. A track can be enjoyable in isolation and still serve the wrong emotional function inside a particular piece.

That emphasis on the experience rather than the asset has a natural companion in Designing Moments: A New Approach to Event Entertainment. Höglund’s classroom demonstration keeps the scale intimate: a small speaker, a room of children, and a series of associations that need little explanation.

The most revealing response is not that the children recognize the music. It is that recognition arrives bundled with a world.

The same pigment makes different pictures

If music carries associations, it does not follow that every track has one permanent meaning. Höglund describes seeing the same piece of abstract music selected by different storytellers and placed in very different narratives.

Depending on the story, he says, that piece can support desire, fear, regret, remorse, or happiness. The musical material remains constant. The surrounding narrative changes the emotional reading.

Do distills the distinction into a visual metaphor: “It's not the painting, it's the pigment.”

The metaphor avoids two opposite mistakes. Music is not an empty substance that can become anything without resistance. Nor is it a finished emotional statement that retains exactly the same meaning wherever it appears.

A pigment has characteristics. So does a track. But the finished work depends on how that material is used in relation to everything around it.

This is where the conversation’s two apparent opposites meet. Music’s openness helps explain why it can accompany different moments in a listener’s life. A structured visual narrative then gives that openness a particular direction.

The result is not simply a song plus a video. It is a relationship between them.

For creators, the important consequence is that selecting a track in isolation cannot answer every question about its fit. A piece that feels one way on its own has to be considered inside the story it will help shape.

Höglund’s examples make the range explicit:

The same music can sit inside stories of desire or fear.
A different narrative can draw it toward regret or remorse.
Another context can make the same material support happiness.

These are not instructions for assigning fixed emotional labels to sounds. They illustrate the opposite: context participates in the result.

This also explains why Do’s comparison between music and film does not end in a competition. The relative openness of music becomes valuable precisely because the visual narrative is more directed. Each supplies something the other does not supply in the same way.

The issue sits close to the storytelling concerns signaled by The WORST Way to Tell Any Story, but Höglund’s argument is specifically about soundtracking. The track is not outside the story, commenting from a safe distance. Once placed, it becomes part of how that story is experienced.

Do’s pigment metaphor also restores responsibility to the maker. A powerful material does not remove the need for judgment. Having access to music is different from deciding what it should do.

The choice therefore cannot end at whether a track sounds impressive, expensive, or emotionally intense. Those qualities say little about whether it creates the right relationship with this sequence and this intended feeling.

The material offers possibilities. The storyteller chooses among them.

Friction belongs in the creative process

The conversation’s turn toward adversity initially appears to leave music behind. In fact, it follows the same underlying concern: how people become capable of making choices that are not merely repetitions of what surrounds them.

Höglund describes growing up in the United Kingdom for 12 years and experiencing the friction of being Swedish there, then returning to Sweden with a different cultural and linguistic background. Do recognizes a parallel in the experience of not fitting easily into a norm.

Neither account establishes that hardship automatically produces creativity. What they identify is a habit of adaptation. When the usual fit is unavailable, a person has to notice differences, interpret context, and work out another approach.

Höglund connects his largest personal and professional leaps with serious setbacks. His interpretation is that disruption to an existing plan can make experimentation feel unavoidable. The familiar option stops being comfortable enough to protect.

He illustrates the problem of conformity through sports. If competitors follow the same training, advice, and routines, he asks how they expect to produce exceptional differences in performance. Applied to creative work, the challenge is to stop treating imitation of a process as a guarantee of an original outcome.

That is not an argument against learning from others. It is an argument against expecting sameness of input to reliably produce distinction.

Experimentation needs discipline, not just inspiration.

Höglund insists that the work still has to be done. Exposure to difficulty supplies material and perspective, but neither becomes a finished contribution without sustained effort. He invokes the familiar contrast between inspiration and perspiration to make that obligation plain.

His position contains a useful tension. He values friction, yet also values conditions that make failure survivable. When discussing Sweden, he describes its social support as giving people more opportunities to attempt something and recover if it fails.

Those are his views on the trade-off, not a detailed account of tax policy or a promise that any particular venture receives protection. The relevant creative principle is the relationship between risk and another chance.

Do notices that relationship. A person can be encouraged to try something uncertain without being asked to romanticize catastrophic consequences. Ambition and support do not have to cancel each other out.

This tension gives useful context to How to stay curious only as a subject, but the supplied related conversation is more precisely available as How to stay curious. Here, Höglund’s concern is keeping exploration alive without confusing it with effortless output.

The challenge for a creator is therefore double. Comfort can narrow the range of attempts, while undisciplined experimentation can leave every attempt unfinished.

Originality needs room to depart. Craft needs the commitment to complete the departure.

Creative confidence also needs protection

Höglund offers another complication to the idea that creativity develops only through effort. He recalls encountering Sir Ken Robinson’s argument that people can lose creative confidence as they learn to avoid mistakes and embarrassment.

The significance for Höglund is not that practice becomes unnecessary. It is that development involves preserving something as well as acquiring something. Curiosity can be exercised, but it can also be discouraged.

His account focuses on the ordinary pressures that make experimentation less attractive: not raising a hand without knowing the answer, avoiding public error, and learning to treat uncertainty as a reason to stay quiet.

Those habits create a different kind of constraint from lack of skill. A person can have an idea and still decline to test it because the social cost of being wrong feels too high.

Höglund does not resolve this by choosing between natural curiosity and learned discipline. He explicitly allows both to matter. The work is to protect the willingness to experiment while developing the ability to make something worthwhile from the experiment.

That balance applies to parenting in his account, but also to the way adults manage themselves. Constant self-correction can become self-censorship if every unfinished thought is judged as though it were a final submission.

The distinction helps explain why his conversation about sound expands into questions about conduct. He is interested in what people notice and permit, not only in what they produce.

When describing persuasion, for example, Höglund emphasizes listening. He says he values asking questions and reading the room, including sentiments that are not stated directly. The emphasis is on attention before expression.

That is a useful counterweight to the image of a creative professional as someone who simply broadcasts a strong point of view. The person shaping an experience also needs to be receptive to the people encountering it.

Höglund gives that receptiveness an ethical dimension through a story about strangers struggling to charge an electric car in Stockholm. Their cards did not work, and their English was limited. He tried to help, then paid for the charge himself.

His explanation is personal: he imagined his daughter, living far away in Australia, meeting someone in a similar situation. The help he wanted her to receive became a standard for his own behavior.

That anecdote does not prove a theory of creativity or persuasion. It clarifies what Höglund means by paying attention: noticing a specific difficulty and responding to it rather than merely admiring empathy as an abstract quality.

In creative work, his account of listening places a similar demand on the maker. Emotional intention cannot be the only consideration. There must also be attention to how the work lands.

A strong intention is a beginning. It is not evidence of a successful connection.

Separate the channels, then judge the whole

The practical resolution returns to Do’s film experiment. After the theories about repetition, the classroom story, and the discussion of creative risk, the most useful move remains remarkably modest: separate sound from picture and pay attention.

Evaluate sound by what it contributes to the experience.

Do offers a comparison, not a named framework or a production checklist. Its strength is that it does not require agreement with Höglund’s strongest claims. The creator can examine a specific piece and draw a conclusion from that encounter.

The sequence in the conversation is straightforward:

Choose a movie clip.
Watch it without sound and notice the feeling it produces.
Turn off the picture and listen to the same clip.
Compare the experiences and draw a conclusion about each channel’s contribution.

The test separates two questions that are easy to collapse. One concerns understanding: what remains clear about the action or the story? The other concerns feeling: what changes in tension, intimacy, anticipation, or emotional weight?

The experiment does not establish that audio always carries more meaning than an image. It exposes the contribution that a combined presentation makes easy to overlook.

Höglund’s account of the same track appearing in different stories adds another caution. The result cannot be judged entirely from the music alone. Sound has qualities of its own, but its role emerges in relation to the narrative.

That leaves creators with a more precise standard than simply having music present. The relevant distinction is between adding a track and making an emotional choice.

Do’s work playlist illustrates one end of that choice: music supports a state without becoming the center of attention. Höglund’s classroom illustrates another: recognizable music brings associations forward immediately. His soundtracking examples illustrate a third: context draws different meanings from the same material.

None of those uses requires sound to announce its importance. Its effectiveness lies in the relationship it creates.

The broader creative argument is equally concrete. Access to material does not settle how to use it. Familiar routines do not guarantee an original result. Confidence without listening does not establish that a message has connected.

Sound makes those distinctions audible. It gives a creator another way to examine the distance between the work as intended and the work as experienced.

The final challenge is not to make every piece louder, more dramatic, or more obviously scored. It is to stop treating the soundtrack as a decision whose only requirement is completion.

A track selected because it fills the silence answers a production problem. A track selected for its relationship to the story answers a creative one.

The picture can show what happened. The sound still has a job to do.

TRANSCRIPT

- The one sense that you cannot turn off is your ears. They're always on. If you put out a piece of content and you don't have audio, you don't have sound, it's like empty calories. You can understand that content, but you can never feel it. Pick a movie, any movie you wanna watch. Watch it without sound. See how you feel. - Yep. My name is Oskar Höglund, and you are listening to "The Future." Hey everybody, as you can tell, I'm not at home and we're live and in person. And it just so happens like I have the CEO of Epidemic here in front of me and we're in Austin. We made this work. So thanks to your team for making this happen. Welcome to the future. Amazing. Thank you for having me. So here's what I think we should do. You said something to me the last time we spoke via Zoom. that you have this whole theory about why music is infinitely repeatable whereas movies not so much so. Maybe that's where we begin this and now is a weird place to begin. I find it fascinating that content lives on this spectrum. And the way I see the spectrum is on the very one sort of far side, on one extreme, we have music. And on the other side, I would say that we have traditional visual content. And the way I think about it, and I'm trying to wrap my head around it, so I'm dying to hear your opinion, Chris, here is that I love visual content. And as an example, Game of Thrones is something that really gets me excited. We can talk about Matrix and other things as well, because I know that's something that's close to your heart also. But even though I see myself as a die-hard fan, When I've watched one episode of a show, I literally have next to zero desire to watch that show again because I've seen it, I know it and I understand it and I want to move on to the next show. I'm dying to see the next show, but I have very little interest in watching that show again. If I move to the other side of the spectrum and you look at music, it's the exact opposite. As in, I listened to a piece of music once and if it strikes a chord, if it makes me interested, it's something that every time I consume that piece of music again, it gets me more excited. So there's more comfort to it, or it's either because I recognize it, or maybe it's capturing onto a feeling. It might be augmenting a feeling. It might be numbing a feeling. But for some reason, music is something that you listen to repeat, repeat, repeat. And I think it's such an interesting thing that these are two different expressions of culture. They live on this different sides of the spectrums. And one is such that you watch it once and you never want to see it again. And music just keeps on compounding and keeps on compounding. And so I think that that's such an interesting thing. And if you put the business side on top of it, you look at what it costs typically to produce visual content. It's like way more expensive. An episode of Game of Thrones, I don't know, how much are we going to get? It's like $10 million? $10 to $20 million. $20 million. And you only get to pay off once because if I've seen it once, I'm not going to see it again. So if I want to rack up like millions of interactions and really make that IP valuable, I have to... I have to find so many people. Music on the other hand is infinitely cheaper to produce and one person can consume the same track thousands and thousands of times. I just think that thinking about this continuum like where does podcasts sit in that short form, long form, how does games play into this? Like just thinking about the continuum I find it to be so fascinating. So I'll stop there in terms of do you agree? I think you're right and I think it's because I think music becomes the soundtrack of our life and the universal language of our soul. And I don't want to get too poetic about this, but I think sound is energy and wavelength. And there are certain sounds that we find to be really pleasant and certain sounds that we are kind of, that make us scared or certain things that allow us to think clearer. And I find that when I'm writing a deck or something and I'm doing serious work, I want to Listen to instrumental and I want to listen to something that tickles my brain and I think there's a playlist on Spotify called brain food. Mmm, sir, listen to them like all these tracks are really good for me and I get into routine So now I just make sure I had the brain food playlist. Mm-hmm What are your thoughts on this kind of like this universal language of our soul? I a hundred percent agree It reminds me of an incident that happened a couple of years ago. So I I live in Stockholm, Sweden, which is in the middle of nowhere. But one day I was invited to, my youngest son had bring a parent to school day and he asked me to come, which in itself was amazing. And so I show up and I bring my Spotify playlist. I bring a little speaker and I get in front of the class. And what you should be envisioning is 25, seven-year-olds at the time. And they're all super excited. There's a teacher involved as well. and I have like 10-15 minutes and I stand in front of the class. I'll first paint a picture then I'll get to the substance. So I stand in front of the class and I open my mouth and I say "Hey everyone, I'm Seth Stadd and I'm here to talk about my job. I know that many of you think that I work with music, which is true, but what I actually do is I work with emotions because music is the language of emotion and I can prove it to you. I see this bewildered look on the teacher's face and the kids, they're scurrying around, they're sitting in their seats and I can tell that they don't want to be sitting in their seats because they're seven, right? And so first track I play, I say that, well, I bet you I can make you think of a season, a time of year. And I start playing this super Christmas oriented track. And so is this summer? And the kids go, no. Oh, is it spring? Is it autumn? No, it's Christmas. I then start playing tracks to the soundtracks to things like Frozen, like what immediately comes to mind. And they start talking about Elsa and this and popcorn and mom and dad and television and joy. I play try to born and realize that they're a bit too small. So they're like, I don't really understand what this is. But I play track after track. And it's so clear that music is very much the direct language of emotion. So if I take a step back and just reflect on what you're saying, I completely agree because I think that music is the language of emotions. And I think that done right, what it does, it taps into that emotion and it either catches on to an emotion and it amplifies it to your brain food point. Or music can also have the direct opposite approach as in it's something that's there to numb, to soothe something. You might be feeling giddy and you want to be feeling focused. You might feel focused, but you want to be feeling joyful. And so you can use it as very much a tool to sometimes augment. I don't want to say manipulate because it sounds dishonest, but you can very much form how you feel and view the world. So I think that it's an incredible, powerful tool. And maybe I think part of the power sits in that it's so pure because most of the time I feel it does one thing whereas storytelling on the continuum that's a more complex product it tries to take you to a story wants to impose something on you like come on my narrative journey I want you to feel excitement curiosity then this and this and this and you disconnect what you're feeling and you engage in something and maybe your mind is like spent after that because I think music is such a it's a way more simple it's almost like you're exercising an emotional reaction with yourself I also think about like how music and sound can influence our own physiology and we have a reaction to that beyond maybe emotions when you watch a movie I don't know if you've paid attention to this, but like a horror film, when they start to play the heartbeat, and then they play the heartbeat in a rhythm that's faster than your normal heartbeat. I think it signals your heart to beat faster. Yeah, I think it does. And you get a little scared and a little perspiration and you're short of breath. And that's why I also think when we need to calm down, we practice the breathing thing to slow our heart rate down intentionally. But music can be the trigger for that and help us to sync with it. I think that's absolutely right. And it's interesting because the last time we met in person, we were in Dubai. And there were two YouTubers who I met who were going on the stage for the first time and they were disclosing their true identities in the sense that the content they put out, which has tens of millions of followers, you can only see their hands and they're making food. And so the guys were super sweet. They were a bit nervous about being on stage. and so uh they asked for a bit of advice we feel so nervous and like just a week before i'd listened to a podcast where uh there was this epic piece of advice i felt and i said that's a As humans, we are genetically trained to, as soon as we are put in danger, our heartbeat goes up, similar to your point, and we start moving quicker. There's cortisol and endorphins that trigger in your body and you start moving quickly. And as a bystander, as an onlooker, if you see somebody moving quickly and the pulse goes up, you immediately equate that with fear, discomfort. And it's relevant because the person then said that if you ever find yourself in a studio like this or on a stage performing in front of people and you find yourself super nervous, there's one rule of thumb, which is whatever you do, make sure that you preferably talk, but more importantly, move slightly slower than everyone else on the stage. Because if you do, all the onlookers will pay a lot of attention to what you're saying. Other people come across as distressed, not on top of their game, on their subject matter. But if you just move slow, you send out an incredible vibe that everyone feels that you are in control. So back to your point, I definitely think that the way we think about music at Epidemic is if you think about food so food without taste is literally empty calories so this bland tasteless piece of food is amazing said no one ever right but if you add taste if you add umami it not only becomes memorable but if you do it right it becomes unforgettable and the exact same thing is true with content so if you put out a piece of video, a piece of content, and you don't have audio, you don't have sound, you don't have the heartbeat you reference, it's like empty calories. You can understand that content, but you can never feel it and you're never going to see it become memorable and forget about it being unforgettable. But as soon as you add like heartbeats is one way of sort of creating that umami or music or sound beds or some, and you use that in a more sophisticated way. Immediately amazing things happen. It's like you connect, you react, your heartbeat increases. So it's, um, I think it's fascinating. If you look at all your different senses, you can choose, see if I can remember all five of them. You can choose not to touch something. And you can choose not to taste something. You can choose not to smell something by closing up your nose or breathing with your mouth. And you can choose to close your eyes. You don't want to watch something. The one sense that you cannot turn off is your ears. They're always on. And I think that that has to do with danger, but also communicating. I've been told that People who lose their sight, it's a tragedy. And I always thought that that would be the most devastating sense to lose. But what I've actually heard is that people who lose their hearing, they feel so secluded, so cut off from society. So the amount of depression and worse is way higher. So I really think that audio is this incredibly important, sensory tool that we have. Like skin is obviously the biggest organ, but you can never turn your ears off. And so to your point, I think it's super powerful and it's so interesting to get to work with it. So Somebody who's going to be listening to this or watching this is going to say, well, Oscar has a dog in his fight. He has a horse in this race because clearly epidemic sound that you're biased. So let's, let's try and understand all of this, everybody. So you don't have to take Oscar's word for it. Let's try this. Pick a movie, any movie you want to watch. Watch it without sound. Yeah. See how you feel. Yep. And then turn off the TV, but just listen to the same clip and see how you feel. You can come to your own conclusion. And I've done this myself because I don't want to be like sitting and drinking the Kool-Aid without testing. Now, this is super weird because we've not talked about this before, but you brought up an example that I've asked my wife. Now, we're both designers. We're mostly visual processors, so we think. So I asked her, if you had to give up one of the two, which would you give up? your ability to see or your ability to hear at first she's like i don't i don't need to hear i need to see i need to see things i said okay so how do you feel what it is that i'm trying to communicate to you that words shape our emotions shape our our memories and we create stories with that i've always wondered how deaf people really communicate because they have sign But is there a nuance sign for every word that is in the English language? I don't think so. I don't know this for a fact, so I hope I'm not offending anybody. But I think because they've lost their ability to hear, they're losing so much more than what we think. And so I told her, if I don't have my eyes, I can still communicate. I can still make content. I can still connect with people. But if I can't speak or hear... I can sign to them, but I feel like I've lost a lot of the nuance and the vocabulary that I have to communicate very specific ideas. What are your thoughts? If I take a step back, I think that one of our species' remarkable achievements is that we've mastered storytelling. It started many hundreds of thousands of years ago, arguably millions of years ago. Like the invent of fire. Communicating, telling people, how do you start a fire? How do you keep it alive? Eventually looking out for each other, strength in numbers. Eventually that evolved into society and now mapping the genome and AI and what it is. But it all hinges on the ability for us to not only capture facts and convey them, but I think it's been said about our species that we are very poor at committing to multi-generational endeavors, as in it tends to be short periods of time we can focus. but i think that the red thread and there are a few exceptions of education is one i think religion is another one even though they change over time but i think that the power to um encourage enthusiast and things like be enthusiastic about something like tell a story I think that, yes, there is a visual component to that, which is important. But if I were to be forced to choose the ability to be able to listen in to other people's stories, their endeavors, their emotions, their feelings, to communicate these nuances myself, that's something that I would never be willing to trade. I think that I'm not an outlier. I think the one thing which is less spoken about is that I think we live in a Renaissance of storytelling. And what I mean by that is if you look at short form, long form, binge watching tweets, few characters, many characters, like advertising subscription, the sub stacks of the world, like storytelling has had like one of the best runs in human history. And I think that underpinning that obviously is technology. But I think that one of the great things about technology now is that it is an unlock. So we are seeing a democratization. So these islands that you talk about, think about Squid Game, think about Swedish shows, Swedish music that previously had a tough time reaching out. It's easier than ever now to publish your music anywhere or distribute your ideas, your content, your spoken word. I think that we're seeing like two things being true at the same time so one the juggernaut brands are gaining a lot of ground but also there's much more local influence of having more of a global impact and i find that to be fascinating i hope that we're moving to a world which is going to be even more eclectic more mixed because content can travel so much faster so much more efficiently and it It's starting more to come down to raw talent as opposed to distribution and being a gatekeeper. The way that you describe epidemic kind of fits very in line with, I think, of what I think of Swedish culture. So I think IKEA, it's like decent furniture for all. Like you can have a stylish home for all at an affordable price. H&M, is that a Swedish company? Yes, correct. H&M, you say what you want about that. But it's like clothing for all. And your whole thing is like, shouldn't we all be able to have the same power of using music? So you describe this democratization of emotion for everyone to have access to. And so then I'm thinking like, what else is there? And so I guess we're all a product for better and for worse of our culture, of our belief systems, right? Because we live within that. It's not like a bubble that exists outside of that. Now, I wanted to bring back this thing because you mentioned it, but then I forgot. you were talking about this, you grew up in the UK. Yes. For 12 years. Yes. And you said you moved around a lot. Yes. And maybe you felt Okay, being in the UK, but you've always been standing out for one reason or the other being born much bigger, heavier than most and being a Swedish person in the UK and then being an English born, but sweet back, you know, and having the language vocabulary of fewer, there's always friction. There's always something weird. Right. And so. This is there's a parallel. I'm not trying to equate the two of us together, but I've had that same kind of adversity I didn't have the same lovely experience you might have had growing up But I think sometimes when things go too smoothly we kind of just fit into like what the norm is Absolutely, and sometimes to create big bold ideas. I think you have to be yourself Used to overcoming certain things and figuring things out as you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I I couldn't agree more I think that the continuation of the arc, the story you're telling here is that I think that basically all great things come from adversary and from friction, sometimes friction and sometimes of downright disaster and catastrophe. And I think it's common knowledge that, or it's common belief that creativity, um, has to come from that place. And to some extent, I agree. I think that you need to experience some life-changing events in order to have some kind of content context, be able to compare and contrast. And in that void, something interesting happens. Then that needs to be paired with discipline because I think that getting great stuff out there eventually is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. So you need to work. But it's interesting to me that like sports um people go to sports camps and they train in the exercise and everyone basically follows the same dietary regime or they follow the same uh coaches and the and the same pieces of advice yet they all expect to win like how are you going to win if everyone plays by the exact same rule and exercises and trains the exact same way you're not going to be exceptional you're going to be saying to everyone else And I think that the same is true when you want to innovate and when you want to create things. You can't just follow a pack and do exactly what everyone else did and then hope to come up with a great idea or create something which has some cultural relevance or genius innovation from a technology perspective. You have to put yourself in a position of massive exposure to risk. I found that All of the biggest leaps that I've done, both professionally and privately, tend to be associated with huge setbacks, as in disasters. Because that's the only time where you truly say, you know what, screw it. I'm just going to go all in and I need to understand this because I have nothing to lose now. I'm desperate. And then something happens. And so I think that you need to oscillate between that. And yet a lot of people try and optimize by saying, Getting the oscillation down as much as possible because you want to be smooth. Yeah, it's easy You want to chill but that's not in my experience the recipe to have exceptional outcomes You need to be okay with pain suffering hurt sacrifice. I think it's a huge part of it. Mm-hmm. Do you agree? Yeah, absolutely and I think This reminds me of something I believe Jeff Bezos said that failure and innovation or invention are inseparable twins You you have to be willing to make a giant big mess Yeah of things and I love that you said it's part of Swedish culture like the social net is so strong that you're encouraged to try and fail and you don't have to have Catastrophic failure correct that you can get yourself up if so motivated and try again and try again. Yeah, I Right now, so it's all connected because the cost of that obviously is again having taxes eat up. We pay the majority of your salary goes to taxes. Let that sink in. The majority of what you make goes into taxes. And so that's a huge toll. And a lot of people say this is unacceptable. Well, it is if you don't utilize the fact that if that's the suffering, if that's what you have to offer to participate, the upside is you get 50 different runs that you're different ideas because everything else, like the key things in life, they will be provided for you. No, you're not going to have a super flashy lifestyle, but it will work and you will live with you will live. to fight and see another day. And so it continues. So I think that there are always these trade-offs. Do you have people that are Swedish who say, I'm tired of this tax. I'm going to go move somewhere where the tax is lower? All the time. All the time. Yeah. So it happens. Okay. I don't think it's a one size fits all. I think that the whole notion of states, and this is just stating the obvious, right? But I think that States are important, but I would argue less so in the sense of I feel less familiarity with fellow Swedes than I do with say people like yourself or people who have experienced similar things or who pursue similar things but in different parts of the world. So I see more of this being a global citizen where somebody in Stockholm probably has much more in common with somebody in New York or in Tokyo than as a a town in Sweden with 20,000 people like Skellefteå, Sundsvall, Skövde, like small towns in Sweden where yes, we speak the same language, but that's of it ends there. And so I think as a consequence, it doesn't come as a surprise at all to me that a lot of people subscribe to different worldviews. And so they move where they feel that they have more excitement, more community, more, more More friction even, because I think some people look for friction because they've realized that friction is the umami. Friction is the spice that makes things interesting. And so they're looking for that adversity in culture or in language or in just process. Try getting a social security number when you move to the U.S. First getting into the U.S. is a challenge in itself, but then social security... The whole catch 22, you can't get electricity to your house until you have to provide an electricity bill. In order to do that, you need social security, but you can't get social security until you have an electricity bill. So you can't get in. And so there are many problems that need solving. And a lot of people are drawn to different adventures. Yeah, perhaps they're saying I don't want somebody to prescribe to me via tax how much risk I want to take on because you're paying the risk tax. Yeah, right. Yeah. And so somebody's like, I'm going to go crazy. I'm going to go for this. And if I fail, I'll pick myself up in a different way. You know, I'll live out of a cardboard box if I have to and at least allow me to eat the fruit of my own labor. Yeah. I think the problem here is that it's not great that you pay a lot of tax, but at least you get your money's worth with the programs that you have. The great social network or this net, not network. And in the US, we pay, California, LA, pay a lot of taxes. Our streets are dirty. Our public services aren't great. Or in places where they have lead in the water or it's rusty, brown water coming out of the pipes. At least you have clean water. So I'm happy to pay and I love this part about you and I think there's another thing we had in common I didn't realize you're like I want to pay my taxes I want to support this idea of the collective and I'm for that and I met with my financial advisor many years ago and he goes Chris We're gonna try to reduce your your your tax obligation. I said, okay, but let's keep this in the white Definitely not in the black. Yeah, I'm not even that interested in the gray. Yeah, because what's wrong with you? I said, I It's my duty to pay tax. I get to live in this country. This country welcomed us in. And if we don't pay tax, who will pay tax? And I don't know who said it. I think it was Warren Buffett who said, like, if the richest people in America just paid their fair share of taxes, no more than everybody else, no one else would have to pay tax. But it's the problem that we have this weird system in America I don't want to get into. But it seems like the bottom is doing all the heavy lifting in terms of supporting our infrastructure. I mean... I agree and I would try and take one step back and to move away from tax because I think that if you look at life and this is my personal view it's we're on this rock which is flying around in space like the only thing we know that we're all going to be dead eventually and some people argue it's all pointless yet we want to have some meaning in it and for me super simple like we put on the earth for a blink of an eye very short period of time we have one job we're custodians of this rock for a tiny fraction of time and you got one job like leave the world slightly better than you found it yeah it's that simple and you can apply that to literally everything you do when my kids and i go to the beach which isn't super often because we live in sweden it's always cold but when we go i've been there when we go um It's super see if we always take three pieces of trash with us from the beach Why because we came to the beach so it's beautiful But we want to leave it slightly better and we found it and I think if you try and find ways to apply that to This sounds a bit goody two shoes and it sounds a bit pretentious. You can flip it around. Like it's 100% egoistic because I think that over time what I found is paying it forward and sort of engaging in your community and people and helping lead something better. Like nothing gives me as sustainable joy as that. I can have much harder, higher, shorter peaks, which are more sort of egoistic. of ecstasy or so I'm really excited, but long-term sustaining happiness comes from contributing to leaving the world a better place. And you can wear many different hats. Like I often think like, okay, as a friend, am I doing that now? As a partner, as a son, my dad was in hospital the other day because it turned out okay, but so just immediately I'm on the other side of the world, you reach out and you commit. to your colleagues, to your coworkers, to my investors, to my community, to my alumni in my school. There are many different ways to think about it. And I don't see them as obligations, but they're more opportunities. Like, what are some of the small things that I can do at a marginal expense to myself? But I just know that if everyone's have did that, Life becomes also easier when you have kids because a lot of the times I ask my questions as in my oldest daughter Stella, she turns 18 in March. She's in the other side of the world in Australia. So we spoke this morning and there's a 17 hour time difference which just blows my mind. And I find myself thinking a lot how I conduct myself. I ask myself the question is if my 17 year old daughter met me or sort of like the equivalent to me in australia how that person sort of treated her is of how i sort of need of how i think about myself and how i conduct myself when i meet other people so um i was in stockholm the other day uh i saw this super sweet couple they had this electric car they couldn't charge it they obviously didn't come from from sweden and there so the credit cards didn't work nothing worked at all and they were super duper stressed and so they asked me in broken english like can you help us understand this and we tried the different cards nothing worked uh and i mentioned i was thinking like if this was my daughter other side of the world these things happen like what's the charge so they need to charge this twenty dollars they're desperate and i took out my card i blipped and i paid it i paid for them and they're like oh but we can't get pay you back i know it's cool like you're going to do the same thing for someone else because one day you might be meeting my daughter on the other side of the world and i use that as a way of thinking about i wish more people thought that way and so it's these small different things so if you apply that and again i don't do that because i'm goody two-shoes because i want to be go down in history i i left that i tell that story now it gives me goosebumps because i feel good creating value for someone else without the expectation of something in return That over time just fills me with pride. We have one job. Leave the world slightly better than we found it. That's what you should be doing, in my opinion. - I think there's some quote, I'm probably gonna mess it up, but like, doing good is good business. So why don't we be governed by doing good? Things may or may not happen on the timeline that you might expect, but I believe in that. One could refer to that, bringing us back into the woo, it's like, it's karma. And so you're making a deposit in the bank of karma, so you have good karmic equity, which compounds interest over time. I have this weird theory that the way that you are inside your heart shapes your face. When you look at a person, you notice like sometimes you're like, that person's up to no good. I can't trust that person. That person, I'm going to let him stay in my place. I'm not worried about. And one is said to have a kind face or a suspicious face. And I've been thinking about this a lot. Why is it that people have a suspicious face, but wind up doing no good? And why is it more often than not that people who seem like they're very kind are kind? And so there's a stereotypical depiction of Buddha as a fat, bald man with really big earlobes, a round nose, and just smiles. And you look at that person versus the depiction of Christ, and they're very different images. But when I look at Buddha, I know it's a Like almost like not even Buddha anymore. It's just a character. Yeah, but you look at it like that person just looks really kind and at peace They're communicating all those things. Yeah, so do you think that there might be something there like when when you have a kind spirit? That actually shapes your face in your body. What do you think? Have you noticed that let that sink in? Do I think so? Yes, I think that that's very much the case I think that It probably manifests in how you look, but back to where we were before in terms of how you move, how you conduct yourself. I think that we live in this world of AI, right? And I think that humans are surprisingly sophisticated. And so it's turning out so we can have LLMs do like things which are very very difficult for us humans to pull off but the things that we take for granted like some dressing ourselves or caressing a cheek or so opening a package uh sort of uh soliciting advice expressing compassion like that's way way way more difficult because it's super super complicated uh for machines to understand that because there's so many different layers so many different components to it um so i um i i tend to agree with you i think that it's your actions manifest not just in your face per se but I think it also I think we send out some pheromones and we have like this multi layer of signals that help build trust I know that I've I've been told that that I can build trust like one of my brothers told me that's one of my superpowers is that I can be persuasive as in, and I think it comes down to, I've tried to break it down is, even though it might not come across here today, because I'm talking nonstop, but I pride myself on being a good listener. I ask more questions. I like to read people, rooms, contexts. I think that people have different propensities to pick things up. I think I can pick up sentiments of unspoken things. I remember I was on a trip once to Africa and I found myself in a bazaar where they were selling rugs and all different kinds of things. And it was a maze. And this is many, many years ago. And I took a left, I took a right. So I was just comfortable being completely lost. And I made a series of turns and suddenly I found myself in an outdoor slaughter environment in this bazaar. uh slightly open skies but the moment i got in there even before i could localize where i was because i was taking all these different turns um my entire body jolted and so i felt very very strongly that there was a completely different vibe in this area and it took me a few reckons seconds to realize but then so this was where uh animals were being slaughtered and what food was being made. And it was clear to me that there was so much pheromone, so much, I think, anxiety going on that it was just, it was one of those moments that I often come back to think about because Again, I'm not a spiritual person. I like to be able to explain things. But going back to the chakras and the feelings and Buddha, I think that there are many different complex layers with which we can both broadcast and appreciate signal. And they might manifest in our facial expressions and things that we can hear, things that people say, things that they don't say, like hesitation, how your eye works, where you... uh, internet. And so I definitely think that this realm is like super interesting, but I don't really have the tools to break it down. So I have to rely on intuition and listen to you. And she didn't. It's a feed off of that, that, that moment that you're describing could be the animal screaming in fear. Yeah. And their sound waves leave an imprint of the materials, the porous materials, the things that can absorb that. And it's imprinted. Or pheromone and smell that they put out. It's soaked into the materials, right? I think, yeah. There was something going on there. And you, you know, because the visible light spectrum is so small relative to the light spectrum. Yeah. So we can only see some things and some people are extra sensory where they can see color. Not see color, they can hear color. That's amazing. I learned that at university. A friend of mine, I'd never heard that before. And she said, something was yellow, this was red, this was green. It's like, what do you mean? And she explained that to me. That was crazy. There's a friend of mine who said there's a famous composer who's worked on a lot of different songs. His entire house is all white. Wow. because it messes them up because the colors emit sound. And so I think what's happening is we're starting to crack this puzzle where we think the natural world is finite to what we can perceive, but that's a very self-centered point of view where animals can see infrared. They can see lots of things. So some animals look at you and like... They're afraid of you. Some animals will run up to you and lick your hand or your feet. And you're like, why is that? Because you're emitting an energy. They're reading your face and the pheromones and everything else. But my theory is this, is that if you worry a lot, generally speaking, you have a lot of worry lines. And some people get like dark rings under their eyes, probably because they're not getting a lot of sleep because they're worrying a lot. Or jet lag. Or like five days of South by Southwest could do that. Who knows? Not always, you know, jump to conclusions here, but we're or people who who are always judging people they fur their eyebrows so they have this deep line in there so that's a permanent record of you they have any emotion or expression and so i'm always looking at people and like when i look at you and you're talking you have a kind face you have a seeming like an open heart and spirit so maybe that's why you're persuasive maybe people are giving you more of their attention or in your audience because they're reading something that's nonverbal. Just putting it out there. - Maybe. I think that one piece of content which borders art that I saw many, many years ago was a TED talk. And it's related to this because I think that Speaking for myself, I tend to subscribe to the worldview that experiences and I think accomplishments or skills are something that we need to appreciate and develop over time. As in you start with very little and then you are determined or persuaded to train. You exercise the muscle. So creativity could be muscle you exercise or focus or whatever your desired outcome might be. You can train to that. So I always subscribe to that worldview until I challenged or I got challenged. And so I see this Ted talk many years ago. Many people have probably seen it because it's one of the most viewed. I think it's interesting. A British man, his name was Sir Tim Robinson, and he was, a brief period of time, he was in charge of the British school system. Oh, Sir Ken Robinson. Sir, that's the one. The number one most viewed TED Talk. Sir Ken Robinson is what I'm getting at. He's done multiple talks, and I find them all to be fascinating. But one of his ideas is the exact opposite of what I just expressed, which is, He tells this story about a classroom somewhere in the south of UK and the teacher is walking around the room and different kids are given an assignment and they're asked to draw something. And kids are drawing away and she's walking around and she's looking at different paintings and she walks up to little Timmy and Timmy sits there and she goes, well, hello, Timmy, what are you drawing? And Timmy goes, I'm drawing God. And she goes, Timmy, are you drawing God? Yeah. but nobody knows what god looks like timmy looks up and he smiles and he says they will in a minute and so his whole premise is that people in general dare i say everyone is born creative yes and then the world kind of beats that out of you because you're encouraged not to experiment not to make mistakes not to raise your hand unless you know the answer not to succumb and expose yourself to embarrassment and so people become less expressive and they fall out of being creative and they fall out of taking risk as opposed to training to achieve that outcome. And it stuck with me forever because I think that there's infinite wisdom to that. I think that a lot of people Both things potentially can be true at the same time. But I do think that a lot of people are born creative and curious and have these traits. And you need to be mindful both as a parent, but also when you work with yourself to try and embrace and protect the things that you have such that they don't diminish. While at the same time, trying to build the other traits and characteristics that you would like to pursue and you'd like that we're at south by southwest you're i'm stealing you from important things you what could be more important than this this is 30 or 40 people are like working in the booth meeting new people you're a title sponsor here i've really enjoyed our conversation i want to bookend it a little bit and take it where we started which was the replayability of music versus movies so here are some of my thoughts on because i'm going to make a Not a different argument, but just the difference. Music, I think, can be experienced in a non-sequential way. Music is abstract and it can be interpreted like poetry. And so it can be individualized for the person. Movies, on the other hand, there's a very clear sequence of beginning, middle, and ending. And if it's in the hands of a masterful storyteller, it's designed to elicit very specific emotions and to get you to feel a very specific way. And so its ability to be replayed over and over again is diminished because If it's designed carefully, it gives you the exact same experience over and over again. Whereas sometimes when you listen to music, you hear a lyric or a note because of your frame in a completely different way. And there's something about it that we can vibe with it just purely on an emotional level, not like a narrative logical level. And I think that's why you can listen to a song almost infinitely. Now, if you listen to the same song and too short of a period of song, it'll drive you crazy, I think. right? But if you listen to enough of it, that's why we have our favorite songs, why on my playlist, some songs have been played hundreds of times, but I can't say any movie I've ever watched a hundred times. I think you're right. And I think that the, the nuance or the incredible nature of music and why we've devoted our lives to work with it is what you're saying is true. And that becomes so interesting to work with because the exact same piece of abstract music, and we see this time and time again, when that gets selected from storytellers and it gets put in the exact same piece of music because it's abstract, but it gets dropped into a story. And in this case, five different stories, the exact same piece of music, depending on the arc of the story that's being told can evoke desire, fear, regret, remorse, sort of happiness, all of the above. And so I think that the interplay between music and visual content like the whole the whole premise of soundtracking is so incredibly rich because there are so many different outcomes so many different variables so many different ways to create these compelling stories whether they're standalone and more predictable or if they're put into a context where the exact same thing can have dramatically different meaning for people and evoke different emotions. In that way, I think music is much more versatile. It's not the painting, it's the pigment. And you get to paint. And in the hands of each artist, we get to tell our own stories. It is blue or it's red, so it's limited to what you can do with it, but what you can do with it is quite amazing and far-reaching, I think. Soundtrack of our lives. It's amazing. Beautiful. Thanks for doing this with me, Oscar. Thank you so much for having me. This was an amazing experience for me. I love talking to you. I think I only scratched the surface of the kinds of things that we could dive into. So, you know, when you're in front of somebody who has a life and a perspective and doing things other than just doing their work, I think it's so easy to have a conversation. So I hope dear listeners, you've enjoyed this conversation with Oscar. He's the CEO of Epidemic Sound. If you don't know what it is, we will provide some links in the description. Be sure to check that out. If you're watching this on YouTube, the links are in the show notes. Check them out. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

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“It's not the painting, it's the pigment.”

— Chris Do

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Topic: CONTENT CREATION

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