The price of creativity

The rise of the creator economy

0:01This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way?

0:31Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. It feels like everywhere you look, people are making and crafting and writing and taking photos to share online. Today is my official three-year anniversary as a content creator. So, I make my own clothes. I love this dress. I'm building a tiny home for my sister. But where is all this creativity coming from?

1:03A word like creativity feels eternal, as natural as air. It's like the base level of all of life.

The cold war origins of creativity

1:11This is entrepreneur, musician, and writer Yancey Strickler. He's a sort of creativity history buff. Well, a common mistake we all make is assuming that the world around us has always been this way. And this is even the case when it comes to ideas that are as bedrock as art and creativity. But in the 1940s, the U.S. government started taking these fields very seriously. And in part from Department of Defense research and funding.

1:45Post-World War II, people were worried about American society becoming too homogenous. And the U.S. was worried about facing off against the Soviet Union. And so they needed individuality to contend with this totalitarian society. The things about us are made to express our own free spirits and desires. So the Defense Department and some social scientists began to study this question of what to do about it. What do we do about this issue of conformity?

2:15On come the developments of ideas. In pace with the emphatic decisions of the American people as to what they want. This is when there were more white-collar workers than blue-collar workers for the first time. And they ended up proposing a concept of something called creativity. creativity, which they discovered after studying artists and engineers, in particular engineers who pulled all-nighters. And they wanted to understand what made them work, what motivated them. To do that, they gave them everything from Warshak tests to the Myers-Briggs personality test.

2:52And they found that these people had this internal drive to make things better. They're just driven in that way. So they began to theorize that what if they could teach people to develop the same skill? They could teach people this notion of creativity. Then creativity would be this democratic form of genius that anyone could access. From there, the push for creative thinking took off. A 1958 bill promoted science and technology education,

3:22specifically to get kids to think differently in the name of national defense. In the 60s, creative writing began to enter American schools, brainstorming, open-ended thinking sort of practices. And these were intentionally created as a way to teach children how to be creative. Developing creativity was seen as a strategic goal of America. That has continued ever since, to where someone like me, I think of myself as a second-generation creative American,

3:52where I went to public schools, where I was taught all of these things. And, you know, creativity is very much a deep part of my life. Much of this history is chronicled in the 2023 book, The Cult of Creativity by Samuel L. Franklin. It was very strange to think that there was this origin to creativity, that it had this military-industrial purpose that was made to make people more productive and to make things that were more impactful.

4:20But the more I sat with it, the more I actually think it's beautiful that this is something that originated through a social scientist, that people had the sensitivity to ask and to study how other people stayed connected and loved what they did, to ask what makes those distinct voices distinct. How could we have more of them? How could we teach that in this phrase of a democratic form of genius? And so when I look at the world now, where more kids want to be creators than anything else,

4:53where creative expression and culture are at the center of really everything in America, it's like how politics works, how the economy works, how everything works. I'm from New York, it's Saturday, yeah! What I see is not some momentary blip, but I see the payoffs of investments that were made 70 years ago. We are on a continued climb in this long process of America embracing creative culture

5:24as one of its founding core ideals and one of the things that really makes America distinct. Can you say E.T.? E.T. Run, Forrest, run! And so when I look at the 21st century, and I think, what are the dominant forces that are shaping the world around us now? It's the internet. It's AI. And it is also creativity. I'm about to hit a million followers on Instagram, which is absolutely nuts. Finishing off my first draft. Probably in the next two weeks.

5:54I'm posting my original song, so maybe I can do this instead of going to college. Free to problem solving, cultural solutions, design-oriented answers, thinking, all of that. This is a long-term investment made by the state, made by past generations, that has worked its way through and has now produced just an absolute explosion of output and production. I use this 1916 sewing patent. Welcome back to my monthly Breakfast Club series. I'll need either book cloth or a substitute like leather.

6:24I frequently use this one. But even though Americans are consuming more creative content than ever, you believe the economics are not keeping up. It's not all wild ideas and roses. There's a big problem. That's right. You know, right now we find ourselves more people than ever creating. More demand for content than ever. Yet less support systems than ever. And there's this very acute pressure that every artist and creative person feels right now of like,

6:56I feel like I'm falling behind. I don't even know what to do. You know, and what is this world that seems like it's sort of racing away from me? In an era when anyone with a phone can call themselves a creator, and half of all young people say they hope to become an influencer, how are they turning all this output into a paycheck? And what does all this commoditized creativity mean for art, money, and culture? Well, over the next two episodes, we're digging in.

7:29First, Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler explains why capitalism needs to transition to accommodate this new marketplace. And then next week, Gen Z linguist and TikTok creator Adam Aleksic shows us how algorithms are reshaping language, attention, and what we value. Together, they'll help us understand the creator economy.

Building Kickstarter and crowdfunding culture

7:52Let's get back to Yancey. In the early 2000s, he was living in New York, working as a music critic and running a tiny record label, when he met a guy named Perry Chen. Like me, he was a creative person, always trying to get projects off the ground. And he had wanted to throw a concert, but didn't have the money to do it. And thought, what if he could just propose the idea for the concert online? People could pre-purchase tickets, and the show would only happen if it sold out. And if there wasn't enough interest, no big deal.

8:24He wouldn't be out the money, and the people together could decide. And this idea really resonated with me because at the time, as a creative person, to get support for your projects, you had to go pitch like a proper company of some kind or some board of approval that you needed. There wasn't that direct path where you could just go out into the world with your own ideas. And the idea of letting us as fans have a voice in what we wanted to see, and the idea that we as artists and creative people wouldn't need to ask for one person's permission, but instead convince people of the merit of our vision, that just seemed way more fun and more interesting.

9:08It ended up taking them, plus a third co-founder, years to create a platform that could let people crowdfund their projects. They called their site Kickstarter. In 2009, Kickstarter went live, and the very first week, a project was successfully funded. And it wasn't an overnight success, but amazingly for us, from the moment the site was there, people got it. People understood what it was there for. They saw it as a type of a game.

9:40It had an energy. Like, everything we could have dreamed really happened. And for creative people, it just dramatically opened the doors to where no longer were we all lining up in front of these singular gatekeepers, but instead we really had the freedom to go out the way we wanted with our own projects and ideas. And it had just opened the floodgates to now, you know, a much bigger world that we call the creator economy and a whole bunch of other stuff. That project was really one of the first that showed what the internet could do, that really put a lot of trust and a lot of power in the hands of individuals versus the institutions, and, you know, exceeded all of our expectations, but really came from our own experiences as creative people ourselves.

10:29Musicians got their albums funded by groups of friends. Authors crowdfunded their new novels. Even huge companies like Peloton and Allbirds got their start on Kickstarter. At this point, I think it's $9 billion or something like that that's changed hands through the platform. In 2017, Yancey stepped down as CEO. And I returned to being a full-time writer, author. I wrote a book and was leading a community and was doing everything I thought I wanted and had thousands of people gathered around ideas I was really passionate about.

11:03But he struggled to figure out how to make this group of creative people who were making books and all kinds of other creative products financially viable. He didn't want to start a nonprofit or another big company. I didn't want to be at the top of a pyramid. I wanted to be a part of something with other people. And I really struggled to see how to do that. How do I, as a creative person, have peers?

11:30You know, do I have to start a band? Is it like a collective? But a collective seems scary. A collective seems like I'm supposed to give up my identity. Like, I don't want to do that. And so I ended up thinking about the model of an indie record label where, you know, a way a label can sort of represent a scene or a sound or a place. And it can bring a lot of different people together around that. And what's cool about a label is like by being a part of a label, you're not giving up your individual voice, but you are just benefiting by being a part of something larger than you.

12:02So I started thinking, could you reimagine something like that, not around music, but around any sort of creative form where people who had a common purpose or common taste, people who wanted mutual support, they can have a structure that let them do that. And let them easily share money, share audiences, and just not be trapped on their own. In a minute, more about the answer that Yancey came up with and how he thinks it could be the way to give creative people the power and money they deserve.

12:35In a world where 48% of Americans report having a personal creative practice, in a world where art and culture has gone from sideline to, like, main stage, it just creates a very different set of conditions. Today on the show, part one of The Creator Economy. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to NPR's TED Radio Hour. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.

13:29We'll be right back.

The economic reality for modern creators

13:59People are trying to turn their creative pursuits into a source of income. I'm creating a super cool piece of, like, brutalist-inspired wall art. From artists and musicians. I wrote a song, and I'm posting it. To chefs. Here's everything I made for an eight-person birthday. To fashion influencers. Let me teach you how to style what you already have. At the beginning of every week. Social media has turned creative expression into a whole new industry. Here's how I made about $7,000 going live on TikTok for one month. We talked to one content creator named Shivani Shah.

14:31She's a professional dancer who started posting videos during the pandemic. I never really imagined it kind of from the lens of, oh, I'm creating content. It was just, oh, I'm doing this thing that, you know, I'm stuck at home in COVID. I'm bored. I'm just gonna do this thing and post it. But her videos caught people's attention, so she started collaborating with other dancers online. It was just crazy because I was like, wow, all these people, like, really love what I'm doing and want to do it, too.

15:02And Shivani started to make money from the platforms and advertising. She built a brand with another dancer. They posted routines together, had in-person classes, even went on tour. Hi, everyone. We are Desi Fuse. I'm Shivani, and this is Ishani. And we both started shuffling in the summer of 2020. Now, to keep the money coming in, Shivani has to keep posting and posting. Yeah, I mean, when you start pursuing your creative hobby full-time, sometimes you have to do work that you're not that excited by just to get, like, the paycheck from it.

15:38And other times, the work you really want to pour into that may require more time and creativity isn't the work that's also paying you. Today, Shivani goes back and forth between full-time content creation and working in the corporate world so that she can have health insurance. It's a tenuous mix because it's not easy out there. As of 2023, only 4% of content creators made more than $100,000 per year, according to Goldman Sachs. Most of those earnings come from brand deals or pitching products.

16:11Other revenue comes from subscriptions or donations. But the creator economy is projected to grow to a $480 billion industry in the next few years. And Yancey Strickler believes it should just be easier for more people to take part in it. The act of people going online, expressing their talent, their hobby, their passion, doing so in a way for which they are directly paid by their audience, or in a TikTok era that they're paid by a brand to endorse a product,

16:47or maybe they have a product they're selling in the Instagram or TikTok store as a part of what they do, that that overall space, that direct connection between a personality and an audience is going to be a hugely significant area of the economy. But that doesn't mean that every person who considers themselves an artist or a creator should be paid for their work, does it? I mean, if someone aspires to be, I don't take that away from them. In our survey data, we find that about half of people have some sort of legal formation.

17:23So to me, that says half of these 3,000-plus people take it at least fairly seriously, serious enough that they were willing to spend $500 to do some paperwork, some arduous paperwork about it. So say half of people are doing that. And say the other half, yeah, maybe half would love that opportunity. Maybe the other half, they don't need it. It's more about singing at church or writing their newsletter, and it's just for fun. It's just for fun. But for the kids coming up, for however many young people who want to be creators,

17:57or the fact that New York City's art schools have the highest application rates ever this past year, there's more energy going into this place. And so I think there is an expectation and a hope that it will bring probably greater economic benefits than is realistic. But in the future, I think that that might actually be the case. But I guess what's different now is that we see it as a potential profession, whereas we used to call that hobbies, right? Like, is that what's changing in terms of this idea that, like,

18:31I love doing this, and guess what? Maybe I can get paid for it, too. Absolutely. You know, the internet has made it so that we can turn our side hustles into forms of income. We can turn them into jobs. The challenge is that it's like the act of being an artist in a world like this is not as simple as it used to be. You know, because now you have many jobs. You're the artist, you're the marketer, you're the community manager, you're the order fulfiller, you know,

19:02you're all of these things because we're ultimately running these small businesses around our hobbies. And this is where you see a lot of stats about burnout being something that's quite common, even for people who are very successful at this, because it is very much a grind. It's an always-on grind, and there's not a lot of peer relationship that's a part of it. And, you know, I'm the optimist who believes that these conditions can change. I believe that what's happening now is not a fad. It's not going away, that creative work is undervalued in our eyes.

19:36It's more valuable than people realize. And that a world in which creative people are reliant on these other players to support ourselves, like, we're always going to be vulnerable. And so we really need a system of our own.

The A-corp proposal for artists

19:53And that brings us to Yancey's big idea. He's working on creating a new legal structure to offer artists protection and stability. He calls it an artist corporation or A-corp. That's right. Yeah. An artist corporation or an A-corp is a proposal for a new legal type, a new corporate type that would be established through a new law, a law established at the state level. And the goal of an artist corporation would be to make an entity that represents creative businesses.

20:26Right now, most of those businesses opt to be either an LLC or S-corp. LLC is the most basic legal structure. It's a legal shield over the project, gives you some tax benefits. It doesn't have upside, doesn't have easy ownership sharing exactly, but it's sort of the base level most people use. It's also not the friendliest to use. But what an A-corp does, A-corp is designed from the ground up for artists and creative people. So to qualify for an A-corp, you have to be making a creative output of some type.

21:00The project must be at least 51% owned and controlled by artists and creators, not outside investors. So you're pre-qualifying in. And as an A, you can raise money from both for-profit sources as well as receive non-profit sources of funds. But overall, we're trying to create a structure that validates creative work and that lets creative people participate in capitalism, have entities, be a real player the way that other economic players are in our culture today.

21:33And we think the A-corp does that. The A-corp just might be the door that opens up a new path to prosperity for creative people. Here's Yancey Strickler on the TED stage. You could think of an A-corp as like a company, but built for how creative people work. And we can imagine a band starts and right from the beginning, they have an A-corp. So they're not just five individuals. They're people who collectively own an organization that has the power to own their intellectual property, their gear, their business. As they start to get paid, that money can automatically flow to each of the members according to pre-set amounts.

22:07And they could even set aside money to be saved for future projects in a treasury or pooling together with other artist corporations to get better health care or other benefits. As an artist corporation, they would also be able to receive both commercial revenue as well as non-profit sources of funding. And if a label or a bigger commercial entity came along, rather than just selling the rights to their intellectual property, which has been customary until now, as an artist corporation, they can issue shares. So instead, that entity would make an investment in the artist corporation, allowing it to be valued more highly and everyone to benefit if things went well.

22:43The music industry is a particularly interesting example because it used to be the case that a popular band could make a lot of money from selling records. But then, of course, the Internet came along and now with streaming platforms, it is much harder for artists to make as much money, any money. So the old system no longer works. But we haven't figured out a new one. Well, we're definitely in the bardo. You know, there is a system that drove the 20th century of creative production that is still in power because it holds the ownership rights to all of that work.

23:24But definitely its tools are less relevant today than they've been in the past. You know, what's interesting is that, say, in music, music is a great case. If a band gets signed traditionally, you know, they're given a standard record deal, which in all likelihood leaves the label owning the publishing and masters of their work. You know, they get some cut of it. They get a royalty. They start some LLC with evidence from their manager, and maybe that's set up by someone else.

23:56And they end up not owning their actual work. They're getting paid out after all these deductions that they don't understand. And they're a part of a system where they have no agency whatsoever. And it's wild. Like, for the capital sources of culture today, for labels and, you know, studios, these bigger entities, artists are essentially service providers who create assets that these larger entities acquire and capitalize on. Hmm.

24:27We're in a weird spot in the industry where it's capitalism for me, but not for thee, not for the artist. So how would it work if a band created an A Corp? How would the money get back to them should they have some success? Well, so as an A Corp, they could pre-register to say, okay, listen, our A owns the IP of music that we create. And so if a label wants to work with us, great. Well, they can negotiate with us either an investment for which they get the right to distribute this work.

25:03Or, you know, right now labels are dealing with individual artists who know that this is their only chance to make it and they're probably going to sign anything in front of them. But if you look at the way these same entities, these corporations, interact with peer corporations, what do they do? They make joint ventures. You know, they make things where both parties share in the upside together. So in a world where the band has an A Corp, I think their record would be like a joint venture co-owned by the band and the label at which they are both putting in some money or, you know, labor to make it happen and which they both own in the upside.

25:41It's not one where only the corporate entity, the larger corporate entity, owns the upside and the artist just gets basically excess returns. But instead, it's one of like real partnership and real ownership. I mean, it's funny to me. I have talked to so many people who are so excited to start their own company because they, you know, want to get their work out into the world, whether that's art or writing or whatever it is.

26:12And then you're like, yeah, but then you also have to deal with accounting and paying your taxes and setting up the structures and and all of those things that are not so fun. But are you finding that creative people are are getting excited about this new tax structure? They they are. They are. And this is being done hand in hand with artists. You know, I have an amazing artist advisers and there's a lot of surveys and data from artists that are informing what we're doing.

26:43Hello, my name is Jackson Cooper and I live in Seattle, Washington. My name is Liz Alvarado and I live in Fort Collins, Colorado. We reached out to some of the artists who are excited about Yancey's plan for the A Corp. I'm a photographer. I'm a poet. I'm a model, performer, singer, songwriter and a musician. I do a lot of collage. I am an illustrator and a writer. Earlier this year, I left my tech design job to run my own multidisciplinary creative practice.

27:14I will say that one of the biggest challenges so far has been kind of battling people's preconceptions of design and what design is worth. The biggest struggle is stability and the admin takes up so much time that it feels like I'm running five different businesses by myself. Pitching, funding, managing rights. We are often trying to please whoever is responsible for giving us funding. You are at the mercy of a system that is only expecting you to produce, produce, produce.

27:45It's not a lack of talent that there aren't more successful working artists. It's a systemic issue. One thing I really stood out, we asked, like, what are your most desired features? And the things people most want, low cost of formation, simpler maintenance, clear ownership of IP and the ability to share profits with peers easily. That would mean I could build equity in my projects instead of just selling them off, and it would make a creative life feel much more sustainable in the long run.

28:16I think that an A-corp could help artists spend more of their time creating and less time struggling against the systems that were never really set up for us. That was Jackson Cooper, Elizabeth Alvarado, Chris Lorenzen, Jade Fox, Craig Cloutier, Alina Braithwaite, Sabrina Liu, Michelle Dong, Maddie Bovard, and Hannah Celeste. And Yancey's A-corp idea isn't just an idea anymore.

28:48In June of 2026, Colorado became the first state to pass legislation making it a reality. Now states like California, New York, and Illinois are working on A-corp bills of their own. And it's quite exciting to really try to operate at this level and to try to make, you know, an impact at the level of a public good. That, you know, if this is successful, it creates a foundation for every artist from here on out.

29:19You know, I think to have a potentially dramatically different outcome than anyone before. Well, let's talk about those who, you know, see creator as a viable career opportunity. How would this change the way they become, I guess, adults who can pay their bills and have health insurance? How do you picture it? Yeah, well, I think, you know, right now if you are, let's say you're someone who makes videos on TikTok or you post songs or whatever, you do something.

29:56My assumption is that you are just largely posting and going on your own for a while, and you probably don't have any sort of legal structure. Now what's happening now for TikTokers who do well is they have investors reaching out to them. What a lot of those deals are right now are 360 deals. These are basically deals that sign all rights of anything you might make, and so they are overly restrictive. Can you give me an example?

30:26What does that look like when you get a 360 deal? So it would say to you, okay, great, you know, X person, you're this makeup artist, you know, great, we believe in your channel, we want to help you scale up. We're going to put in, you know, $100,000, and now we own, you know, 25% of everything you make from here on. I see. Versus saying, in the way the A-Corp is structured, you're asked to say what IP, what work lives within the structure.

31:02So in that world, that makeup artist could more easily say, hey, this is a deal involving my podcast, involving these things. It doesn't involve these other things. This is the structure that puts me in control. It can sound like a lot of legalese, but put simply, the A-Corp business structure will let creators own the content they create, get investors, and officially value creativity as capital. Rather than them being just an individual personality, they would be something that might have more heft, more market power to it.

31:39When we come back, how all this content creation is being affected by the age of A.I. On the show today, the creator economy with entrepreneur, Ansi Strickler. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Back in a minute.

Schools and the artificial intelligence shift

32:09It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, we are talking about the creator economy with entrepreneur, Ansi Strickler. So earlier, Ansi called himself a second-generation creative, someone who grew up in 20th century America where individualism and creativity was nurtured. But not everyone agrees that that was the case. So I want to talk about education, and I want to talk about creativity.

32:42This is education advisor Sir Ken Robinson. In 2006, he gave what has ended up being one of the most-watched TED Talks ever. It's called Do Schools Kill Creativity? My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. He started off by making the point that everyone is creative when they're very young, and shared a story that I have heard repeated by many different people over the past 20 years.

33:16Maybe you have too. It's about a little girl in art class. She was six, and she was at the back drawing, and the teacher said, this little girl hardly ever paid attention. And in this drawing lesson, she did. And the teacher was fascinated. She went over to her, and she said, what are you drawing? And the girl said, I'm drawing a picture of God. And the teacher said, but nobody knows what God looks like. And the girl said, they will in a minute. For Robinson, being creative was the willingness to take risks, to immerse yourself in your imagination, and make something that doesn't yet have a template.

33:49Something he felt that most adults ended up losing. Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.

34:20They have become frightened of being wrong. Sir Ken died in 2020, just a few years before ChatGPT and other large language models became ubiquitous. And today, young people might wonder, why risk looking silly or even taking the time to draw a picture or write a poem, when the algorithm can do it so much faster, maybe better? Sir Ken's final thoughts in his talk sound prescient. Our task is to educate their whole being so they can face this future.

34:52By the way, we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Because creativity is at an inflection point. There are those who believe it's being crushed by AI, which turns everything into slop. Others who feel that if a computer can compose a symphony or design a logo in seconds, then maybe originality no longer defines creativity. And still others who believe AI will give creativity a boost.

35:23But with or without AI, artist and entrepreneur Yancey Strickler believes we are entering humanity's most creative period yet. I think ultimately we're on a course of this being seen as the creative century, which is going to be the period of time in which humans approached problems and approached opportunities from this creative mindset of seeking the culturally resonant solution,

35:54seeking the aesthetically beautiful or pleasing answer, bringing design principles and creative principles to apply in culture and in society and in business and economics. And the way that creative thinking has grown in our culture in a very explicit way is just something that is going to embed itself more deeply around all of society. In a world where technology and AI, all these things, makes a lot of what manufacturing and creation to be input-output,

36:27I think it's personality and its relationship with audience that's going to distinguish what stands out from what doesn't. Are you talking about, you know, this sort of disillusionment in a lot of young people with late capitalism, this idea of the individual and sort of this yearning to come together in real life, to have a community, quote-unquote, of people? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that culturally, no one believes in social media, I think, in a real way.

37:03We all know all social media is an ad. Everyone's doing it because they have to. And so, as creative people, there's a lot of pessimism at the moment. There's pessimism about the world. There's pessimism about AI. There's pessimism about platforms. And, you know, I think that it's all true.

Navigating tools, memes, and burnout

37:25But we also just have such amazing opportunities as creative people. There's a lot more of us than there used to be where, you know, it's more competitive. Those are things that we're having to deal with. But I feel like there is a classical era of culture production that has closed. And I think probably that dividing line is AI. There's probably some dividing line where, like, classical culture production involves the period of time which we can say with certainty these things were largely made by human hands and human minds. That's classical, huh?

37:56That's classical. And then the neo-modern will be what we're in now. This perpetual now, this confusing amalgamation of things that, you know, initially I felt judgmental about being kind of boomer of me. But in talking to, like, the teenage TikTokers, you know, I understand that they view these things as tools. And that, you know, it's just something that's there for them.

38:28And that, you know, people imposing their 20th century viewpoint of what, you know, what truth and beauty is, is, like, probably not going to make it or win in this moment of time. But so I really think that the conditions of our escape are here. The tools are here. Like, I just continue to have faith in the energy of the internet. And if I look at what's happening in dark forests and group chats and these spaces,

39:00if I look at what people are able to achieve with light coordination and very little resources, it just makes me continue to be bullish on what internet-powered people can do. Can we talk more about AI? Is, I guess, I think of it in two ways. One is that IP or intellectual property, that's going to be more difficult to figure out what that even is in the era of AI.

39:32And then I guess the other question is, are more people going to be turning to creative professions or trying to make money off their hobbies simply because AI will allegedly take some of the – we'll have more time. There'll be less normal nine-to-five jobs. Yeah. Well, I think the – I think that using AI because we have more time, I think that's real. And, you know, I mean, definitely, definitely AI is your production assistant.

40:05You know, AI is trying to fill those gaps of all the jobs that you as an artist have taken on in this modern world. I mean, certainly people are going to try at that. I kind of think a world of AI is, you know, probably we'll all get to have a more childlike experience with creative things. You know, I think us interacting with, say, AI-augmented creative tools is going to let us feel like we're good at anything. It just might be that no one else cares. I guess I'm wondering, you know, can we set expectations? There's a worry that I have that we picture this potentially – let's stay away from dystopia for a sec and go towards utopia,

40:44which is like AI makes things incredibly accessible. I can finally put out the album that I want to put out because I can't compose music, but with AI, I can. And do you worry that there are people who are like – who maybe it's wishful thinking that they can pay their bills by becoming an artist or a creator? That when everyone is a creator, you know, what even is art? I mean, this gets more philosophical, but, you know, this idea that everyone thinks what I'm making is amazing and someone should pay me for it.

41:21And there's something very – well, childlike, yes, but also – I'm just worried that people think they don't have to work anymore, Yancey. How boomer of you. I know. I think just because AI makes it easier doesn't mean the audience is going to care. And the audience still has a lot of power. And, I mean, there's – a lot of the AI creative demonstrations I see is like art for non-artists to me.

41:55It's like, why would I do that? Like, that's the fun part. You're taking away the fun part.

42:01And I don't think it's going to replace what people choose to actively consume with the exception of like, you know, things that become memes or just hits a lottery of the right moment in time. And so I don't – I don't really worry about that. But I do have – you know, as a writer, for example, I do feel gatekeeper-y when I see, you know, AI books, for example. Like, you know, and I have a reaction of I, like, I want that to be branded that that's AI and that mine is not.

42:40And, you know, I feel something about that. And I think that maybe just what I have to believe is that, again, the audience will help determine the relative value of those things. But I also probably have to accept that someone 30 years younger than me is going to have a very different, very different, you know, way to come at this. Yeah, I mean, because as – I'm not a boomer. I'm a Gen Xer. And part of me wants to maintain that sort of don't sell out.

43:13Don't be, you know, punk rock thing, which is what if you just make art because you like making it? Why do we have to commoditize everything? Like, the idea of people, you know, selling subscriptions so that you can be boyers on their life. Yes, I know I sound old by saying, like, I think that's kind of gross. But maybe that is just me being of my generation. Yeah, I mean, I see both sides for sure.

43:47I am also Gen X. And who knows? I mean, I hear people. And honestly, the worries people share are worries I share of, like, you know, I don't know if we want more money coming into our space. I don't know what it's going to do. I feel anxious about those things. But to me, an even bigger challenge is the fact that there is not enough support coming in and that I believe that people aren't capturing the value of what they do. And actually, our work is being exploited in a way that doesn't actually reflect the value we create.

44:19And that that is something that's changeable. And I think changing that will materially change the conditions and the lives of future generations of creative people. And what about for you?

A lifetime supporting creative people

44:33I don't think you're even 50 yet, right? But you've ended up spending a lot of your adult life experimenting with ways to align money with creativity. Do you think you'll keep doing that? Yeah, I mean, I'm 46 years old.

44:53I've been working in the creative fields my whole life. I mean, I grew up the son of a musician. And my dad was a country musician who didn't make it, you know, the way he dreamed. And instead, he had day jobs. When I was growing up, he was a traveling waterbed salesman who played music on the weekends. And to me, like the idea that a creative life is a mix of income sources and you do it out of love. And it's, you know, that was always it was always so apparent to me. And that's also how my life has been lived.

45:25And, you know, what I can see is that there's more of us, there's more and more of us living our lives that way. And actually, the opportunity, I think, is significant. And in that experience of 48% of Americans who have a creative practice, who some are trying to make money out of it, some are it's a hobby, you know, that there's a real benefit to taking that seriously. To me, all narratives are retrospective.

45:59Moving forward through life, I haven't known what I'm doing. I'm just doing what is interesting, what I feel called to do, what I can't help but to do. And only now, after being a music journalist, doing Kickstarter, starting the creative independent, doing metal label, doing artist corporations, I've also run a small press right now that I love doing. You know, my life is about lifting up the potential of creative people. My entire life is dedicated to that. And from childhood, that has been my life.

46:30You know, I didn't know. I didn't know that's what it would always be. But it's what it's always been. And I just have, like, an unbelievable hunger for that. And such joy. And for me to be able to, like, support an artist in putting out a work, a few things better. For me to discover something that I love, I mean, that's as good as it gets. Like, this is just who I am and who I will always be.

47:02And I take that with an extreme amount of responsibility and love being able to support my people. That was Yancey Strickler. He's an entrepreneur, musician, writer, and the co-founder of Kickstarter. You can see his full talk at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to part one of our two-part series on the creator economy. Next week, linguist and viral content creator Adam Aleksic takes us inside social media trends

47:38and explains how they're changing culture and how we talk to each other. I don't want to be shallant all the time. There's a time and a place to be shallant and there's a time to be nonchalant. Yeah, but shallant is not its own word. What? But it is. It is now. It's a slang word that was popularized through, like, social media. Meaning? Meaning the opposite of nonchalant. Meaning you are overt about something. You are, yeah, you are excited about something. I'm shallant about language, you know? And Adam even teaches us what it takes to go viral. Wait, so we're trying to make a viral video right now?

48:09Yes, we're going to make a viral video, you and me. It's a fun one. You don't want to miss it. If you liked this episode and enjoyed it or you have some feedback, do email us. We are at tedradiohour at npr.org. We read every message and we love hearing from you. For example, we got this lovely voice message from a listener about a past episode. It was called The Art of Choosing What to Do. Danielle Eve sent us her thoughts about being intentional with how she spends her time.

48:41I've never actually sent a voice comment to radio hosts, but I feel like this conversation about time and how we are spending our time and finding the meaningfulness of life is so important. And I think I shared the episode 10 or 12 times during the podcast. And so I just wanted to say thanks for making it.

49:12It was really great. And I was really excited to share it because it felt like it combined a whole bunch of resources that I hadn't thought of yet. So thank you so much. This episode was produced by Harsha Nahada and Katie Monteleone and edited by Sanaz Meshkanpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahousie, Rachel Faulkner-White, Matthew Cloutier, Fiona Guerin, and Phoebe Lett. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi.

49:43Our audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Hilash, and Daniela Belarezzo. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Thank you.