20: Yancey Strickler - Constellations of Creativity

Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 20 with Yancey Strickler. Yancey's a writer, entrepreneur, and currently the founder of MetaLabel, a network and platform that allows creative people to release work together. He also founded Kickstarter, where he was previously the CEO and is a current board member, and is also working on a new corporate form called the Artist Corporation. We talk about all of these and more, and frankly, those only scratch the surface of Yancey's creative life and work. At Root, I think he spent his career thinking about what it means to be an individual and what what it means to be a creative in the modern world and how the internet is shaping all of that.

Much of this work has been specifically around new types of forms that enable artists and creatives. The first half of the conversation is really focused on a backdrop around how the world is so shaped by individualism and by creativity, and how while the internet has ultimately empowered both of those dramatically, it's also left many people longing to be a part of something bigger than themselves, especially creatively. And so we spend the rest of the conversation talking about how that can happen and Yancey's notion that we should creatively conspire together, effectively acting both as individuals who can shine brightly as stars, but also as part of a constellation we are proud to be in.

All of this rolls into Yancey's notion that the 21st century will be the creative century, where increasingly more of us will find work and more importantly, meaning in what we make. With that, here's Yancey. Speaker B: Yancey, we're here. Speaker A: Thanks for doing this. Speaker B: We're here. We're so here. Speaker A: On a moody Friday in New York. Perfect time to talk about so many things. We're going to start with individualism. A couple of quotes for you that seem to be favorites of yours. One in particular from Cahill and their Youth Mode essay.

Once upon a time, people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today, people are born individuals and have to find their communities. And then the second is from your interview with Adam Curtis. He said, the contemporary idea of freedom is very much an individualist one. I, as an individual, want to be free to do what I want to do. The idea of individual self-expression whilst feeling limitless because the ideology of our age is individualism, looked at from another perspective, is limiting because all you have Is your own desires.

I think both of those quotes are definitely hinting at where the conversation will go, but I want to start specifically with individualism. You've written and talked a lot about this idea and specifically how when the world shifted from a much more collective place to a much more individualistic place. And so maybe the first place to start would be, why has individualism been good for the world? And what does it mean to be individual? Speaker B: Just start it. Just boom. Just boom. Right? Just right into it. Yeah. So thanks for the warmup, Jackson.

Well, I find this, I tend to be, to get interested in things, especially when I learn that something I assume has been true forever wasn't always the case. I don't know the first time that happened. Maybe it was that people thought the Beatles were one-hit wonders for a while, you know, but like, That always sticks with me. And I was reading the book, The Invention of the Individual, or Inventing the Individual, by Larry Sydenhop, and then a book by Joseph Heinrich called The Weirdest People in the World, both of which tell the story of the modern concept of an individual was something that was, hasn't always been here.

And that there was a point in time that historically, for a variety of reasons, they can pinpoint with some degree of accuracy where people identified much more as part of a clan or part of a tribe or part of something larger, and their sense of identity was related to where they fit within that network or system or, you know, clan. And that was the way of the world. And that, that makes sense, I guess. I mean, I can imagine that, but this notion that there was a moment when people began to see themselves differently.

Speaker B: Just start it. Just boom. Just boom. Right? Just right into it. Yeah. So thanks for the warmup, Jackson. Well, I find this, I tend to be, to get interested in things, especially when I learn that something I assume has been true forever wasn't always the case. I don't know the first time that happened. Maybe it was that people thought the Beatles were one-hit wonders for a while, you know, but like, That always sticks with me. And I was reading the book, The Invention of the Individual, or Inventing the Individual, by Larry Sydenhop, and then a book by Joseph Heinrich called The Weirdest People in the World, both of which tell the story of the modern concept of an individual was something that was, hasn't always been here.

And that there was a point in time that historically, for a variety of reasons, they can pinpoint with some degree of accuracy where people identified much more as part of a clan or part of a tribe or part of something larger, and their sense of identity was related to where they fit within that network or system or, you know, clan. And that was the way of the world. And that, that makes sense, I guess. I mean, I can imagine that, but this notion that there was a moment when people began to see themselves differently.

Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Was really interesting. And both books talk about this moment as being related to when the Catholic Church in Southern Europe around 1000 AD, sometime around, give or take 100 years, they banned cousin marriage. And up until that point, it was common in clans for the patriarch, matriarch, to marry cousins to each other, 'cause it's like— Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Was really interesting. And both books talk about this moment as being related to when the Catholic Church in Southern Europe around 1000 AD, sometime around, give or take 100 years, they banned cousin marriage.

And up until that point, it was common in clans for the patriarch, matriarch, to marry cousins to each other, 'cause it's like— Speaker A: First cousins. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, just more labor, you know, keep, don't let them get out. Speaker A: Yeah. You know, just keep making more. Keep the dollars in the family. Speaker B: Keep making more. And that was a real source of power. And so some of the papal officials, some of the churches wanted to break some of that power. And so they had this idea that the church would declare it wrong to have first cousins marry.

Within a couple generations of that being decreed, there was this big change in society that you can see in historical record. One is that cities began to grow like never before. Mm. Cities had never been that big. There weren't that many of them. There were tiny trading posts. Suddenly those trading posts grew to something bigger because whereas before people would just marry the person in the bunk next to them— On the farm, whatever. Yeah, on the farm. Now they had to go and meet someone. They had to go and meet someone.

So these trading posts suddenly grew. So cities became a part of human life for the first time. And two other things emerged then too: guilds and universities. And so because these newly liberated people were showing up inside these— to these villages, these towns, these bustling cities, and you needed a way to find work, to find a trade, to have some sort of context. 'Cause before that, it's just, you know, you don't need those things. Speaker A: It was pre-installed. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't need those things. Speaker A: You do what your dad did, yep.

Speaker B: And so it was like within the span of, you know, 60 years, you see these new structures that are still the infrastructure of the world today begin to emerge. And it was largely because people were individualized beyond the clan and they were showing up, still not to the degree of individualism we think of today, but comparatively, they were showing up like, on their own and, you know, serving, leading to serve their interests or serve a specific purpose. These structures began. And I mean, a lot of things, I mean, individualism was something that continued to be written about during early Renaissance and has always been a part of, you know, I think like the emergence of rationalism and the scientific revolution.

A lot of those things have quite a individualistic point of view that still, I think, has this origin point. Speaker A: Maybe romanticist era too. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I personally find that interesting, and I identify with the K-Hole quote so much because I do feel like someone that grew up in a, you know, in a culture that was very much focused on your self-actualization. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: And I can sense in the difference of my parents and my grandparents, a difference in how, what it meant to belong to something or to be from a place.

Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: And I look at people younger than me and I see that continuing. And then I look at the internet and I see a whole new world with a different set of rules that to me resembles that 1,000-year-ago moment where the internet, I think, basically stopped cousin marriage in that it allowed us to, become individuals in a whole new way. Like to be an individual online, it's not just that you're not from your clan, it's that you don't know what you look like. You can choose everything about yourself.

And you can also do it over and over again. And actually the people who go deepest in this world, you cultivate alts, you cultivate many slices of yourself that are all true parts of you, non-complete parts of you, But there are things that the internet accentuates, celebrates, rewards. And what I see online is similar to 1,000 years ago. I see the creation of a new society. And I think just like cities, guilds, universities created the structure that we still live within today, I think that the things that we're experiencing now online are creating the structures of society for the next X many centuries.

Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: And I can sense in the difference of my parents and my grandparents, a difference in how, what it meant to belong to something or to be from a place. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: And I look at people younger than me and I see that continuing. And then I look at the internet and I see a whole new world with a different set of rules that to me resembles that 1,000-year-ago moment where the internet, I think, basically stopped cousin marriage in that it allowed us to, become individuals in a whole new way.

Like to be an individual online, it's not just that you're not from your clan, it's that you don't know what you look like. You can choose everything about yourself. And you can also do it over and over again. And actually the people who go deepest in this world, you cultivate alts, you cultivate many slices of yourself that are all true parts of you, non-complete parts of you, But there are things that the internet accentuates, celebrates, rewards. And what I see online is similar to 1,000 years ago. I see the creation of a new society.

And I think just like cities, guilds, universities created the structure that we still live within today, I think that the things that we're experiencing now online are creating the structures of society for the next X many centuries. Speaker A: You have a line, you say, to go online is to be reborn as an individual. This idea that you're kind of invited to redefine what you can be. A couple of excerpts from The Second Self, which you reference heavily, by Sherry Turkle, where she's talking about really computers and then I think maybe it's a revision and she's going back and talking more about how the internet has changed things.

There's this little, I think she's like a 6th grader, Deborah. She says, the experience of authorship in programming gave children like Deborah a sense of control that enabled them to construct micro worlds that were exquisitely tuned to their own developmental needs. And then Deborah says, when you program a computer, there is a little piece of your mind, and now it's a little piece of the computer's mind, and now you can see it, this reflectiveness. And then finally, it's another kid, I think, or maybe a grown-up. She says, he uses the computer to underscore this difference as a mirror for his own uniqueness.

He tells me, when I saw what I did with the computer, I used to laugh. I could see what a nut I was. Externalization of self onto a canvas is a way of seeing who you are. So much of what you were just saying, I'd be curious for your reflection, both personally and maybe broadly, on this identity plasticity that you were just talking about. You've also written, and I think another piece about at one point you grew a mustache while you were writing a book, took maybe like the Sasha Fierce, Beyoncé, like take on a new identity, Paul McCartney going into disguise so he could explore Sun Ra.

There's all of these great examples, particularly in professional creat— creativity around people donning disguises or creating identities. What are the primary ways that individuality changes when it can have so many different forms and they're so plastic with the internet? Speaker A: You have a line, you say, to go online is to be reborn as an individual. This idea that you're kind of invited to redefine what you can be. A couple of excerpts from The Second Self, which you reference heavily, by Sherry Turkle, where she's talking about really computers and then I think maybe it's a revision and she's going back and talking more about how the internet has changed things.

There's this little, I think she's like a 6th grader, Deborah. She says, the experience of authorship in programming gave children like Deborah a sense of control that enabled them to construct micro worlds that were exquisitely tuned to their own developmental needs. And then Deborah says, when you program a computer, there is a little piece of your mind, and now it's a little piece of the computer's mind, and now you can see it, this reflectiveness. And then finally, it's another kid, I think, or maybe a grown-up. She says, he uses the computer to underscore this difference as a mirror for his own uniqueness.

He tells me, when I saw what I did with the computer, I used to laugh. I could see what a nut I was. Externalization of self onto a canvas is a way of seeing who you are. So much of what you were just saying, I'd be curious for your reflection, both personally and maybe broadly, on this identity plasticity that you were just talking about. You've also written, and I think another piece about at one point you grew a mustache while you were writing a book, took maybe like the Sasha Fierce, Beyoncé, like take on a new identity, Paul McCartney going into disguise so he could explore Sun Ra.

There's all of these great examples, particularly in professional creat— creativity around people donning disguises or creating identities. What are the primary ways that individuality changes when it can have so many different forms and they're so plastic with the internet? Speaker B: Yeah, I think we're still early in discovering all of those. I mean, those quotes are from 1982, and it's people using like an Altair, you know, something that to us would be like, look like a calculator, right? Speaker A: Right, right. Speaker B: Literally. And that was the experience that they saw it.

No internet. No, just like the dumbest interview. And that, that feedback loop created that. It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. Speaker A: And highlights the core difference between television and computers as a medium, like the reflexivity of computers. Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think that, uh, I think of the internet as having spawned identityism and its entire philosophy and modes of being that are about finding the specific identities to which you belong. Every sub-identity you can ascribe to is a source of power and a source of, like, beef and all kinds of things online.

We are arranging ourselves through identityism, and it's just a continued proliferation of identities. New ones could be made every day. Like, you could have one about being mad about, you know, the Wendy's Instagram account. Like, that could be your for, you know, that could be your identity for a good 2 months. You know, it's really quite possible. Speaker A: Yeah, maybe it's compressing the length of our identity periods are compressing. Speaker B: But I, so I just think that there's a lot of intrinsic rewards for that is one thing. Certainly in an LLM world, you know, we are, well, what's interesting is that whereas in the past we would dump our feelings onto Tumblr and, you know, be vulnerable to each other, now we're doing that into LLMs and we're, talking back to a version of ourselves, back to a model, you know, meant to speak back to us.

But the amount of, the amount that we are asking for affirmation or guidance. Speaker B: But I, so I just think that there's a lot of intrinsic rewards for that is one thing. Certainly in an LLM world, you know, we are, well, what's interesting is that whereas in the past we would dump our feelings onto Tumblr and, you know, be vulnerable to each other, now we're doing that into LLMs and we're, talking back to a version of ourselves, back to a model, you know, meant to speak back to us. But the amount of, the amount that we are asking for affirmation or guidance.

Speaker A: We look how people are using O3, like in the last few, hey, O3, tell me about myself. I was just asking it what I should do with the next 10 years of my life, and it's being seen by the computer. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, totally. So like, it's interesting to think that maybe, —was vulnerable/cringe that, you know, Tumblr days, we would post our feelings, you know, to each other and people would be like, that's crazy. Why would you let someone do that? And people would have alts and whatever.

That was part of a culture. It's still web culture that's like that. Yeah. And then it moved more towards, you know, real identity and— Yeah, the Facebook era. Yeah, Facebook era, then the Twitter. And now it's just like, well, now we will just talk to LLMs and then we'll ask it, what do I tweet or whatever? And it's just like a we are intermediating, you know, by choice through a closed-loop interface that loops back to us that no one else can see. And I think that that ends up satisfying a lot of the desires that people had, really does.

Imagine if Chat, imagine if Chat like gave me likes for how good, like, you know, Mike, whatever I was showing up like, that would be evil to my behavior. 'Cause like my, every part of my lower cortex would just, it's like already it's clawing, it's chewing through my skin to get to it. Yeah, so that's just a really wild, a wild side of things. And the way people are pushing and exploring the boundaries of individuality right now, I mean, I find it both ridiculous and beautiful and amazing. You know, like I was thinking, This is almost like the, we're in the golden age of hotness where it's like, there's so much, there's so much of a mirror online, full-on augmentation hasn't happened yet, whatever that future is gonna be.

We're going here. We're still an organic, an organic self-improving through largely natural/more and more protein, you know, means of doing things. Looksmaxing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're all looksmaxing, good for us. But yeah, I mean, It's hard. It's hard not to just continually experience the internet as a very true reflection of a lot of what's inside of us. And, you know, I've always thought like the metaverse word is wrong and that I always think it's like a Mesa-verse because it's about all of our inner selves meeting. It's not about physically embodying some digital— no, no, it's our It's our inner, all of our inner voices.

That's who is meeting online. It's more authentic is essentially what you're saying. In some ways. In some ways. In some ways. It's also more performative. It's all, every range, just like every range for a person. But there is just an inherent truth to it. Even the manipulation. Even last night I went to an event that Toby Shoren hosted of Other Internet and he had us. Former guest of the podcast. Great, and he had us map the eras of the internet and, You know, people talked about like now, someone said the era of now is scam or be scammed.

And she's just like, everything's a scam. You know, everything's a scam. And so, you know, the only thing to do is that you have to scam, you know, because otherwise, what are you doing? Speaker A: You're just waiting. Everybody's, yeah, it's sort of like everybody's LARPing. Yeah. And yeah, the new form of LARPing is, or role-playing, is scamming. Speaker B: Just scamming. And just, but just listening to people talk about that and to feel, oh, that is the Well, that is the current of our political situation now. That is like, there's a truthful, even as I may be troubled by it, right?

There's a truth that I recognize. And I'm like, yeah, I think, I think she's onto something. Speaker A: You wrote about it in the piece, and I think it might be very obvious to someone who's extremely online, but for those who it might be less obvious for, can you talk a little bit about The ways that this identity plasticity can, can show up in terms of there's maybe the one end of the spectrum, which is a non-account or an alt identity or a fake Instagram under a totally different pseudonym. And then there's a massive gradient to just like, what are all the versions of Yancy on Twitter versus Yancy in this room versus Yancy on whatever, some other platform, Substack is different.

And there's like, it's almost like there's a wide gradient there. Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think that we are, Ben Thompson writes in, had a Stratechery piece, like Social 2.0, where he talks about like this Ben flower, all these petals of him. Yeah, it's a great image. Um, I think rings true. Speaker A: Um, and Ben is a simple example. Ben has Ben Thompson and then he has No Tech Ben, which is his basically basketball account. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And yeah, so I think that there is that.

You are encouraged to see things that way. There was like the Dolly Parton meme years ago of like the four different— there's like the— I don't know if I know this— parts of you, four different fits for like, who are you? So the idea is like we each have four different personas we step into. The systems incentivize us to optimize for whatever content does well in their spaces, but I a lot of people in past versions of myself, probably future versions of myself, spin a lot of wheels trying to optimize for those spaces.

And I think that there's such thing as like a artist format fit or a creator format fit. And that in most channels, the people that most people follow tend to be someone who only does that thing. Yeah. Tends to be, not always, but tends to be. But that the rest of us midtwits like me, of course we consume everything, so we're like, I gotta be everywhere. So I gotta conjugate this, I gotta have my LinkedIn today, I gotta have my whatever it is. Speaker A: Um, and Ben is a simple example.

Ben has Ben Thompson and then he has No Tech Ben, which is his basically basketball account. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And yeah, so I think that there is that. You are encouraged to see things that way. There was like the Dolly Parton meme years ago of like the four different— there's like the— I don't know if I know this— parts of you, four different fits for like, who are you? So the idea is like we each have four different personas we step into. The systems incentivize us to optimize for whatever content does well in their spaces, but I a lot of people in past versions of myself, probably future versions of myself, spin a lot of wheels trying to optimize for those spaces.

And I think that there's such thing as like a artist format fit or a creator format fit. And that in most channels, the people that most people follow tend to be someone who only does that thing. Yeah. Tends to be, not always, but tends to be. But that the rest of us midtwits like me, of course we consume everything, so we're like, I gotta be everywhere. So I gotta conjugate this, I gotta have my LinkedIn today, I gotta have my whatever it is. Speaker A: Yeah, I gotta take this piece of content and convert it to Twitter and da da da.

Speaker B: And we're filling the boxes. Right. And we're making ourselves Very busy, very busy little mice running the nice little maze all around, maybe buying some good SaaS software to do it more efficiently. But like, I don't know if it helps us. And I also don't know that— I think there's two ways to come at that. One way is to try to make yourself fit. Say, how do I, how do I go big on TikTok? Like, that's a lottery. I understand. Like, you want to win the lottery. Okay, I get that.

But there's a way where you can try to construct your persona to match what you think the place needs. And there's another form where it's like, well, I do my thing and I want it to be as many channels as possible, so I'll just push it in those things. Yes, yes. Which is a different, different energy levels. Speaker A: Yeah, I gotta take this piece of content and convert it to Twitter and da da da. Speaker B: And we're filling the boxes. Right. And we're making ourselves Very busy, very busy little mice running the nice little maze all around, maybe buying some good SaaS software to do it more efficiently.

But like, I don't know if it helps us. And I also don't know that— I think there's two ways to come at that. One way is to try to make yourself fit. Say, how do I, how do I go big on TikTok? Like, that's a lottery. I understand. Like, you want to win the lottery. Okay, I get that. But there's a way where you can try to construct your persona to match what you think the place needs. And there's another form where it's like, well, I do my thing and I want it to be as many channels as possible, so I'll just push it in those things.

Yes, yes. Which is a different, different energy levels. Speaker A: But it's also almost like a pre-internet way of thinking. Yes. Right? Or even in like a Marshall McLuhan sense, it's sort of like not truly internalizing the notion that different mediums aren't— it's not only like the medium is the message, the medium is like the identity. Yeah. You know, in a way. Okay. We're going to come back, obviously, to the identity stuff. But the other thing I think it's worth talking about before we get there is creativity. Uh, when we first met, you told me that creativity kind of blew my mind, that apparently creativity was basically created in the '40s as a, as an idea, as in a word, and then wasn't even added to the dictionary until the '60s.

So like one way you frame this is basically like our current conception of art is like 100 years old, which is pretty mind-blowing. And then you've also talked a lot about individualism and creativity, so. This kind of frame of like creating for me versus the mean, um, what's most personal is most universal. The classic advice, like, creating starts with knowing yourself. How is creativity a natural extension of that individuality pattern we were just talking about? Speaker B: Yeah, it's a really wild, it's a wild history. Last year I picked up a book I saw at the Strand.

It was called The Cult of Creativity by Samuel Franklin. Just had the word creativity. So I just bought it that day and started reading it. And the book made me angry. Hmm. Because the book explained how the concept of creativity was developed through two dual forces that began in the 1940s. It was the Department of Defense that was looking to find divergent thinkers to be officers in the military. Wow. They were facing off against the Soviet Union. Soviet Union was the ultimate totalitarian state of more manpower than ever. So the only way the US could compete was through individualism and like new ideas, industriousness.

So they needed to find, and at the time the US was, had a high degree of conformity, very conformist society. Speaker A: Yes, what, like right after World War II? Speaker B: Right after World War II, extremely conformist society. And so conformity was a high value. And so to seek divergent thinkers was also to go against the value set. So they end up studying certain types of engineers, and they study artists, and they're like doing Rorschach tests. That's invented in part to do this. They're like measuring electrodes, and they're trying to see what makes these people work.

And some of the first researchers doing this were Abraham Maslow and Timothy Leary. Got early grants to do this work. At the same time, in the advertising industry, the head of BDDO wrote a book about— sorry, BDDO? BDDO. Yeah, it's an advertising agency. Still around. Still about a big agency today. But he wrote like a book that was kind of about bringing aesthetics into advertising. Because at the time, advertising was completely utilitarian. And he was looking at the Bauhaus stuff and some of the way that art was entering pop— starting to enter pop consciousness for the first time.

Fascinating. And so he proposed like more aesthetics in advertising. And he also introduced something called brainstorming, which is something they had started to use as a way of creating ideas. And his example of a successful product made with brainstorming was Pringles, which is— how do you keep chips from getting broken? Oh, I have my tennis ball container. Boom. Brainstorm. Brainstorm. Making the money. And so there were these forces happening at the same time that were trying to solve this question. And there's one other force too that also comes in social sciences, which is that There's a famous book, uh, One Dimensional Man, that came out in the early '50s.

But there was, uh, Americans under early capitalism, post-war, were not very happy. There was this mass conformity, more white-collar jobs, then everyone's moving to the suburbs. It's just like mass society in a way that really hadn't been experienced before. And so there was also this concern that came up in the media a lot about like Basically, is this it? And all those forces came together, and in these social science circles and in these DoD-funded projects, there began to percolate this idea of there's an essence. There's an essence that's presence. In this essence, it's the democratic form of genius.

Because at the time, genius was thought of the lone genius, the madman, the like mad artist, you know, it was like. The edges of society, but there is an essence of that that anyone can aspire to, and it's called creativity. You said this made you mad. Speaker A: Yeah. Why? Speaker B: Because I felt like, is my life a psyop? Ah. You know, I felt like, am I the kitten batting, you know, the toy? Speaker A: That's what I was gonna say, is it almost feels like they tapped into something like really true there.

Speaker B: Oh no, yeah, I mean, it is, it is. But just first reading, you're like, how is this true? You know, we posted a MetaLabel Instagram, we posted a carousel that tells a little bit of the story last week. It's getting a lot of shares on Instagram, but a lot of people are really angry and accusing us of like, you're lying, you're lying. That's how I felt. But yeah, so it started from this place of what is this essence that could be mixed into life? And, but it always had this, both commercial and industrial purpose.

Yes. It was for the military. Speaker A: Almost pragmatic. Yeah, it was for the military. It was for advertising. Speaker B: Like Westinghouse was advertising their nuclear plants were like the state-of-the-art creativity. And it was just like a buzzword. And in 1966 is when they entered the dictionary for the first time. So like creativity would have been like the Webster's Word of the Year in like— Wild. 1964 or something like that. But it's to the degree of I'm reading an amazing book about the Beatles. It's like 2,000 words and it's just their childhood up until before the first record came out.

And when the first press release went out about the Beatles in 1961, it had to describe what a band was. It said, "These are two singers and two musicians who all together play in the same group and they make their own songs. This is called a band." Prior to this, it would have just been like Buddy Holly and the background people or something? Yeah, the Buddy Holly was the closest thing. It was always a name and the crickets. It was Buddy Holly and the crickets. Or it was like a solo torch singer.

But in 1961, a press release had to explain what a band was. Speaker A: These things that we take so— that we lament are going away or yeah, fascinating. Speaker B: Yeah, and so it's a very— it's a very new force in society. And I think that like there is something to the notion of creativity that's about improving things through ingenuity, through aesthetics. Yeah. Through, you know, all kinds of things that to me make sense as maybe you did reach a certain stage of Maslow's hierarchy. He hadn't come up with that yet, but maybe that is, you know, where creativity enters the picture.

And maybe it is the case that up until that stage in human history, that the broad, you know, the broad stability would allow that to be a real goal of society. But, you know, if you look at someone like South Korea, who's had such a dominant cultural footprint, you know, the last 20 years. I'm reading books about it now, but yeah, you know, you're going to find that this was an explicit investment by the government to say, yeah, we need to, let's raise children to have artistic practices, you know, just certain things that have been shown If you look at the example of America, I mean, I think there's an argument that, like, creativity as we think of it is an American ideal.

I was going— yeah, not solely in the same way that, like, whatever, some food started in a certain place. It's not owned by America, but I think it is an American concept. Speaker A: Almost American myth. Yeah. Prior to this, do you think artists were just sort of thought of as, like, tradespeople, like, craftspeople? Like— Speaker A: Almost American myth. Yeah. Prior to this, do you think artists were just sort of thought of as, like, tradespeople, like, craftspeople? Like— Speaker B: Well, the history, yeah, I mean, the history of art is, I don't know it well enough to really explain, but like, you know, if you think of art as being a representative drawing, then you have like cave paintings and things, but those are seen as telling stories or it's about a, you know, myth or something.

You start to get into like representative portraits. Right, it's almost utility-oriented. Speaker A: Yeah, those are— Even music. Speaker B: Purely patronage, edification. When you start to get into the arts as individual expression or the beginnings of a commercial expression, you're really looking at after the French Revolution, like, yeah, early 19th century French salons began to have, like, competition to show your work for the first time. There's a book, a great book I've been reading that's, like, all about the art market of early America in the late 18th century. So there's, like, it was just starting then, but really art, like, art as a part of mainstream conversation, you're looking 1930s, 1950s, and beyond.

Salvador Dalí, Jackson Pollock. Right. Speaker A: What's interesting too is that at least even just in the, in the words, creativity connotes it doesn't require there be some implicit, explicit medium or craft or skill, which is interesting. It kind of ties back to what you were saying earlier, which is almost like way of thinking or way of approaching. Fascinating. Okay, you've also called creativity sacred. What are you, what are you saying when you say that? And what are the inputs for you, at least personally, for what's driving your curiosity and your creativity?

Speaker B: I bet when I said creativity is sacred, I hadn't read that book yet, because I really do see creativity as a, as like explicitly a commercial thing in a way. Like, I kind of accept that about it. Explains to me what the difference is between an artist and a creator. Is like, an artist is a self-employed self-expressor. A creator is a self-employed commercial expressor. Wow. You know, uh, creative, someone who works in advertising, is a brand-employed branded expressor. Um, but I mean, I do think that artistic practices— I'll come out another way.

I, I— it really strikes me that, um, when you make something There's moments where you're overtaken by a feeling and you don't know what happens and something, and something happens and you are, many artists will talk about this. I also find it interesting how we will experience certain works and we will have a strong emotional, physical experience. And I believe it's the case that the same feeling the artist has when they're making that work that overcomes them, is the same feeling the audience has when they encounter that work. And that millions of people, thousands of people have the same feeling.

It's almost pointing at something. Yes, and that we all, our heart, our chest rises in a certain way. An aliveness. Because what we are experiencing, I believe, is a real rational thing. And the way I've come to think of art, all art, maybe, but the way I've come to think of like that sort of expression is that it is God. And that it is a, the way I would put it is it's like a stalactite or stalagmite of God, just like this jutting out, this wave that crashes and stops midair so we can just look at it.

And sometimes it comes out of our fingers or our mouths. Sometimes it's just in front of us and it is just an absolute gift. and it's wondrous, and we get to see it. And art, it's not just art that's this. Religion can be this. Nature can be this. Love, you know, all kinds of things can be this. Speaker A: Yeah, people use the word art generously to encompass all that. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. But like, but to me, it's about, at its highest, at its most truthful, it is accessing and reflecting God, which is all of us.

Yes. Like the deepest parts of us. So I think every time you sit down, that is like, that's there, that's accessible. It is open. God is open to you in that moment. And you can't force your way there. Often what I find is, I've had this visual recently I think is really true, that sometimes I'm being drawn by something and I come to this like cliff edge. Of this unknown, and you have two, you don't know you have two choices, but you have two choices. One choice is just to follow the cliff edge and, you know, just stay on the ground.

And that's normally what I and most people do. But I believe every time you come to that, there's a second choice to just step out into the unknown. Every single time there is that choice. And like, and that is— Speaker A: There's like a whole Joseph Campbell thing there. Yes, yes. Speaker B: And that choice is there for us. Again, there's lots of places that's there in a human relationship, you know, but those are also places that I think are deeply like of God and that is just so truly of the deepest part of our essence.

So when I'm making things or I'm experiencing things and when I'm like soft enough, yeah, I feel like you can feel that real truth. And to me personally, it just really, speaks to me in a really deep way. For other people, it's, you know, the beauty of math. You know, it's like lots of different things, but both making things and really appreciating and understanding the things other people make are, for me, the ways I think I most consistently get close to that deeper truth. And I could just feel it and sense it.

Speaker A: To square it, is that creativity? Is creativity where the thing you just described meets some kind of commercial component of it? Speaker B: No, I think creativity, no, I think creativity is, uh, what I described, I don't know what I would call what I described. It's art making, it's a journey within, it's love, it's ultimate love, it's a lot of things. Creativity, creativity is a mindset, creativity is a positive openness. Uh, and, and, and, and a far, an affirmative optionality. Yeah, it's, it's, it's like, uh, at its best, it's an act of love, you know, but I, it's a little different.

Speaker A: You've called the 21st century the creative century. Speaker B: Why? Well, when I started to appreciate how recent my conceptualization of art and creativity are, that was just like, whoa, whoa. Speaker A: Recent in the 100-year sense? Speaker B: Yeah, recent in that like my parents were alive when these things were happening. Right? You know, my, my, like, I, I've come to think of myself as a second-generation creative American because creativity entered the school system in the 1960s, creative writing, things like that, all explicitly from this research. So like, I have been brought up into this and I've also just seen in my life, I've always cared about, you know, music and culture and things like that.

And I've seen everything I care about go from like a footnote of society to now like main venue of things alongside politics and business and sports is like culture. It's what kids wanna do. Entertainment, it's what kids wanna do. So I've watched, I have watched that like greatly rise in the relative importance. And if you just even think of being a creator or being someone who is a self-employed commercial expresser, which is the number one most desired job for people under the age of 18. That job did not exist 15 years ago.

Yep. Did not exist 15 years ago. And so, when I just look at all those history of things, what I see is I just see a straight line up and to the right of creative output, number of hours consumed of whatever, self-expression, number of people participating, number of people who want to participate, like, amount of transact— you know, I, I don't know if the amount of money being spent, you know, if you compare per capita to the height of, you know, CDs or whatever, when everything had to be paid for, exactly what that nets out to.

Yeah. But in terms of total activity, total all of that, it's just unprecedented. Speaker A: There's also a notion that maybe it's— we, we're like hitting the top of the And, and I don't know, I started a podcast in 2024, a little late to the game. I always tell the story. I remember I was, I was like first internship in after freshman year of college. It's like 2012 maybe. And I was watching YouTubers like vlog and I was like, this would be cool to do, but it's probably too late. It's like Casey Neistat hadn't even started.

And so I also— maybe I'm finishing your thought for you, but all to say, I think that there there's this continuous notion that we've like hit the top of this. And I, my instinct is that you're much closer to being right. Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think we're nowhere near, nowhere near. And we're still, still being a creator is like, you know, largely in a few countries. It's like, it's still, it is still growing. And, and of course, AI makes all this trivially easier to produce. And right now we're in a weird, crazy tension.

For a creative person, every creative person is feeling the same tension right now. And it is a crazy tension between two forces. On the one hand, there is unprecedented demand for creative output. However much you make, you need to be making more. Where's your TikTok? Jackson, where's the TikTok? Jackson, Jackson, Jackson. I don't even have a video. Jackson. It's just that, right? And you feel it all the time. So unprecedented demand for creative output. Yeah. And then crumbling support systems for creative people. Like there's really not a lot. Everyone's on your own.

Yeah. And everyone's meant to do more. And even for people at the top of their game, you know, some of the cuts that happened with Doge and all that, one is involved the National Endowment of Arts, of the Arts rescinded grants, all the grants they had given in 2025. So about a month ago, there were 1,000 artists in America, A-level artists as well as like starting, who got letters from the government saying like, that money you're counting on, we're taking it back. And yet you look around culture and it's like, yeah, this is, it's like our game, you know, all the attention's in our space.

And it's, it's wild because the, the previous systems of support were built on a gatekeeper model and they were built on being the place for everyone to advertise and Yeah, things worked quite well. And now the wide openness, you know, just means much greater power law, you know, greater competition, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think the bear case would be, well, everyone's going to go broke and everyone's going to quit because only so many subsects can work. Speaker A: And the power laws are too strong. Speaker B: And the power laws— but, but I don't think that's going to stop people from trying.

Yes. And what else are they supposed to do? And I think that we're gonna find that the audience for green-sumption will keep growing. It's all gonna keep growing. Speaker A: Now, a quick break from the episode to talk about something for Dialectic listeners from Hampton. Hampton is a membership for founders and entrepreneurs that provides both in-person and online community for support, advice, and accountability in the founder journey. One critical part of being an entrepreneur is managing your own financial life. I think unfortunately, For most of us, talking about finances, even with close friends, is a little bit taboo, let alone getting a more holistic view from a wider set of peers or people.

So fortunately, Hampton surveyed over 100 of their members with net worths from $1 million to over $100 million and asked them a wide range of questions about their money, how they spend it, how they're doing with regard to their financial goals, what their quote unquote number is. How close they are to it, the timeline to get there, tactical stuff like risk tolerance, a breakdown across their investment portfolios, how much they're in cash relative to the year before, how much they pay themselves, how much they're burning monthly at each of those wealth ranges, even stuff like estate planning and philanthropy.

It's a fascinating dataset that Hampton's added editorial and commentary over the top on too. And it takes a topic that is typically opaque, or at the very least you'd only have a small handful of data points on, and gives a much more transparent look at it. I found it really valuable to look through. And if you're interested, I've linked Hampton's 2024 Wealth Report in the description. You can also just go to com, click reports in the menu, and fill out some basic information to get the report. Thanks again to Hampton for supporting Dialectic.

Now back to the episode. You got it a little bit there. Everything we've talked about thus far is on single-player mode. Yeah. Many of the ideas I quoted from earlier are from a piece you have on the post-individual. That's obviously where we're going. I quoted Adam Curtis earlier in that same interview with you. He says, he goes on to say, the hyper-individualism of our age is not going to go back in the bottle. You've got to square the circle. You've got to let people still feel like they're independent individuals, yet they are giving themselves up to something that is awesome, greater, and more powerful that carries them into the future beyond their own existence.

That's what people are yearning for. And then one other quote, I believe from your highlights from The Second Self: Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but never feel vulnerable to another person. So we're getting at this tension, which is like, on one hand, we've had this like amazing just kind of explosion of individuality going back to cousin marriage.

On the other hand, I think a lot of people feel that tension. I think Adam Curtis nails it so well, which is, yeah, I'm not, I'm not willing to give up being free. I'm not really willing to give up this romantic idea of the individual, but I, but I also want, that's not enough. There's not that much meaning here. You have a definition of this as the post-individual is a state of being in which a person carries multiple non-compulsory group-oriented identities. Much like we were just talking about, this idea almost like a networked individual.

What is happening to us as we're increasingly finding our homes on the internet, we're finding ourselves on the internet, but we're also looking for more meaning there and meaning inherently, as I think any person who's lived a little bit of time on earth knows, it's big, has to be bigger than you. What is happening to us and how are we becoming more than individuals or post-individual? Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, know that anything critical I'm ever writing, I'm probably writing about myself. As you're describing the Sherry Turkle lines about the person who's a loner but doesn't feel, can tell themselves I'm not alone, like, yeah, that's kind of— Speaker A: Nobody else felt that way in college.

Speaker B: Kind of true. Yeah. Kind of true. Yeah, I mean, that first quote you read from Adam about you have to square the circle, you have to square the circle about letting people be an individual but be a part of something bigger than them. I mean, that sentence echoed in my mind, has echoed in my mind ever since. And he and I have known each other, been friends and worked on things together for a long time now. And that conversation was similar to most talks we had. And he is just so often pointing out the degree of power that is accessible to people if they allow themselves to see themselves as part of something greater.

Mm. But how hard that was to do, how hard that was for people to do, 'cause you're giving up something. And so he's talking about, is there a way, in much the way that people give themselves up to God— Yes. That you can, that by giving up, you become stronger. And in that same conversation, he compares you going out alone at night with a flashlight on your own to look for something scary versus you going out with a group of people. And he's like, think about how much powerful you are in one versus the other.

And yet this is how we behave. I just really felt in my bones how true that was. And, and just that image of squaring the circle really stayed with me as like, yeah, both are true. How can both be true? It's paradoxical. Yeah, absolutely. And so I, that ended up leading to a project I spent a few years on of Bentoism, which was like a framework for self-interest that tries to map these different spaces and dimensions and is trying to hold that tension and truth, right? Like it's all, it's all true.

You know, no one's wrong. We're all right. It's all true kind of thing. Speaker A: It's very positive sum, both present and I'll link to it, but both the present and the future and in a selfish way and in a collective way. Speaker B: But I think that what I have, you know, a lot of my work in recent years has been around group things, and MetaLabel has a lot of story around doing things together, but I'm not, I don't advocate necessarily for, like, collaboration as a way forward. Like, collaboration is a, is the scary part that Adam talks about of, like, giving up too much of yourself.

Because collaboration means maybe I don't know, I don't know, you know, who are they, who am I, like, there's a little bit of a Today especially, I think we have to respect our boundaries a bit. But like, but instead something like co-releasing or cooperating or conspiring to me are all— conspiring is a great word. Yeah, are all excellent things where it's like, well, yeah, I don't want to be just me. I'd love if I knew that when I did something like you always had my back. And if you always have my back, I will always have your back.

And hey, if we got 30 of us to all say that to each other, shit, we'd be pretty powerful actually. Yes. You know, and it's that mindset, which right now, you know, bot networks, no, people, people launching a shitcoin, no, but there is, and this is what Dark Forests unlock, but there, there is a way of engaging the internet today that I think is far more advantageous and more fun, which is to have your Conspiracy running in some other channel where you're just making things and talking about things together, and then you're launching them on Main when you want, or you're showing up in those other spaces as you wish.

But actually, your primary relationships aren't the, uh, I'm putting a finger to the wind and seeing if anybody loves me today. Speaker A: You're a part of a network. Speaker B: Instead, you're just like, I'm checking in with my chat. We're like talking about maybe a project we're doing together or something like, uh, in the last, since MetaLabel, especially in the last 2 years and since doing the Dark Forest book where I brought together 10 writers to make a book together, um, almost all my projects are collaborative now. My writing is still solo, but I'm in so many collaborative projects, which really just involve, collaborative is not the right word, I'll go more the conspiring projects, which just involves like, a phone call a month, an open chat channel where we're passing things back and forth, a sense of a larger project we're a part of.

I'm probably a part of maybe a dozen things like that. And it's really fun. It's just rewarding. It's a fun, it's a fun project. It's interesting. And I am still being myself. I am still writing as myself. I'm still acting as myself, but yet there is this, these other horizontal connections that have unlocked for me. That are this sort of post-individual where I am both me and something larger than me. And so now, like, there were people that when I began MetaLabel that I looked up to that are now like my core network.

And if I look around, I can picture, you know, I know people show like the Twitter graph of who tweets like you, but I can picture actual humans who like I am making stuff with right now that are some of the most impressive people I know. Speaker A: Yeah, like they're in the ring with you. Speaker B: And we're, yeah, and we're like figuring something out together. And it's, I'm gonna look back on this period of my life with like, I think real gratitude and like, wait, I got to post up with all those, you know, really like that, that, that, like it's gonna feel uncanny, you know, and, but it's all just been this going with the network spirituality.

you know, taking me and connecting me, and it just keeps flowing. So there's something there, and I don't, Josh Citarella and I talk a lot about this, like, I think our experiences are early, but I don't think they are unique. I think this is something that we will all be able to discover. Speaker A: Yeah, like they're in the ring with you. Speaker B: And we're, yeah, and we're like figuring something out together. And it's, I'm gonna look back on this period of my life with like, I think real gratitude and like, wait, I got to post up with all those, you know, really like that, that, that, like it's gonna feel uncanny, you know, and, but it's all just been this going with the network spirituality.

you know, taking me and connecting me, and it just keeps flowing. So there's something there, and I don't, Josh Citarella and I talk a lot about this, like, I think our experiences are early, but I don't think they are unique. I think this is something that we will all be able to discover. Speaker A: Yes, it's building. You have this amazing metaphor that describes, I think, so much of what you just said, which is the antidote to sort of longing for a peer or for this loneliness is not being a star, but being part of a constellation.

Although maybe in some sense it's being both. Speaker B: Yeah, you're still a star. Speaker A: There's so many different ideas to pull apart here. Some of what you were just talking about, the root being ultimately to tie back to what we were saying earlier, collective creativity in some sense. Speaker B: Well, it's not, I want to, yeah, please. It's, I was this Toby event last night. Some Toby brought up the word collective and someone else is like, no, no, I mean that in a good way. And Toby's like, "I mean in a good way."

But it's funny how that word triggers me. But it is that creativity as a way of, and art as a way of finding your voice and finding the way that you reflect the source and God and how are you most true to yourself is like a beautiful, important practice that we all should go through. Speaker A: Yeah, that is in some sense individual. Speaker B: It absolutely is. It's about a sense of individual discovery. But like someone like Jung talks about individuation, which is about, say, learning to identify who you are by how you relate to a group.

Like, oh, within the group, I'm the one who always does this. I'm the one who knows this sort of thing. That's another way to find your individual identity. Speaker A: Right, right, right. But I think— like a puzzle piece almost. Yeah. But it's just allowing— Speaker B: I think technology, I think technology narrowed our window to say the individual re-individual, post-individual path is the one. So technology narrows to say it's, it's not about your peer group of friends, it's about how many followers you get. But now technology is going to change and it's going to make— we've already seen that like it's a false crown.

The follower crown is a, is a, is a false faulty, you know, be careful what you wish for type of crown. But now we have squad wealth. Now we have group chat. Now we have a different form of power, a different sort of network, and something that still exists beyond public prizes. Mm. It's still about relationships. Yeah. You know, no one can see whether my group chats are like with baller people or not. They, they may or may not be, right? Speaker A: And to the extent you're chasing legitimacy, you're doing so as part of this.

Speaker B: Yeah, but if I look at like what led me to have the ideas behind a lot of this, MetaLabel, a lot of these things, was seeing how early punk bands and hardcore bands, no one would want to put out their record. So they would make their own label, which was just a logo and a PO box. It was a form of self-legitimization solely through creating some fake third-party entity. But by virtue of doing that, it both legitimized them and brought all these other people who said, "Can you put me out too?"

Yes. "I wanna be like you." Yes. And so there's this form of like collective, sorry to use that word, but collective legitimization this way. It's like a mimetic self-authoring legitimization. Speaker A: And to the extent you're chasing legitimacy, you're doing so as part of this. Speaker B: Yeah, but if I look at like what led me to have the ideas behind a lot of this, MetaLabel, a lot of these things, was seeing how early punk bands and hardcore bands, no one would want to put out their record. So they would make their own label, which was just a logo and a PO box.

It was a form of self-legitimization solely through creating some fake third-party entity. But by virtue of doing that, it both legitimized them and brought all these other people who said, "Can you put me out too?" Yes. "I wanna be like you." Yes. And so there's this form of like collective, sorry to use that word, but collective legitimization this way. It's like a mimetic self-authoring legitimization. Speaker A: Or like the way an A-frame holds itself up. Speaker B: You know, there's just like a belief and a commitment to each other that is enough to be like, holy shit.

So if I look at the Dark Forest universe, Like, we're going to put out two books this year that are going to be iconic. One, Nadia's anti-monarchy. Speaker A: Yeah, Nadia's coming on the podcast. Speaker B: We have another one coming out later this year that will be iconic. Iconic. And like, but there's going to be a scene that did not exist before, and it solely happened because like 15 people made a little whirlpool, you know, of just like running around. And now it's bringing, bringing things in and it's growing.

And again, Anyone can do that. Speaker A: You mentioned the book you're referencing, Our Band Could Be Your Life, and music labels. You've also said that labels are the most successful form of cultural production. When we first met, you also referenced the Royal Society. You've talked about Odd Future. There's this amazing quote from them, if one of us dropped it, we all dropped it. Why are labels so effective? If we're not going to use this collective, whatever word we want to use, what is it? What are the kind of like elements that make a successful label?

I would also add that at least my, my vantage point would say labels almost never last longer than maybe a decade at best. And that's in maybe in the music, like what goes into a label's continuing success? It kind of goes back to the inherent tension in the post-individual idea, which is like the best labels have a high degree of individuality. And this collective group thing. And maybe eventually that runs out. Like Odd Future's— Tyler's doing his own thing now. Speaker A: You mentioned the book you're referencing, Our Band Could Be Your Life, and music labels.

You've also said that labels are the most successful form of cultural production. When we first met, you also referenced the Royal Society. You've talked about Odd Future. There's this amazing quote from them, if one of us dropped it, we all dropped it. Why are labels so effective? If we're not going to use this collective, whatever word we want to use, what is it? What are the kind of like elements that make a successful label? I would also add that at least my, my vantage point would say labels almost never last longer than maybe a decade at best.

And that's in maybe in the music, like what goes into a label's continuing success? It kind of goes back to the inherent tension in the post-individual idea, which is like the best labels have a high degree of individuality. And this collective group thing. And maybe eventually that runs out. Like Odd Future's— Tyler's doing his own thing now. Speaker B: And so, yeah, I'm curious. Yeah, it's a— there's a kind of a delicate— delicacy to it. Yeah. I mean, I, my career began as a music journalist. Like, music is my first love.

I started a record label before, but I had never really thought that deeply about them. I mean, a lot of my music discovery is through record labels. Like, I would— back in the day, I would buy a CD from a band. You see their label, you try to find a catalog or anywhere to just see who else, what else did they release? You're just looking at names. You're like, and you mail order something else from the label. And suddenly you're like, oh, I'm really into Louisville math rock, you know, all because you bought a Slint record or something.

So there's like, there was amazing portals into whole universes and so lovingly curated and so specific, but I'd always been aware of them, but it was reading about the Royal Society, which started in 1660. Sir Christopher Wren and there's a group of natural law professors, which was the term for science back then. And natural law were things only God would know. Wow. And so this group of a dozen professors started meeting at a pub in London. The pub is still standing today, starting in 1660 on Thursday nights. And they were all fed up 'cause facts were proven by the church or the king.

So they started a group and their motto was, "Take nobody's word for it," in Latin. And they began publishing one of the very first zines. It's called Philosophical Transactions, still in print today, 400 years later. Speaker A: Creativity is 100 years old and zines, they were ripping in the 1600s. Speaker B: Zines fucking own this shit. Yeah, but they, in Philosophical Transactions, they published the first experiments because the idea was proving facts through evidence. So let's try. To prove facts or evidence. This was a new idea. And through those pages, iteratively, peer review was invented, the scientific method was invented iteratively.

And this is where the Babbage machine was funded, where Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment discovering electricity was published. And it was like an iterative process of not a product of science, not a, not a top-down designing of something, but simply a point of view, proof facts through evidence, a group of people who are all agreeing to publish under that shared point of view, under this shared banner, and there being some— and they publish publicly, and there's some rules about how it operates. And I saw that, like, we both— but both a punk label and the Royal Society and A24 and Mischief and da da da da da They're all ultimately some brand, some thing that exists to promote some cultural point of view.

It puts out work by anyone who reflects that point of view, and there's some rules to make it operate. And suddenly I could just see that like hundreds of years of cultural production have generally flowed through structures like this. Shapes like this, yeah. Where in many cases, often in, often it's an artist themselves proves to be very successful and also proves to have the— have like a business mind and just sees how to make something bigger. Or their success, they want to create a larger halo, and so they just start to support other people in something.

Speaker A: Yeah, or they bring the— Tyler brings Odd Future with him as he rises. Speaker B: Yeah, Francis Ford Coppola turned the success of Godfather into American Zoetrope, which he used to put out all the French New Wave movies in America. And Zoetrope is still like an important project today. So like What it just made me see in the internet of today was that one of the reasons I was sad as a creator, 'cause I was struggling with a lot of happiness issues at the time, was I was really on my own and grinding and trying to like make a dent in the universe through my emails, you know?

And, but yet if I look throughout history, there's a different model. That I can adopt in a way that I can be in more of a conspiracy, can be in more of a relation to other people. And it involved not using the technological primitives of today, but like, instead looking back. Yeah. And just be like, okay, how do I approximate that? Speaker A: There's something here too, which is interesting hearing you talk about it. Not always, but especially the Royal Society, and presumably I think a lot of the organization, the dark forest type stuff you're in.

It's not just that you're producing with the label, but you're also sort of each other's audience, at least you're each other's initial audience. Yeah. I think of something like Other Internet. It's a very critical part of it. And I think that's a really powerful thing that wasn't totally obvious to me when I was initially thinking about it. Speaker B: Yeah, there isn't a, there is, I mean, internally to the Dark Forest and our Telegram, there are definitely different personas. There are definitely ideas that I propose that Vin Cat is like, hell no.

You know, I mean, it's for sure, for sure. Uh, but it's. I mean, that's the beauty of it. And again, what I've just found, I mean, what I caution people to say is like collaboration theater is not real. Hey, let's all get together and make something collectively really hard and like not easy. You could graduate to that as a first step. It's probably gonna be kind of painful. Most of these conspiracies, you need a ringleader and someone's gonna end up doing more of the work, more of the organization. Speaker B: Yeah, there isn't a, there is, I mean, internally to the Dark Forest and our Telegram, there are definitely different personas.

There are definitely ideas that I propose that Vin Cat is like, hell no. You know, I mean, it's for sure, for sure. Uh, but it's. I mean, that's the beauty of it. And again, what I've just found, I mean, what I caution people to say is like collaboration theater is not real. Hey, let's all get together and make something collectively really hard and like not easy. You could graduate to that as a first step. It's probably gonna be kind of painful. Most of these conspiracies, you need a ringleader and someone's gonna end up doing more of the work, more of the organization.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker B: Gotta be the person who starts it. I personally don't mind that. That's like being a good dinner party host, but like for anything to work, it's gonna need that. I've also found that like if I send a group message out to everybody, no one responds. But if I email or text each person individually, they'll all say what they think. Speaker A: Accountability. Speaker B: You know, and so there's like, you just learn things like that about how do you get a group of people to do something together.

But you know, the Dark Forest Collective was kind of fake, was kind of me forcing everyone to be my friend. Until the book itself was printed and they got, and they, everyone got their copy. And then it was like, oh, this is— Speaker A: Just for my audience's clarity, it was basically a book of essays. Speaker B: Yeah, a book of essays that everyone had already written before. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But that you guys saw a through line on that you guys were reading, right? Speaker B: Yeah, that they all happened to reference me in this original piece.

And they're all pieces that I had read and appreciated. Speaker A: Just for my audience's clarity, it was basically a book of essays. Speaker B: Yeah, a book of essays that everyone had already written before. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But that you guys saw a through line on that you guys were reading, right? Speaker B: Yeah, that they all happened to reference me in this original piece. And they're all pieces that I had read and appreciated. Speaker A: You're sort of squaring the circle, maybe, at the time. Speaker B: Yes, I was.

And, uh, and now it's manifested in something. And now, yeah, like Nadia shows up and says, I like, I like the Dark Forest vibe. I have a new book I'm thinking about. The band can be your life idea. I want to be with you. Another artist doing the same later this year. Yeah. Speaker A: Something hanging over all of this, and going back to the individualism stuff, the story of the last 30 years is the internet killed gatekeepers and made it the best time to be an individual creative person ever.

Granted, there are a whole bunch of asterisks there, not the least of which being that great to be one of the few individuals who is at the top of the power law, but individuals never had more leverage. We're at the peak kind of creator era. And there are all these downsides. And I'm sensing some tension. I'm curious. It goes back to when we were talking about collectivism, but like, at least I would see some of the downsides of the creator stuff as one, audience capture, just Audience capture with a failure point of one person's decision-making or ego.

Individuals with the most leverage have all the leverage, or excuse me, most distribution of all the leverage. So the story of every creator business is like MrBeast rules, and then you hope he likes you or whatever. Less collaboration, which maybe to go back to your, your idea is fine. And also to go back to the labels, it's harder for new creatives to emerge on the back of curatorial brands. Um, the best part about A24, in theory, or Pixar— I was thinking about this the other day, I was in Paris, and I'm like, they made a movie about a talking rat on some guy's head.

And it, like, we're, we're, we're on the back of this movie era of the last 20 years where people complain no one makes anything new ever. Yes, of course, new creative, rambunctious, rebellious people will show up and make new things. But the wonderful thing about Pixar or A24 or Music Label says, Hey, we know this is new, but like, trust us, we think you're going to like that. It feels like we've kind of lost that. I guess what I'm wondering is why shouldn't this just hyper-individual creator internet thing, one-to-many broadcast era just continue?

Like why? Another side of that would be why haven't we seen more labels actually work or show up? Speaker B: Uh, for sure, for sure, that is going to continue. And for sure that will be a huge, a huge strand and energy of what happens. Of course, like, MrBeast is not just MrBeast. MrBeast is a team of people. And certainly once you get to a certain level, that, that is the case. But I think that— Speaker A: but there's a dictator and there's an army. Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. It's not a— it's a specific type of relationship.

So I think that, that will continue. But I think that there are other countervailing energies that are gonna also be a factor. Number one is there's just so much stuff. And so the noise and sifting and finding an audience, cultivating an audience as an audience member, finding things you like consistently, all really challenging. Yeah. And this is why being a part of a network or having, you know, being on the, whatever the 2025 version of a blog role is with like other quality people is so important because it just, what is the 2025 version of that?

I think it's like you are, you will always like or rep— I will always post your story. I will. It's just those mutual republishing. I'll read your thing. It's not super scaled. Speaker A: No, no, it's not. I think hanging over some of this, maybe for some people, certainly for me, is like, I don't want to be in a Discord. Yeah, I'm sorry. Like, I'm just not looking to be in a Discord or any more Discords. And so I think like, I hear some of this and it sounds cool, even your Dark Forest stuff, but I'm also like, No, you gotta keep, you gotta keep it all, to me it's all WhatsApp, Telegram, like iMessage.

Speaker B: It's just simple. The squad. Speaker A: Very much the squad vibe. Just simple. Speaker B: It's not, it's not 50, it's not trying to like keep people happy. It is a, it is like a, a work zone, but a zone around a specific project or strand of things. So I just think like one of the ways we are discovering to have more outsized success as an individual in this market today is to have a backchannel conspiracy with other people where you are co-promoting each other, and it's like one of the best things that works.

It's why brands do collabs. It's like, it is one of the last things that consistently works. So I think that, that is a force. And then number 2 is just the tools are different, are going to be different. And already if you look at like compare Substack to Patreon, 2 services that provide basically the same functionality. Very, very little difference in reality. Uh, Substack made later. So Substack has more nuance around multi-authors, around multi-publications. There's like a, a more modern notion of, oh, someone will have sub-identities and other things they're going to do.

Whereas Patreon is more of a, you know, it was a Kickstarter derivative, you know, it's more in that era where it's just like websites are about these very— it's an account and, you know, it's very basic sort of things. But I think you're already seeing some evolutions and how these tools can function. And in the post-crypto world, which we are moving into, and post-crypto world will equal things like what we're doing with MetaLabel of like splits and treasuries and fluid money. Yes. Being a basic function of the internet that we become used to, that the notion of money easily flowing between people not so clearly being mine and yours, but things that, yeah, disperse, distribute.

We get a little bit from here, a little bit from there. I think that also is going to change our relationships where right now I think we have a very monogamous, uh, monolithic approach to creative output. I think the future is a lot more poly and yeah, you have your main and you have your alts and there's, you know, the income is coming from these different places and probably your main is like where you're doing your core brand work and probably all the group label things you're doing is the fun stuff.

And that's your, and that's your balance. And that gives you enough of, I get to, I get to square the circle. I get to be myself and an individual, but I also get to be a part of something bigger than me. Speaker A: And that feels pretty different, by the way, than being a part of a company, which is maybe— Yeah. One, one, one other thing I think Hearing you talk about this is it almost feels like the, the role of the label, unlike maybe in 1990 or certainly earlier, prior, and maybe still today in A24's case, but in most cases not, prior labels were inherently tied to scarce distribution in the case of music labels and film, movie studios, whatever.

Now they are not. Distribution is owned by individuals. And so when I think about Josh Citarella has a massive audience that he's bringing people to the Dark Forest thing, as are you, as are— so as are Venkat. And the role of the label seems to be less on the distribution end and more on the how do we work together, how do we organize, maybe who is our first set of audiences. Speaker B: Is that right? Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I could see that. I mean, it is a tool to amalgamate those audiences into a concentrated distribution source.

Yeah. Um, but maybe is more niche or at least, uh, but you kind of need it. You kind of need it to give a sense of permission because otherwise, like, what are we doing here? Right? So Josh and Venkat and, you know, and all, and Peter, it's an organizing principle. Carly, like, what, what are we, you know, what are we, are we, uh, yeah. So you need the very first release of MetaLabel week, it was going to be called Introducing MetaLabel. The first title for a long time was Psychic Infrastructure.

Because I was just like, that's what the label is. It's just an organizing function that, that to me opens up a new door. It's like, oh right, yay, we could just do it that way. And again, not all of your work has to go in that channel, but it's like, yes, clearly another path that I think speaks to some of what's lacking. Speaker A: You started to get it. The last kind of big category I want to talk about, which is new forms. I think along with obviously a tremendous amount of publishing creative work, the primary thing you've done in your career is work on new forms.

I also think this is something we talked about a little bit the first time we met. I think my belief, and it seems that maybe you would agree, is that the way that new behavior happens at a foundational and scaled level is this combination of— or at least large-scale behavioral change is this combination of both cultural norms and new technology or mechanistic forms. So a super simple way to think about this, at least the way I do, would be a number of the largest tech platforms that have caused new behavior are doing both of these things in a way that's almost about like a new premise.

So you think about Twitch or Airbnb or Substack or Patreon. They're like giving, yes, technically they allow you to rent somebody else's house or livestream, but like, it's also like, hey, Twitch, it's okay to pay for content that's already free via subscription, or it's okay to stream video games, or it's okay to stay in somebody else's house, or it's okay to pay this, your favorite Patreon, your favorite independent writer for their writing. And it seems to me that that like is a, is a good way to think about what new forms do.

Do you, before we talk about specific You think that's right? Would you add anything? Speaker B: Yeah, I think that, I mean, when you're talking about a web-based way of thinking about it, it's a, you know, you're talking about platforms, you're talking about normalization of format. Yeah. You know, uh, and industrialization is, would maybe be a 1950s word for it, but it's like a, how do you create a complete cycle, you know, of whatever this action is. And if you can deliver that, it has the possibility of taking on a life of its own.

Yes. And people will learn how the machine works. Speaker B: Yeah, I think that, I mean, when you're talking about a web-based way of thinking about it, it's a, you know, you're talking about platforms, you're talking about normalization of format. Yeah. You know, uh, and industrialization is, would maybe be a 1950s word for it, but it's like a, how do you create a complete cycle, you know, of whatever this action is. And if you can deliver that, it has the possibility of taking on a life of its own. Yes. And people will learn how the machine works.

Speaker A: Right, right. Yes. Okay. Let's look back a little bit and we'll look at the present. We'll look forward. Yeah. You spent a huge part of your career on kind of a two-part or two forms, one being Kickstarter and crowdfunding, the other being the public benefit corporation. A few questions. What are your reflections on what worked and what didn't work? And then I guess more broadly, like, to what extent do you think you were enabled by the cultural era that was in? And to what extent were you guys either inhibited or even prisoners of that period as you look back?

Speaker B: Well, I think that we, we began— Perry Chen first had the idea in 2001. I— we became friends in '05 and started working on it together. And that was like a different internet in a lot of, a lot of ways. I mean, MySpace was just starting then, and we were looking at the broader culture and seeing someone like David Lynch or musicians that we liked and knowing they couldn't get signed to a label or no studio would put them out. And because of that, they just had no options.

The options were so limited. And we just would get ourselves so excited talking about how fans fans could fill that gap. And at the time, Arrested Development was being canceled, a great, a great show, the lowest rated show on TV, but a great show. And so we tried, we were trying to do like create a, the word crowdfunding didn't exist yet, but to create a crowdfunding campaign to save Arrested Development was one of our ideas for early Kickstarter. But there was just, uh, Perry really saw it first, but just this strong feeling that, uh, people know what they want and especially that a tool like Kickstarter wouldn't be like American Idol.

But it would be more about powering all of these niches to represent themselves. Yeah. Speaker A: When Perry first talked to me about the idea— Very internet native, like truly understanding what the internet was about early. Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. I mean, when Perry first told me about the idea, I was like, this is American Idol. This sounds terrible. And then he was like, no, no, no. Like, think of the kid in, you know, Nebraska who makes a sculpture that, you know, someone in New York would get. Yeah. But like maybe not their neighbor.

Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: You know, it's, you're like helping that person. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Um, you know, Kickstarter, it was years before it launched because it was a different internet and we were non-technical founders. But it didn't, it like didn't, it didn't have a hockey stick moment, but it also like never not worked. And there was like a, it was quite painful to try to explain crowdfunding to people for many years before you could show them, you show a mockup, but like it was hard. It's a very boring conversation, but people, people got the mechanics quickly.

And it helped that like the first 3 years, every Kickstarter video was someone explaining how Kickstarter worked until by year 3, no one had to. Speaker A: Pretty amazing. Yeah. So you just saw— Talking about a new form, right? Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Watching how a platform and people are iteratively learning from each other. Like the idea of a stretch goal came from Alison Weiss project in her third week, like, and she invented it on the fly and Everyone learned from her and you just see how knowledge is produced and how norms are made.

And then eventually how those things professionalize. Yes. Speaker A: And by the way, every single bottom-up internet thing like this, Twitter, like they didn't invent the hash. You see this pattern everywhere. Yes. Speaker A: And by the way, every single bottom-up internet thing like this, Twitter, like they didn't invent the hash. You see this pattern everywhere. Yes. Speaker B: Yeah. And, and there is that phase and you, you know, we reached it in the App Store, for example, where, you know, you have the amateur period where you can make Flappy Bird or, you know, you know, it's just like, you can just, you can just do things.

Uh, but then there becomes a point where where it becomes fully professionalized and then there's a clear after. There's a clear after for a market like that. And so I, I saw that come for us too, just like the increasing professionalization of it. And yeah, I mean, I think I reflect, I mean, there's some, it's still active. I mean, my reflections are still active and, uh, I just recently rejoined the Kickstarter board after 8 years. So it's, really starting to think about it in a real way again is very interesting.

But yeah, we always faced real choices between, we had very, you know, punk rock, New York City hip hop, Detroit techno, Chicago techno roots. All three of us who started, Charles, Charles Adler, Perry, and I, and like, we're always adamant about never sell out, never go public, make, you know, be the Green Bay Packers of the internet. Just like the people's champ forever and do it the right way. And don't be like those assholes and always very motivated by that. And that's part of what led us to be one of the first companies to be a public benefit corporation, which Albert Wenger at Union Square Ventures was a part of and was telling us about and was like, hey, with y'all's politics and the way you want to run the business and all that, like, you should look at, you should look at this.

This is like made for someone like you that's trying to carve a different path. And so we became really excited about not just having like cafeteria posters, you know, about your, uh, what drove you, but actually to inscribe it in like a piece of paper in a filing cabinet in Delaware felt way, way more meaningful. Yeah. Yeah. But, um, but I think that there was an interesting, we were always aware that we were unusual entrepreneurs. There weren't other creative entrepreneurs that we saw. I mean, there were friends who ran like restaurants, you know, buddies.

Speaker A: Unusual in Silicon Valley. Speaker B: In technology, in technology, you know, didn't, we never met other founders like us, never. But we wanted to set an example. We wanted to pave like a path for someone who wouldn't think of this as being something that they could do. Yes. And we ourselves were conflicted about doing it. We didn't wanna be business people. Like we, we were creative people who were just really inspired by this idea. We're just excited as a project. And so we were always having this thought of like, build a bridge to somewhere so that someone else, you know, sees themselves and can like be that.

And that's a hard, you know, I wouldn't give us an A+ grade on that. You know, I mean, it's a challenging thing, but that has always been the spirit that we brought to the project. And yeah, you know, I continue to believe, believe in it. And probably one of my favorite things doing there was making the Creative Independent, actually, which we did right after becoming a PBC because it mandated this arts advocacy thing. And I'm like, all right, we're going to spend this much money a year to create an independent organization that doesn't promote Kickstarter, that's solely about helping people see the emotional realities of the creative life.

And now I get to see it as like a, 16-year-old company and get to understand what that's like, which is a whole new, whole new thing. Speaker A: There's something in, um, what you were just saying and something that came up earlier in the conversation too, that Virgil Abloh talked about all the time too. And I think it's just so important for, for creative stuff or artistic stuff is people being able to— it even goes back to the new forms and the platform thing is people being able to see it.

And kind of see themself in that. So I always talk to people about this with the, like the ultimate genius of TikTok was like, hey, you don't have to make like a top to bottom, totally new YouTube video. Just like do your 3%, just do your version of this thing. And I think that that applies to certainly in the new forms, but I think it applies broadly to all creativity. Any, on the final question on the Kickstarter thing, maybe especially having rejoined the board, is there anything that you are excited about or imagine maybe especially for people who kind of might have an idea, used Kickstarter in the past, might have an idea of it as like the cynical view is like a preorder platform, basically, like the ways that that platform could evolve or be used in new ways.

TBD. TBD. Speaker A: There's something in, um, what you were just saying and something that came up earlier in the conversation too, that Virgil Abloh talked about all the time too. And I think it's just so important for, for creative stuff or artistic stuff is people being able to— it even goes back to the new forms and the platform thing is people being able to see it. And kind of see themself in that. So I always talk to people about this with the, like the ultimate genius of TikTok was like, hey, you don't have to make like a top to bottom, totally new YouTube video.

Just like do your 3%, just do your version of this thing. And I think that that applies to certainly in the new forms, but I think it applies broadly to all creativity. Any, on the final question on the Kickstarter thing, maybe especially having rejoined the board, is there anything that you are excited about or imagine maybe especially for people who kind of might have an idea, used Kickstarter in the past, might have an idea of it as like the cynical view is like a preorder platform, basically, like the ways that that platform could evolve or be used in new ways.

TBD. TBD. Speaker B: I won't make you say it. I had my first meeting this week, so TBD. But I think that, listen, it's a huge, a huge customer base. It's like almost $10 billion or something. Like in the next year it'll hit $10 billion that's moved through it. It's a huge economic driver. You know, it's driving more money every year than Patreon or Substack. You know, it's, it's been around, so it becomes invisible. And, and definitely there's certain categories where it's found real product market fit, especially in technology products and games.

And then in others where, you know, I think the giant scoreboard of money is like, the vibe is not as great of a fit, but I think it continues to deliver audience and funding to people in a way that's still very reliable and, uh, and possibility in some sense, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like, the attitude was always like, the internet needs a place where anyone can get a chance. And like, how do you make that? And honestly, as I think about the future of Kickstarter, I'm asking myself, what does it want to be?

One of the things I've come to understand from Meta Labels, like, we, we believe that MetaLabel itself is an entity that is alive separate from us and that it has desires and non-desires that make some things hard or easy or whatever, and that you have to learn to listen. And I think Kickstarter wants to be certain things, and I think we've struggled to listen. And, and if we, if you take an approach of asking, what is it, what is this called to be? I'm curious what that looks like. Yeah, if we really, really listen.

Speaker A: You've mentioned it a whole bunch of times and we've talked about at least the philosophy behind it extensively, but your current focus is MetaLabel. You've said a core product mentality behind MetaLabel is legitimacy maxing, which is awesome and maybe worth talking more about. At a super simple level, MetaLabel, at least as I understand it, is a platform built on the premise that collective— well, maybe I'm using that word again. Speaker B: What's— what do we decide? Speaker A: I'm leaving the territorial creation by way of distribution and economic tooling in particular, probably a whole bunch of other things, including legitimate legitimacy piece.

Yeah. What is, what is the goal of MetaLabel and how are you enabling new legitimacy? Speaker B: Yeah, MetaLabel, we'll try some new language I've never said out loud before right now. MetaLabel is a creative network. It's a system that you can use to publish and sell your work, catalog your work. Uh, it's meant to operate for both you working on your own as well as you collaborating with as many people as you want. You can have as many sub-identities as you want. All of your work is cataloged and preserved like it's actually creative work and not like some random data in a database somewhere.

And— Speaker A: Or a social media post. Yeah, or a social media post. Speaker B: So it's like more meaningful than Instagram. Easier than Shopify and you're in a network. And so it's a place to sell. Speaker A: It seems to be a little more built around content. Is that wrong? I mean, I think that, uh, it's certainly better for content than Shopify at least. Speaker B: So it's like more meaningful than Instagram. Easier than Shopify and you're in a network. And so it's a place to sell. Speaker A: It seems to be a little more built around content.

Is that wrong? I mean, I think that, uh, it's certainly better for content than Shopify at least. Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's a release page is like a catalog page where it's like for you to both document the work, but also make it available. So, you know, we sold half a million dollars worth of zines and art through Metal Label in the past year. So people are, you know, 20,000, 25,000 transactions. But yeah, it's really a place that it's meant to honor the creative person as not just a poster.

It's saying that creative work has context in which it is understood. It's saying that creative work often has many authors that are hard things to represent in specific places. And it came from me feeling both frustrated with how my, work felt when I'm relying on Instagram and Twitter to be its home. So ephemeral. And then running like having a Squarespace or a Wix or a Shopify where my work is just random data in a trapped server that the second I stop paying them X amount per month, like I lose. So I was always thinking like, how do I, yeah, what is, what is that other mode?

And so, yeah, it's a, it's a product where someone can, make a page, begin publishing, selling work, invite other people to collaborate. Makes all the money sharing, like split payments, getting a royalty on anything, makes all that stupid easy without crypto, all using Stripe and bank accounts and things that we made. But I've, I've spent a lot of time in the past year talking about like these features that we've built, 'cause they were hard to make and they felt, you know, you're just like, oh my God, we did it. And I really have come to realize, I don't think a single person is using our tools because of those tools.

They're all using it because they want to be seen as legitimate. They like the energy that we put out. They like that we are optimistic about the future and that we are offering a degree of like respect and allowing them to, establish a real relationship as a creative person rather than, you know, just treating them as a generic content producer. And so, yeah, so it's a, it's a, it's a quixotic project that has taken its time to find itself. And I think we are, it's becoming clearer. And I think this is a project that's on its path to becoming core internet architecture, just like Arena, you know, Craigslist, Bandcamp.

Just one of those things that does a set of tasks extremely well, is very simple, doesn't try to do too much, proves to be useful. And that we're not trying to like crank the marketing flywheel up to a million to drive huge amounts of growth super fast because legitimacy is about time. Legitimacy is about proving yourself repeatedly, just showing up and like, and I understand how that is. There's no shortcut to trust. Yeah. If we behave with the same degree of integrity and vision we have to date for like another 2 years, I think we're going to wake up and be, you know, Substack, YouTube, MetaLabel, you know, it's like, what are the core parts of your infrastructure for where your work lives?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like that kind of thing. Speaker A: If you used Substack and YouTube and MetaLabel, yeah. What part of your work or what part of your commerce is happening there? And why, or Patreon maybe is a closer example. Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, MetaLabel is where your drops are happening. So like, yeah, you're posting your YouTube and those are your free content things, but maybe sometimes there's a deeper one or you want to have something for sale through it. Uh, you know, you could link to like the YouTube store in that future world or something like that.

But MetaLabel is where your one-off drops and where your catalog of like actual works you're putting out. Speaker A: But it's content forward or product forward rather than maybe I subscribe to Josh on Patreon. Yeah, yeah. But if I wanted to buy a specific piece or something. Speaker B: Yes, but Josh is never going to say, because you subscribe to my Patreon, you get this new book I made or this new video series I've made, the high production for free. No, he's going to want to sell that and have a specific, you know, SKU.

And, and that's where I think he'll look at MetaLabel as, okay, I have a, I have a following there. It plugs into my existing audiences and tools. I can sell digital or physical very easily. I can make things scarce. There's like 20,000 people who actively buy things there. Like, I would hope that it becomes like, oh yeah, that's, that's where I do that. Speaker A: Yep. We, we're talking about new forms. Are there specific forms that you've found are particularly, uh, emerging as the, like with Kickstarter classic, like tabletop games became like this crazy thing.

What are the forms, both digital or physical that are starting to emerge? Speaker B: Yeah, the two, the two I can see so far and I don't think it will be all, but Number one is like the majority of collects on MetaLabel today have been for digital things and a lot of zip files. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker A: The zip is like— all of your pieces, by the way, that we've been talking about are all available. Yeah. And it's really cool. You don't just get the blog post, you get your research and you get your like little intro video.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I just try to make like, how would I properly express this? You know, like if I really tried to, if I'm like, what isn't, what is at stake for me in this? How would I share that? Speaker A: Rather than doing so via the Instagram lens. Yes. Yes. Which Instagram is like, I'm going to give you the smallest amount of it possible so that you don't scroll. Speaker B: Well, and I'll still post something on IG. Right, right. Speaker A: But that's a billboard. This is the thing.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Just like, how do I— if I really sit down and ask myself, what is it about for me, then I try to express that. And you end up with a handmade digital thing. And I've sold these zips for $5. $5 or pay what you want. My post-individual zip, I think I'm at $800. Or something that I've sold at this point, which makes it the most money I've ever been paid for a piece of content. Like, uh, you know, a couple thousand dollars for a zip file. Speaker A: So like, we don't really pay for content.

We pay, we either, uh, pay with our eyeballs via ads or we pay subscriptions to creators. The paying for content is still extraordinarily rare. Yeah. Speaker B: Like $5 for a zip or PDF. People do it all the time. Like that is a, there's a price point by which someone will like, I'm your patron, I care about you. I'm down to have a real thing by you. And that's still with us making like, there's not a good reading experience or any of that yet. Like that stuff will come. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So like, that I think is interesting. The other one that has been around forever and is like part of labels and punk forever, but I think we are, and especially things happening soon with us, we're going to make a whole other level, our zines. Self-expression, like, how do you legitimacy max? You put something in print. You make it physical. For most people, that's the big step. When I first got my book, like, back from the publisher and I saw my name on it, I mean, like, major moment. Speaker B: Like $5 for a zip or PDF.

People do it all the time. Like that is a, there's a price point by which someone will like, I'm your patron, I care about you. I'm down to have a real thing by you. And that's still with us making like, there's not a good reading experience or any of that yet. Like that stuff will come. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, that I think is interesting. The other one that has been around forever and is like part of labels and punk forever, but I think we are, and especially things happening soon with us, we're going to make a whole other level, our zines.

Self-expression, like, how do you legitimacy max? You put something in print. You make it physical. For most people, that's the big step. When I first got my book, like, back from the publisher and I saw my name on it, I mean, like, major moment. Speaker A: Especially when you take some of the Dark Forest thing, like, it's a bunch of blog posts that are really cool that are sort of, and by the way, to put that in, this is happening for Toby, like Toby and Other Internet, somebody, something that I and so many other people have enjoyed for so long.

And it's like there's a website, but it's like kind of this like spread out collage and you're, you're, you're creating an artifact that embodies it, which is really powerful. Speaker B: And we are, so the majority of projects on Metal Label have been zines, people self-releasing, you know, 500 or less of something. And people show up, people are excited, there's a great culture around them. If you go to things like the Printed Matter Book Fair in LA or SF or New York, it's like crazy how many tables there are, how many people there are to buy things.

It's like a big scene. And we've made, I think, more zines happen than ever. Digital zines are a real thing, but we're going to have a product update coming. Speaker A: You help produce the zines? No, in some cases. Speaker B: I mean, we have a list of— Speaker A: Nadia's book, presumably you're helping produce and publishing. Speaker B: Yeah, there's ones where I'm like personally the publisher. Uh, we, we have, I mean, I've made a lot of these in the past year, so we have a list of printers that we like, etc.

But we're going to have a product. Coming in June. We'll see when this goes up, but in June where you'll be able to take a link, a Substack, or a link to anything, and within 5 minutes sell a print-on-demand zine that contains as many things as you want. Actually, it could be 30 things you've written, and in less than 5 minutes you can be selling a print-on-demand professional beautiful zine through MetaLabel, legitimizing yourself like that. And like that, because that's an important step for people to look at themselves differently and to feel like I did, I've done something.

Speaker A: And reflect on this waterfall of, yeah, ephemerality. Speaker B: So imagine, imagine soon you're starting to get a Substack and at the top it says like, you know, get the zine and like $5, you know, commemorate this. Yeah, you like this post, you know, you like my work, here you go. That's cool. So that to me, yeah, is very much about legitimacy, ways of standing out. You know, and of course the way culture works is eventually so many people will make these, they will lose their power and then, you know, and then it moves to somewhere else.

But yeah, if you look through, again, just following the early labels thing, what do you do? You self-publish, you self-legitimize by being alongside other people. And that, that is honestly often enough. To just get the flywheel going and to bring other people in. And suddenly you have a culture, you know, being at Toby's thing last night, watching people talk about the history of the internet. And of course, like Toby's leading it, but hearing people mention the word lore, not, not picky of him, you know, people, several people having lengthy things about Dark Forest, you know, and just talking about them as like a part of our understanding and Yeah, there's just like a, a shared space that, that we're navigating, and I feel like the world is evolving to meet us and we are evolving to meet it.

Speaker A: There's something hanging over all this too that I think is important that maybe came up in one of your conversations with Josh for this new podcast, uh, the New Creative Era, which is like quality of reach and this notion that like, to go back to all the other stuff we were talking about and creators is like You can play one game and there's a metaphor I love, like, uh, this guy C. T. Nguyen, he writes about games and a whole bunch of other things and how what we measure defines our values.

And he gives the analogy of like a tweet versus a classroom and the teacher who says something to a room of 30 students and 29 don't care and one of their eyes lights up and that's high fidelity to them. Meanwhile, you, you post a tweet and it gets 30 likes and you don't know if that means 30 people loved it or 30 people like like incrementally kind of was like, eh. And I think this obviously gets in the dark forest stuff too, so much of what we talked about, but it seems in many ways that MetaLabel, and not unlike platforms like Substack, but maybe to an extreme degree, MetaLabel is a product that is ultimately about quality of reach rather than maximization of reach.

The bottom of the funnel of this, like, what do I, do I actually want to deliver something for the people who really truly care about what I have to make? Speaker B: Yeah, a fully opt-in environment. You know, and yeah, I mean, I think it, do I think all activity moves there? No. Do I think that is a necessary and important part of the stack? Yes. Do I think that part of the stack could be powerful and open up new possibilities and actually treat creative people as like businesses and not just a revenue source?

Speaker A: By the way, some of the biggest ones buy into crypto stuff too. I just think unfortunately, layer of speculation doesn't necessarily fit super well with the like super hardcore fans. As much as we want. Yeah. Uh, the last form that you've been working on is a new legal structure. I want to talk about that, but maybe in the broader context of creativity and commerce overlapping. Um, maybe for what it's worth, based on your earlier definition, creativity and commerce overlapping is intrinsic, but broadly artistic type work and commerce. You have this line, it's possible to make a killing, but hard to make a living.

I think comes from Broadway, which is amazing. It really feels like it describes most people's experience of making things on the internet. You also say the great benefit of capitalism is collective wealth creation. You don't just make money from your own labor. And this being this really powerful idea that has certainly been internalized by startups and companies that hasn't been internalized by artists or creatives. Yeah. What is the overlap between these two things? You've said creative people will be the wealthiest and most powerful group of people by the end of the century, which is an extremely bold claim.

And then most importantly, How is this new form, this new legal structure that you're working on going to help enable this path? Speaker A: By the way, some of the biggest ones buy into crypto stuff too. I just think unfortunately, layer of speculation doesn't necessarily fit super well with the like super hardcore fans. As much as we want. Yeah. Uh, the last form that you've been working on is a new legal structure. I want to talk about that, but maybe in the broader context of creativity and commerce overlapping. Um, maybe for what it's worth, based on your earlier definition, creativity and commerce overlapping is intrinsic, but broadly artistic type work and commerce.

You have this line, it's possible to make a killing, but hard to make a living. I think comes from Broadway, which is amazing. It really feels like it describes most people's experience of making things on the internet. You also say the great benefit of capitalism is collective wealth creation. You don't just make money from your own labor. And this being this really powerful idea that has certainly been internalized by startups and companies that hasn't been internalized by artists or creatives. Yeah. What is the overlap between these two things? You've said creative people will be the wealthiest and most powerful group of people by the end of the century, which is an extremely bold claim.

And then most importantly, How is this new form, this new legal structure that you're working on going to help enable this path? Speaker B: We love, we love bold claims. Uh, I believe it. Yeah, I had a moment. So the Dark Forest work was going well and I was working on Nadia's book last year and I could foresee that our like little collective, which was a Telegram group, we're going to have six figures worth of sales in like a year. And I thought, oh shit, I should like be more real about this and started looking into legal structures for us and felt uninspired.

Just to be clear, for The Collective, not for the collective. Speaker A: Yeah, for The Collective. Speaker B: And, uh, I felt uninspired by being an LLC, which is like the default because it's just a legal shield, but I didn't feel like it reflected anything about us. And C-corp, nonprofit, both non-starters. And I jumped to that experience watching PBCs become law, where I had like a third row seat, you know, to watch how part of that happened and just thought about the steps that were necessary to create a new legal form and just had this flash, I think because I've been thinking so much about, you know, collective value creation through MetaLabel already, but had this flash of what if you could create a new legal structure for the type of project that we were doing.

And I reached out to a friend who knew a lot of lawyers and, uh, had a team of lawyers answering some questions for me. And after a few weeks, they came back and said, um, congratulations, you found something. There's a gap here that you could address. You could try to address. And the idea I'd proposed to them was that there was an— we make a new legal form called an artist corporation or an A corp. And what an A corp would be, like an S corp, which is a small business corporation, or kind of like an LLC, but it would be a for-profit entity that would have a creative purpose along with some financial or sustainability purpose that it would, as a for-profit entity, it would be able to accept both commercial revenue as well as have easier access to nonprofit funding.

Artists really rely on grants. The amounts of money are so small, they have to contort themselves to ridiculous things to make themselves eligible. Let's try to, like, ease that because it seems unnecessary. An artist corporation would have pass-through income like an S corp or an LLC, so you're not taxed twice. And then an artist corp would be able to fractionalize into equity and to create shares and to operate like a startup would, which is not something that's available to creative people now. Additionally, artist corporations give access to healthcare benefits and other things that you get by being a part of a, you know, an entity.

Speaker A: And by the way, historically, just to jump in, it would be like, you could make, you could do this with a brand, but critically, not with any of these other permutations of identities we just spent a couple hours talking about. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, and I, so we started digging into this legally, and then that started, uh, like last July, August, and Since then, for like the past almost year, I've been speaking to so many artists, managers, industry people at every level about this idea. And I have never had doors open up or people be as welcoming as I've experienced with this, because what has been revealed is that our existing financial system does not know how to value creative output or the work of artists.

In all kinds of ways. So for example, you see big companies like Hypnosis or now like Blackstone buying like Bruce Springsteen's catalog for $600 million, right? And so they're treating songwriting as a capital asset that they're acquiring to generate a— An incredibly durable one. Incredibly durable one. But yet like artists themselves, they're, they're, the money they make is looked at as just straight income. It's not equity. It is not like, it is not a form of capital at all. It is just an income stream, but yet a financial, a financial entity is able to turn it into like an asset in a way that an artist or a creator themselves cannot.

And that means of the way, uh, by virtue of working at Facebook, you become rich from a bunch of shit that you didn't do and a bunch of code you didn't write. There isn't that same possibility in the creative fields. Maybe in the '90s, it's like you worked on Friends or something. You get residuals for forever as the equivalent of that, but there just isn't that same level of access. And I believe that a lot of that, it's, it's a mix of things. Number one, it's how recent art and creativity are so that these are still nascent spaces that aren't that sophisticated in some ways.

And the number of people who've been making a living in these professions is quite small cuz it's been gatekept and like there's only so many movies that a studio puts out a year. All of those things are so different now. And, and that we are just reached a, a different sort of environment where, you know, the idea that artists would be paternally cared for by some institution and that there'd be a bunch of amateurs we don't need to give a shit about and whatever, like that whole world is dying and it's not real anymore.

Speaker A: Yep. And yeah, institutions ironically held the space, held enough space to sort of not require something like this for a while. Yeah. Whether it be in academia, whether it be in Hollywood, music. Speaker B: Yeah. And so now, but now those, yeah. So now we're in a place where, again, more people than ever are acting as creators. Some people are doing very well at it, but yet we all basically function as 1099 NPCs. We're not real players in the larger economic system. We're just like, we're rounding errors, but yet we are where culture is going.

We are where the economy is going. We are like one of the fastest growing. Speaker A: The future of small businesses. Speaker B: Yeah. One of the fastest growing. Business types is this. Yes. And so every other business type has its own corporate form. You know, you have a C corp for startups, you have an LLC for, you know, law firm partners, whatever. Everything has its own form. And my belief is that art and creative practices and cultural production have reached a level of size, maturity, and have needs that are specific enough that creating a dedicated form and a new capital base and a whole new area of the economy is necessary.

And our goal is, you know, to do this, you have to pass laws. You have to pass laws at the state level. We have planned for how to do that. I think optimistically there could be a first law passed next year in a specific state in 2026, and that there could be some sort of, uh, like a pilot program, make sure the first, you know, 500, 100 are treated well. I, I would expect the first few years of this to be slow and a lot of figuring out what is the right way to structure these things.

What's the right P/E ratio? What's, you know, so many things to be determined. But I think that by, you know, year 10 and on, and especially like generations from now, I think that you see artist corporations be extremely competitive and that like the next Disney and the next Pixar, things like that are going to be A corps. And in many areas, they will be competing against a C corp. They will be competing against businesses we think of them today and that they will outcompete. And that in a world of like AI making everything a function of basically input-output, still the special traits of the artist continue to be valuable.

They, you know, AI becomes a tool they also use. Speaker A: You also just think about like, it's not exactly the same idea, but this notion that there could be a billion-dollar one-person company, that's kind of adjacent to this, certainly. Maybe it depends on what specifically they're doing, but software and media are increasingly starting to look similar. Speaker B: Yeah. So I, I've come to feel that this is a new door that we will open up. And just as I experienced with crowdfunding, that like once it was out in the wild and had oxygen, it felt incredibly obvious.

And, you know, iteratively we learned what to do with it. My feeling is the same can happen here in that the job, my job as steward and Metalabel's job as one of the many people working on this is to try to create an initial minimal foundation that other people can build on, but that the ultimate outcome is more capital moves into creative spaces. Creative people are empowered, you know, to operate as real businesses and not infantilized as like, you know, a quasi-permalancer or something. And Yeah, I think you begin to see a different sort of creative economy take shape.

Speaker A: At a super high level, you've talked about how passive income for creative people is really important. The only business model we have really found at true scale when information is effectively free is advertising. Obviously, a number of platforms like Substack, Patreon, Twitch, MetaLabel,, even Kickstarter, begun to explore new ways for creative people to really be businesses or create businesses. I would argue inside of almost all of those is patronage, just direct support. Is that the right way? In a world where we actually have 100 million people plus as these sort of small businesses that are creatives, how do you see that?

What do you think that looks like? It doesn't seem like it's YouTube ad revenue. Speaker B: Maybe it's Patreon, but I think it's a, I think it's a basket of things. I think some of it is for sure patronage and probably the biggest spends will be paid, both like the smallest and the biggest spends might be a form of patronage, which is just at its very simple core, like, hey, I like what you're doing. I'm going to support you with something a little bit. Yeah. I'm into you. And yeah, that love, love still the biggest driver.

Yeah. After that, I think there's an interesting mix of things. Like if I think, if I play this out to like its full, you know, mature capitalist place, what do I see? I think number one, I think A corp equity is just like startup equity and the notion of being a part owner of throwing fits or, you know, Tim Ferriss or a beggar's banquet or of whatever is like, just like to be on the Uber cap table at a certain point really meant a lot and status and meaning and a whole lot and like access to wealth.

I think you will see proximity and access and ownership to certain creative projects is similarly having a mix of status and wealth that come as a part of it. I think advertising, I mean, advertising has made up the gap in creative income for people at the top of the food chain, especially in music. Syncing in ads has replaced what was CDs. And in many cases, people will do better than, you know, the right artist. I think that only grows. I mean, you see it with like influencers and being paid to endorse products.

I think all of that just keeps going. And, you know, right now, if you're a musician, a label will advance you money that is recouped against and you get like 12% back and da da da. In the future, I think some of that is more like a, your Series C round that values you at a higher amount that gives you more equity, et cetera. But you still need money for marketing. You still need money for tour support. You still need all that. You're not going to want to give up equity for marketing dollars, but something like advertisers, like advertising money could be a way that you start to fund things or thinking of the ways that a company will want to participate in the Dua Lipa universe.

And there's a lot of ways to think about that. And a lot of them are, would probably be distasteful to the Yancey of 15 years ago, but you know, I, I, I've taken the, the, the position, I really thought a lot about this this year of recently we've crossed over this end of this classical period of art and creativity. Classical being defined as, you know, made through, uh, human slash like certain predictable mechanical instruments. And now we're intrinsically scarce. Yes. And like that defines whatever till like 2020. 2, or I don't know, I don't know what the line will be.

And now we're in a new period of like permanent modernity where like we— our cultural memory is completely reset every 48 hours. And you know what creativity is and what— it's all like a whole new thing. But at its best, the same force of God, you know, the same human energy, the same truth will be channeled through it. I believe that. That force is more powerful than anything, more powerful than any model. Like, it sits at the top of every pyramid. Uh, it is way above the API line, you know, and like, that is, that will continue to govern, I think.

And, um, we will keep trying to control it, but, you know, it's what we're all ultimately a part of. Speaker A: You recently wrote a piece about the long game. You've also talked about this idea of praxis, which is like do something and then figure out what the arc is or what the narrative is in reverse, which is, I think, a really important reminder for some of us who over-narrativize or think about things. With that in mind, what do you think the underpinning motivation for you is, even if the trajectory of the arc isn't always clear?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think I've never had a forward-looking narrative. I think I'm more constantly self-critical and self-doubtful, slash just like I have a hyper Puritan temperament and I just like to really work hard. The harder it is, the more I'm gonna throw myself into it. I don't know what sort of sickness I got, but it is a, It is nonstop for me, but I think, I think I'm, uh, I'm, I'm always pulled to try to understand my own feelings. I think it's a lot of this sort of circular thing I go through.

I think it's like why so much of the Sherry Turkle stuff really resonates with me. It's just, uh, you know, writing the Dark Forest theory was a way of under— trying to understand my own behavior. And so I'm just trying to like, express it and just see, just look at it and see, look at it and see what I think. And I think that I have learned, I've found that, I guess I've found my, my, my product market fit in terms of, or my, you know, my format fit of just the things that click for me.

And, uh, and I've come to see that it's about creative forms. And I recently went through this, uh, someone encouraged me to do this like life planning exercise that I was quite resistant to. And then I talked to some really impressive people, very impressive, and they're like, oh yeah, she had me do that. I was like, okay, I'm gonna do it. And it ends up with like, what are your two purposes in life? And what is your obituary? And like you do this long process, takes several weeks. Like there's iterations, you have to stop and come back.

And ultimately it comes down to that. And, um, yeah, there was one thing that popped out from that that makes sense now, but like I hadn't seen, but it was like one of the outcomes of my life is to be a, you know, someone who did a lot to really support the artistic and creative life. And, you know, doing that just by being it. Doing it with Kickstarter, with Creative Independent, with MetaLabel, you know, with A Corpse. We'll see if other things happen or whether those things stand, you know, any test of time.

But knowing that, I don't think it's going to change what I do, you know, because I still think I'm just going to keep being interested and curious. Like, I can't wait to have a week off so I can write about astrology, you know. I can't wait for 10 years from now to write a series of fantasy novels that have been a side project for a long time. And there's so many places that I feel drawn. And, um, maybe at earlier parts of my life, those— it was ego calling the shots, I think, a lot of the time.

Like, one of the great gifts of Kickstarter was to satisfy that ego and to allow it to shut up and to just be a little bit more still. And now You know, I hope I'm being called by the source. You know, I hope it's something real. And I know that every time I'm in the midst of the project, I feel the same panic of like, I don't know what I'm doing. This is maybe a waste of time. Oh my God. And then for me, it's like just when I'm falling on my face, I catch a glimpse and I see the flash of, oh, it's that, it's that.

And then you keep going. The Virgil line, I always think about the Virgil Abloh line. There's no work is as good as being able to make the next one. Speaker A: On a related note, and as a final question, you've said that the last step of creating something is realizing that you are not it. I think that was in the context of Kickstarter, but obviously applies to so much of what we talked about. You've been a writer, a journalist, a founder, CEO, a creator, a podcaster, many other things, a husband, a father, if maybe what you were just talking about is what you wanted, what you would want to be known for, who do you want to be known as?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, yeah, it isn't you. It takes a while. I was, I was talking to someone about this today that like, MetaLabel is still me. It's not only me. It's like the group of us. It's all of us. But like, A Corpse is already not me. I can feel it. Acorps is like a Rottweiler I found in an alley. That's like, hey, who does this belong to? And it's just going to like unleash itself on the world. I really, it's like, it is not mine. It is not mine.

Metalabel still is, but there's a good friend of my family and my wife is an 88, 89 year old man, Paulie, Paul Waters, and he talks about how he's happier than he's ever been in his life before every day because he just learned to, like, love himself and to appreciate himself and to not, not look externally for anything, but simply to love himself the way he would a friend. Imagine your friend who you just, like, just think the world of. Think of the way you look at them and their actions.

Look at yourself that way. And that for him, the ability to do that is something he still learns every day. And it brings him infinite joy. And like, he can just look inside and he'll spend a whole day just writing his memories. He's a brilliant man, like, spend— and just, it just brings him immense joy to just see them and to feel them. And like, and so, you know, I have a, I have a core friend group, but maybe, you know, 6 to 8 people who are like, been best friends for life, all of life.

We will always— I see them all every at least once a year. They live all around the world, my best, best friends. And, you know, they said to me before, like, uh, you know, in all your writing and stuff, you're so serious. You're always so serious. But like, the experience of me as a person, I think, is not that at all. I'm like, I could be deep, but I'm quite light, and I joke around a lot. I grew up in a family, you give each other shit to like give love.

And you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of nuance to like how to be and express and like And I am, I'm so comfortable with that being something that is a part of my deepest friendships and as a part of who is my spirit, but like doesn't have to be flexed, you know, it doesn't belong. Maybe I'm algorithmically optimizing by being like, don't try my corny whatever jokes, don't fucking mock people. Many selves. But, you know, I'm good with it. I'm good with it because I, I'm learning to love myself.

And that's about my relationship to me. And the better that is, the better my relationship is with my wife and with my friends and with my partners. And the more I'm able to be honest. And, um, that, that, you know, that is the biggest journey and quest in life. And it's like infinite reward. Infinite reward, like knowing, appreciating, understanding yourself, letting, letting go of that tension we feel of like not knowing how to show up, not, not just, not just be able to just be, getting over that. It's, it's infinite, infinite reward, infinite reward.

And it never stops. And it just keeps giving you that. And you can look into the universe, you can look at the bounds of science, you can look at the edges of all these things, and you will be— if your heart is in it, you will have wonder. And you could do the exact same thing inside of yourself and have all the same feelings and all the same realizations and all the same truths. And, um, you know, life is an invitation to discover that. And oh my God, I say yes.

Yancey, thank you very much. This is wonderful. Ah, thank you, brother.