*Dialectic Episode 20: Yancey Strickler - Constellations of Creativity - is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/7nstURJxsYa7dvG8AXglJU?si=f1be54197d534b8f), [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/20-yancey-strickler-constellations-of-creativity/id1780282402?i=1000712556376), and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/kJqzoiAaQpY?si=FMtuD8nV-SNzpuZb).* ![[20-Yancey_Strickler.jpg]] <iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/7nstURJxsYa7dvG8AXglJU?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/20-yancey-strickler-constellations-of-creativity/id1780282402?i=1000712556376"></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kJqzoiAaQpY?si=FMtuD8nV-SNzpuZb" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> # Description Yancey Strickler ([Website](https://www.ystrickler.com/), [X](https://x.com/ystrickler), [Metalabel](https://www.metalabel.com/ystrickler)) is a writer, entrepreneur, creative, and founder of [Metalabel](https://metalabel.com/), a network and platform that allows creative people to release work together. He is also a board member, co-founder and former CEO of [Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/) and is currently working on establishing a new kind of corporate structure, the [Artist Corporation](https://www.artistcorporations.com/). Yancey's life and work has revolved around what it means to be a creative individual, and how to improve the cultural and mechanical forms that enable artists and creatives. We talk about how much of modern society is rooted in individualism, how that wasn't always the case, and how the internet is evolving our sense of self. We get into creativity, the term's surprisingly recent origins, and why Yancey believes the 21st will be the "Creative Century." Then, we go beyond the individual and discuss the deeply-rooted longing that all of us have to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. Yancey suggests that is not simply about being subsumed by a collective, but by maintaining our individual star while becoming part of larger constellations—like the labels that have empowered the distribution of ideas for centuries. Finally, we discuss the forms Yancey has or is helping to build and imagine a future where even more of the world creates professionally. May we all shine more brightly and find others who inspire us to make wonderful things. --- **This episode is brought to you by [Hampton](https://joinhampton.com/community)**, a private, highly vetted membership for founders. Hampton surveyed over 100 members with net worths of $1M-100M to create its **2024 Wealth Report.** They asked about financial goals, spending habits, how much founders themselves, investment portfolio breakdowns, risk tolerance, estate planning and philanthropy, and more. Visit https://joinhampton.com/community to access the report. # Timestamps - 1:41: Individualism, Identity, and the Internet - 19:13: Creativity — Its Origins, Art, and Reaching Toward Something Deeper - 33:30: The Creative Century and a Case for the Continued Growth of Professional Creativity - 38:27: Hampton - 40:02: Something Bigger than Ourselves — The Post-Individual, Bentoism, Being a Star and a Constellation - 51:51: Labels & Conspiring Together in Practice - 1:07:15: New Forms & Kickstarter - 1:18:44: Metalabel - 1:31:56: Creativity and Commerce & A Brand New Form: The Artist Corporation - 1:46:22: The Long Game: Supporting the Artistic and Creative Life # Links & References - [YOUTH MODE - K-HOLE](https://khole.net/issues/youth-mode/) - [Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression - Yancey Strickler for The Creative Independent](https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/adam-curtis-on-the-dangers-of-self-expression/) - [Inventing the Individual - Larry Siedentop](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18740986-inventing-the-individual) - [The WEIRDest People in the World - Joseph Henrich](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51710349-the-weirdest-people-in-the-world) - [The Second Self - Sherry Turkle](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/686495.The_Second_Self) - [Dialectic Ep. 7: Toby Shorin - The Shapes of Culture](http://dialectic.fm/toby-shorin) - [Social Networking 2.0 – Stratechery by Ben Thompson](https://stratechery.com/2020/social-networking-2-0/) - [NoTechBen](https://x.com/NoTechBen) - [Dolly Parton meme](https://www.threads.com/@thatericalper/post/DFG-s_fJqtM?hl=en) - [Nine Creative Meditations - Yancey](https://squad.metalabel.com/ninemeditations?variantId=1) - [The Cult of Creativity - Samuel Weil Franklin](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62707931-the-cult-of-creativity) - [Tune In (The Beatles: All These Years, #1) - Mark Lewisohn](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17884043-tune-in) - [Instagram post on creativity](https://www.instagram.com/p/DJuSxcUtJVW/?img_index=4) - [The Post-Individual - Yancey](https://www.ystrickler.com/thepostindividual/) - [Bentoism](https://bentoism.org/) - [The dark forest theory of the internet - Yancey](https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet/) - [The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet](https://darkforest.metalabel.com/dfc?variantId=2) - [Joshua Citarella](http://joshuacitarella.com/) - [Squad Wealth](https://otherinter.net/research/squad-wealth/) - [Nadia Asparouhova](https://nadia.xyz/) - [Our Band Could Be Your Life - Michael Azerrad](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29393.Our_Band_Could_Be_Your_Life) - [Royal Society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society) - [Philosophical Transactions](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rstl) - [American Zoetrope](https://www.zoetrope.com/) - [Other Internet](https://otherinter.net/) - [Venkatesh Rao](https://venkateshrao.com/) - [Introducing Metalabel](https://squad.metalabel.com/introducing-metalabel?variantId=1) - [Perry Chen](https://www.perrychenstudio.com/about) - [Charles Adler](https://charles-adler.com/) - [Benefit corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation) - [The Creative Independent](https://thecreativeindependent.com/) - [Other Internet 2018–2024](https://otherinternet.metalabel.com/other-internet-book?variantId=1) - [New Creative Era with Yancey & Joshua Citarella](https://metalabel.substack.com/s/new-creative-era) - [C. Thi Nguyen](https://objectionable.net/) - [How Twitter Gamifies Communication - C. Thi Nguyen](https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=NGUHTG&aid=NGUHTGv1) - [Artist Corporations](https://www.artistcorporations.com/) - [How to long game - Yancey](https://www.ystrickler.com/how-to-long-game/) - [Paul Waters](https://www.ericfirestonegallery.com/artists/paul-waters) Dialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms. [Join the ⁠telegram channel for Dialectic⁠](https://t.me/dialecticpod) [Follow ⁠Dialectic on Twitter⁠](https://x.com/dialecticpod) [Follow Dialectic on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/dialecticpod/) [Subscribe to Dialectic on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@Dialectic) # Transcript **Jackson**: Yancey, we're here. Thanks for doing this. **Yancey:** We're here. **Jackson:** We're here on our moody Friday in New York, a perfect time to talk about so many things. ## [00:01:41] Indvidualism, Identity, and the Internet **Jackson:** We're going to start with individualism. A couple of quotes for you that seem to be favorites of yours. One in particular is from Khole 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." 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." Both of those quotes hint at where the conversation will go, but I want to start specifically with individualism. You've written and talked a lot about this idea, specifically how the world shifted from a much more collective place to a much more individualistic place. The first place to start would be: why has individualism been good for the world, and what does it mean to be an individual? **Yancey:** Thanks for the warmup, Jackson. tend to get interested in things, especially when I learn that something I assumed 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. That always sticks with me. I was reading the book \*The Invention of the Individual\* or \*Inventing the Individual\* by Larry Seidentop, and then a book by Joseph Heinrich called \*The Weirdest People in the World\*. Both tell the story that the modern concept of an individual hasn't always been here. There was a point in time, which historically, for a variety of reasons, they can pinpoint with some degree of accuracy, where people identified much more as part of a clan, a tribe, or something larger. Their sense of identity was related to where they fit within that network, system, or clan, and that was the way of the world. That makes sense; I can imagine that. But this notion that there was a moment when people began to see themselves differently was really interesting. Both books talk about this moment as being related to when the Catholic Church in Southern Europe, around 1000 AD [give or take 100 years], banned cousin marriage. Up until that point, it was common in clans for the patriarch or matriarch to marry cousins to each other. **Jackson:** First cousins. **Yancey:** Just more labor. Keep. Don't let them get out. Keep the dollars in the family, keep making more. That was a real source of power. Some of the papal officials, some of the churches, wanted to break some of that power. 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 the historical record. One is that cities began to grow like never before. 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, now they had to go and meet someone. These trading posts suddenly grew. Cities became a part of human life for the first time. Two other things emerged then too: guilds and universities. Because these newly liberated people were showing up in these villages, these towns, these bustling cities, you needed a way to find work, to find a trade, to have some sort of context. Because before that, you don't need those things. **Jackson:** It was pre-installed. **Yancey:** You don't need those things. **Jackson:** You do what your dad did. **Yancey:** Within the span of 60 years, you see these new structures that are still the infrastructure of the world today begin to emerge. It was largely because people were individualized beyond the clan. They were showing up, not to the degree of individualism we think of today, but comparatively they were showing up on their own, serving their interests or serving a specific purpose. These structures began. Individualism was something that continued to be written about during the early Renaissance and has always been a part of the emergence of rationalism and the scientific revolution. A lot of those things have quite an individualistic point of view that still has this origin point, Romanticist era too. I personally find that interesting. I identify with the K. Hole quote so much because I do feel like someone that grew up in a culture that was very much focused on your self-actualization. I can sense in the difference of my parents and my grandparents a difference in what it meant to belong to something or to be from a place. I look at people younger than me and I see that continuing. I look at the Internet and I see a whole new world with a different set of rules that to me resembles that thousand-year-ago moment where the Internet stopped cousin marriage in that it allowed us to become individuals in a whole new way. 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. The people who go deepest in this world, you cultivate alts. You cultivate many slices of yourself that are all true parts of you, none complete parts of you. They're things that the Internet accentuates, celebrates, rewards. What I see online is similar to a thousand years ago. I see the creation of a new society. Just like cities, guilds, universities created the structure that we still live within today, the things that we're experiencing now online are creating the structures of society for the next X many centuries. **Jackson:** "To go online is to be reborn as an individual." This idea that you're invited to redefine what you can be. **You have a line:** You heavily reference Sherry Turkle's \*The Second Self\*. She discusses computers and, perhaps in a revision, how the internet has changed things. A couple of excerpts: A sixth grader, Deborah, says the experience of authorship in programming gave children like her a sense of control. It enabled them to construct microworlds that were exquisitely tuned to their own developmental needs. Deborah also 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 highlights reflectiveness. Finally, another she quotes uses the computer to underscore this difference, as a mirror for his own uniqueness. He tells her, "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. Reflecting on what you were just saying, I'd be curious for your thoughts, both personally and broadly, on this identity plasticity. You've also written about growing a mustache while writing a book, perhaps to take on a new identity, like Beyoncé's Sasha Fierce. Paul McCartney going into skies so he could explore Sunra. There are many great examples, particularly in professional creative activity, of people donning disguises or creating identities. primary ways individuality changes when it can take so many different, plastic forms with the internet? **Yancey:** I think we're still early in discovering all of those ways. Those quotes are from 1982, and it's people using something like an Altair, which to us would look like a calculator. **Yancey:** Literally. And that was the experience. **Jackson:** But they saw it. **Yancey:** No internet. Just the dumbest interview, and that feedback loop created that. It's incredible. Absolutely incredible. **Jackson:** It highlights the core difference between television and computers as a medium: the reflexivity of computers. **Yancey:** I think of the internet as having spawned identityism. Its entire philosophy and modes of being are about finding the specific identities to which you belong. Every sub-identity you can ascribe to is a source of power, a source of beef, and all kinds of things online. We are arranging ourselves through identityism, and it's a continued proliferation of identities. New ones can be made every day. You could have an identity about being mad about the Wendy's Instagram account. That could be your identity for a good two months. It's quite possible. **Jackson:** Maybe it's compressing. The length of our identity periods are compressing. **Yancey:** I think there are a lot of intrinsic rewards for that; that is one thing. Certainly, in an LLM world, what's interesting is that whereas in the past we would dump our feelings onto Tumblr and be vulnerable to each other, now we're doing that into LLMs. We're talking back to a version of ourselves, to a model meant to speak back to us. And there's the amount that we are asking for affirmation or guidance. We look how people are. **Jackson:** Using O3, 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. **Yancey:** It's interesting to think that maybe it was vulnerable cringe, those Tumblr days. We would post our feelings to each other, and people would be like, "That's crazy. Why would you let someone do that?" People would have alts and whatever. That was part of a culture. It's still a web culture that's like that. Then it moved more towards real identity, the Facebook era, then the Twitter era. And now we will just talk to LLMs and then we'll ask it, "What do I tweet?" or whatever. We are intermediating by choice through a closed-loop interface that loops back to us that no one else can see. That ends up satisfying a lot of the desires that people had. It really does. Imagine if Chat gave me likes for how good whatever I was showing up. That would be evil to my behavior because every part of my lower cortex would just—it's already clawing, it's chewing through my skin to get to it. That's just a really wild side of things. The way people are pushing and exploring the boundaries of individuality right now, I find it both ridiculous and beautiful and amazing. I was thinking this is almost like we're in the golden age of hotness. There's so much of a mirror online. Full-on augmentation hasn't happened yet, whatever that future is going to be. We're still an organic self, improving through largely natural, slash more and more protein, means of doing things. **Jackson:** Looksmaxing, right? **Yancey:** Yeah, exactly. We're all looksmaxing. Good for us. It's hard not to just continually experience the internet as a very true reflection of a lot of what's inside of us. I've always thought the metaverse word is wrong. I always think it's like a mesaverse because it's about all of our inner selves meeting. It's not about physically embodying some digital—no. It's all of our inner voices. That's who is meeting online. **Jackson:** It's more authentic, is essentially what you're saying. **Yancey:** In some ways. In some ways it's also more performative. It's every range, just like every range for a person. But there is just an inherent truth to it, even the manipulation. Last night I went to an event that Toby Shorin hosted of Other Internet. **Jackson:** Former guest of the podcast. **Yancey:** Great. He had us map the eras of the internet. People talked about now. Someone said the era of now is "scam or be scammed." She's just like, everything's a scam. You know, everything's a scam. So the only thing to do is that you have to scam, because otherwise, what are you doing? You're just waiting. **Jackson:** Everybody's, yeah, it's sort of like everybody's LARPing. **Yancey:** Yeah. **Jackson:** And the new form of LARPing, a role-playing, is scamming. **Yancey:** Just scamming. But just listening to people talk about that and to feel, "Oh, that is the current of our political situation now." That is like, there's a truthful—even as I may be troubled by it. **Jackson:** Right. **Yancey:** There's a truth that I recognize, and I'm like, yeah, I think she's onto something. **Jackson:** You wrote about it in the piece. It might be very obvious to someone who's extremely online, but for those for whom it might be less obvious, can you talk a little bit about the ways this identity plasticity can show up? There's maybe one end of the spectrum, which is a non account, an alt identity, or a fake Instagram under a totally different pseudonym. Then there's a massive gradient to what are all the versions of Yancy on Twitter versus Yancy in this room versus Yancy on some other platform. Substack is different. It's almost like there's a wide gradient there. **Yancey:** Ben Thompson writes in a Stratechery piece, Social 2.0, where he talks about this Ben flower, all these petals of him. It's a great image. I think it rings true. **Jackson:** Ben is a simple example. He has Ben Thompson, and then he has No Tech Ben, which is basically his basketball. **Yancey:** You are encouraged to see things that way. There was the Dolly Parton meme years ago of the four different parts of you, four different fits for who you are. The idea is we each have four different personas we step into. The systems incentivize us to optimize for whatever content does well in their spaces. A lot of people—past versions of myself, probably future versions of myself—spun a lot of wheels trying to optimize for those spaces. There's such a thing as an artist-format fit or a creator-format fit. In most channels, the people that most people follow tend to be someone who only does that thing. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Yancey:** Tends to be. Not always, but tends to be. But the rest of us mid-twits like me, of course, consume everything. So, I gotta be everywhere. So I gotta conjugate this. I gotta have my LinkedIn today, I gotta have my whatever it is. **Jackson:** I gotta take this piece of content and convert it to Twitter and fill it. **Yancey:** We're filling the boxes. 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 I don't know if it helps us. I think there are two ways to come at that. One way is to try to make yourself fit. Say, how do I go big on TikTok? That's a lottery. I understand you want to win the lottery. 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 I do my thing and I want it to be in as many channels as possible, so I'll just push it in. Which is different. Different energy levels. **Jackson:** But it's also almost like a pre-Internet way of thinking. Or even in a Marshall McLuhan sense, it's not truly internalizing the notion. It's not only that the medium is the message; the medium is the identity in a way. ## [00:19:13] Creativity Its Origins, Art, and Reaching Toward Something Deeper **Jackson:** We're going to come back to the identity stuff. But the other thing worth talking about before we get there is creativity. When we first met, you told me something about creativity that blew my mind: apparently, creativity was basically created in the 40s as an idea, as a word, and then wasn't added to the dictionary until the 60s. So one way you frame this is that our current conception of art is like 100 years old, which is pretty mind-blowing. You've also talked a lot about individualism and creativity. So this frame of creating for me versus the "we," and "what's most personal is most universal"—the classic advice, "creating starts with knowing yourself." How is creativity a natural extension of that individuality pattern we were just talking about? **Yancey:** It's a really wild history. Last year, I picked up a book I saw at the Strand called \*The Cult of Creativity\* by Samuel Franklin. It just had the word "creativity," so I bought it that day and started reading it. The book made me angry because it explained how the concept of creativity was developed through two forces that began in the 1940s. The Department of Defense was looking to find divergent thinkers to be officers in the military. **Jackson:** Wow. **Yancey:** They were facing off against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the ultimate totalitarian state, with more manpower than ever. The only way the US could compete was through individualism, new ideas, and industriousness. At the time, the US had a high degree of conformity; it was a very conformist society. **Jackson:** Right after World War II. **Yancey:** Right after World War II. Extremely conformist society. Conformity was a high value. To seek divergent thinkers was to go against the value set. They ended up studying certain types of engineers and artists. They were doing Rorschach tests—that was invented in part for this. They were measuring electrodes, trying to see what made these people work. Some of the first researchers doing this were Abraham Maslow and Timothy Lee, who got early grants for this work. At the same time, in the advertising industry, the head of BDDO wrote a book about— **Jackson:** BDDO? **Yancey:** BDDO. **Jackson:** What is that? **Yancey:** It's an advertising agency, still around and a big agency today. He wrote a book about bringing aesthetics into advertising because, at the time, advertising was completely utilitarian. He was looking at Bauhaus work and how art was starting to enter pop consciousness for the first time. Fascinating. He proposed more aesthetics in advertising. He also introduced brainstorming, which they had started to use as a way of creating ideas. His example of a successful product made with brainstorming was Pringles. The question was: how do you keep chips from getting broken? The idea: "Oh, I have my tennis ball container." Boom. **Jackson:** Brainstorming. **Yancey:** Brainstorming. Making the money. These forces were happening at the same time, trying to solve this question. Another force came from the social sciences. There's a famous book, \*One-Dimensional Man\*, that came out in the early 50s. Americans under early post-war capitalism were not very happy. There was mass conformity, more white-collar jobs, and everyone moving to the suburbs. It was mass society in a way that hadn't been experienced before. A concern also came up frequently in the media: "Is this it?" All those forces came together. In these social science circles and DoD-funded projects, this idea began to percolate: there's an essence. There's an essence that's presence; in this essence, it's the democratic form of genius. At the time, genius was thought of as the lone genius, the madman, the mad artist. It was on the edges of society. But there is an essence of that which anyone can aspire to, and it's called creativity. **Jackson:** You said this made you mad. **Yancey:** Yes. **Jackson:** Why? **Yancey:** Is my life a psyop? I felt: Am I the kitten batting the trouble? **Jackson:** It almost feels like they tapped into something really true there. **Yancey:** Oh, no, it is. But just at first. **Jackson:** Reading it, your thought was: "This is where it came from." **Yancey:** How is this true? We posted a Meta Label Instagram carousel last week that tells a little bit of the story. It's getting a lot of shares on Instagram, but a lot of people are really angry and accusing us of lying. That's how I know. It started from this place of what is this essence that could be mixed into life? But it always had this both commercial and industrial purpose. Yes, it was for the military. **Jackson:** Almost pragmatic. **Yancey:** It was for the military; it was for advertising. Westinghouse was advertising their nuclear plants were the state-of-the-art creativity. It was just a buzzword. In 1966 is when it entered the dictionary for the first time. Creativity would have been the Webster's word of the year in 1964 or something like that. It's to the degree of... I'm reading an amazing book about the Beatles. It's 2,000 words, and it's just their childhood up until before the first record came out. 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." **Jackson:** Prior to this, it would have just been Buddy Holly and the background people or something? **Yancey:** Buddy Holly was the closest thing. It was always a name and The Crickets. It was Buddy Holly and The Crickets or a solo torch singer. In 1961, a press release had to explain what a band was. **Jackson:** These things that we lament are going away. Fascinating. **Yancey:** It's a very new force in society. There is something to the notion of creativity that's about improving things through ingenuity, through aesthetics, through all kinds of things that make sense to me, as maybe you did reach a certain stage of Maslow's hierarchy. He hadn't come up with that yet, but maybe that is where creativity enters the picture. Maybe it is the case that up until that stage in human history, the broad stability would allow that to be a real goal of society. If you look at South Korea, who's had such a dominant cultural footprint the last 20 years—I'm reading books about it now—you're going to find that this was an explicit investment by the government to say, "We need to. Let's raise children to have artistic practices." Just certain things that have been shown. If you look at the example of America, there's an argument that creativity, as we think of it, is an American ideal. **Jackson:** I remember. **Yancey:** Not solely, in the same way that some food started in a certain place. It's not owned by America, but I think it is an American concept, almost an American myth. **Jackson:** Prior to this, do you think artists were just thought of as craftspeople? **Yancey:** The history of art... I don't know it well enough to really explain. If you think of art as being a representative drawing, then you have cave paintings and things. But those are seen as telling stories, or it's about a myth or something. You start to get into representative portraits. **Jackson:** It's almost utility-oriented. **Yancey:** Those are even music—purely patronage, edification. When you start to get into the arts as individual expression or the beginnings of commercial expression, you're looking at the period after the French Revolution. Early 19th-century French salons began to have competitions to show your work for the first time. There's a great book I've been reading that's all about the art market of early America in the late 18th century. It was just starting then. But art as a part of mainstream conversation, you're looking at the 1930s, 1950s, and beyond: Salvador Dalí, Jackson: Pollock. **Jackson:** What's interesting too is that, in the words creativity connotes, it doesn't require an implicit or explicit medium, craft, or skill. It ties back to what you were saying earlier, which is almost this way of thinking or way of approaching. You've also called creativity sacred. What are you saying when you say that? And what are the inputs for you, personally, for what's driving your curiosity and your creativity? **Yancey:** When I said creativity is sacred, I bet I hadn't read that book yet, because I see creativity as explicitly a commercial thing. I accept that about it, and it explains to me the difference between an artist and a creator. An artist is a self-employed self-expresser. A creator is a self-employed commercial expresser. Someone creative who works in advertising is a brand-employed, branded expresser. But I do think that artistic practices... I'll come at it another way. It strikes me that when you make something, there are moments where you're overtaken by a feeling, you don't know what happens, and something happens. Many artists will talk about this. I also find it interesting how we experience certain works and have a strong emotional, physical experience. And I believe the same feeling the artist has when making that work that overcomes them is the same feeling the audience has when they encounter that work. And millions of people, thousands of people, have the same feeling. **Jackson:** It's almost pointing at something. **Yancey:** Yes. And our heart, our chest, rises in a certain way. **Jackson:** Aliveness. **Yancey:** Because what we are experiencing, I believe, is a real, rational thing. The way I've come to think of art—not all art, maybe, but that sort of expression—is that it is God. The way I would put it is, it's like a stalactite or stalagmite of God: this jutting out, this wave that crashes and stops midair so we can look at it. Sometimes it comes out of our fingers or our mouths; sometimes it's in front of us. It is an absolute gift, and it's wondrous, and we get to see it. And it's not just art that's this. Religion can be this, nature can be this, love—all kinds of things can be this. **Jackson:** People use the word art generously to encompass all that. **Yancey:** But to me, at its highest, at its most truthful, it is accessing and reflecting God, which is all of us. **Jackson:** Yes. **Yancey:** The deepest parts of us. So, I think every time you sit down, that is 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 that I think is true: sometimes I'm being drawn by something, and I come to this cliff edge of the unknown. And you don't know you have two choices, but you do. One choice is to follow the cliff edge and stay on the ground. That's normally what I and most people do. But I believe every time you come to that, there's a second choice: to step out into the unknown. Every single time, there is that choice. And that is. **Jackson:** There's a whole Joseph Campbell thing there. **Yancey:** That choice is there for us. It's present in human relationships, and those are also places I think are deeply of God, truly of the deepest part of our essence. When I'm making things, experiencing things, and when I'm soft enough, you can feel that real truth. It speaks to me in a deep way. For other people, it's the beauty of math or many different things. For me, both making things and appreciating and understanding what others make are the ways I most consistently get close to that deeper truth. I can feel it and sense it. **Jackson:** Is creativity where what you just described meets a commercial component? **Yancey:** No, creativity is 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, ultimate love. It's a lot of things. Creativity is a mindset, a positive openness. **Jackson:** And so go back to the democratic... **Yancey:** ...form of genius, an affirmative optionality. At its best, it's an act of love, but it's a little different. ## [00:33:30] The Creative Century and a Case for the Continued Growth of Professional Creativity **Jackson:** You've called the 21st century the creative century. Why? **Yancey:** When I started to appreciate how recent my conceptualization of art and creativity is. **Jackson:** Recent in the 100-year sense? **Yancey:** Recent in that my parents were alive when these things were happening. I've come to think of myself as a second-generation creative American because creativity entered the school system in the 1960s—creative writing, explicitly from this research. I have been brought up into this. I've always cared about music and culture, and I've seen everything I care about go from a footnote of society to a main venue alongside politics, business, and sports. **Jackson:** Culture is what kids want to do. **Yancey:** Entertainment is what kids want to do. I've watched that greatly rise in relative importance. Consider being a creator or a self-employed commercial expresser—the number one most desired job for people under 18. That job did not exist 15 years ago. When I look at all that history, I see a straight line up and to the right for creative output, hours consumed of self-expression, number of people participating, number of people who want to participate, and amount of transactions. I don't know about the total money spent compared to the height of CDs when everything had to be paid for, but in terms of total activity, it's unprecedented. **Jackson:** There's also a notion that we're hitting the top. I started a podcast in 2024, a little late to the game. During my first internship after freshman year of college, around 2012, I was watching YouTubers vlog. I thought, "This would be cool to do, but it's probably too late." Casey Neistat hadn't even started. There's this continuous notion that we've hit the top of this. My instinct is that you're much closer to being right. **Yancey:** I think we're nowhere near. Being a creator is still largely in a few countries; it is still growing. AI makes all this trivially easier to produce. Right now, we're in a weird, crazy tension. Every creative person is feeling the same tension—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? I don't even have Video Jackson. It's just that, and you feel it all the time. So, unprecedented demand for creative output. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Yancey:** And then crumbling support systems for creative people. There's really not a lot. Everyone's on your own. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Yancey:** And everyone's meant to do more. Even for people at the top of their game, some of the cuts that happened with Doge and all that, one involved the National Endowment of the Arts rescinding grants, all the grants they had given for 2025. About a month ago, there were a thousand artists in America, A-level artists as well as starting, who got letters from the government saying, "That money you're counting on, we're taking it back." And yet, you look around culture, and it's our game. All the attention is in our space. It's wild because the previous systems of support were built on a gatekeeper model, and they were built on being the place where everyone advertised. Things worked quite well. And now the wide openness just means much greater power law, greater competition, et cetera. I think the bear case would be everyone's going to go broke and everyone's going to quit because only so many Substacks can work. **Jackson:** And the power laws are too strong. **Yancey:** But I don't think that's going to stop people from trying. And what else are they supposed to do? I think we're going to find that the audience for consumption will keep growing. It's all going to keep growing. ## [00:38:27] Hampton ## [00:40:02] Something Bigger than Ourselves — The Post-Individual, Bentoism, Being a Star and a Constellation **Jackson:** You got at it a little bit there. Everything we've talked about thus far is on single player mode. Many of the ideas I quoted 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, "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 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." We're getting at this tension. On one hand, we've had this amazing explosion of individuality going back to cousin marriage. On the other hand, a lot of people feel that tension. Adam Curtis nails it so well: I'm not willing to give up being free. I'm not willing to give up this romantic idea of the individual. But I also want more. That's not enough. There's not that much meaning here. You have a definition of this as the post individual: a state of being in which a person carries multiple non-compulsory, group-oriented identities, almost like a networked individual. What is happening to us as we're increasingly finding our homes and ourselves on the internet? We're also looking for more meaning there. And meaning inherently, as any person who's lived a little bit of time on earth knows, has to be bigger than What is happening to us, and how are we becoming more than individuals or post individual? **Yancey:** 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 can tell themselves, "I'm not alone"—that's kind of true. Kind of true. That first quote you read from Adam about having to square the circle—letting people be an individual but be a part of something bigger than sentence has echoed in my mind ever since. He and I have known each other, been friends, and worked on things together for a long time now. That conversation was similar to most talks we had. He is so often pointing out the degree of power accessible to people if they allow themselves to see themselves as part of something greater. But it's hard for people to do because you're giving up something. He's talking about whether there's a way, much like people give themselves up to God, that by giving up, you become stronger. In that same conversation, he compares going out alone at night with a flashlight to look for something scary versus going out with a group of people. He says, "Think about how much more powerful you are in one versus the other." And yet, this is how we behave. I really felt in my bones how true that was. That image of squaring the circle really stayed with me: both are true. How can both be true? **Jackson:** It's paradoxical. **Yancey:** That ended up leading to a project I spent a few years on, Bentoism, which was a framework for self-interest that tries to map these different spaces and dimensions and tries to hold that tension and truth. It's all true. No one's wrong; we're all right. It's all true. **Jackson:** It's very positive sum. Both the present and the future, and in a selfish way and in a collective way. **Yancey:** 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 don't necessarily advocate for collaboration as a way forward. Collaboration is the scary part that Adam talks about: giving up too much of yourself. Collaboration means maybe I don't know who they are or who I am. There's a little bit of that. Today, especially, we have to respect our boundaries a bit. Instead, something like co-releasing, cooperating, or conspiring, to me, are all... **Jackson:** Inspiring is a great word. **Yancey:** ...are all excellent things. I don't want to be just me. I'd love to know that when I did something, you always had my back. And if you always have my back, I will always have your back. If 30 of us all said that to each other, we'd be pretty powerful. It's that mindset, which bot networks and people launching a shitcoin know. And this is what Dark Forests unlocked. There is a way of engaging the Internet today that is far more advantageous and more fun: to have your conspiracy running in some other channel where you're making things and talking about things together. Then you're launching them on "main" when you want, or you're showing up in those other spaces as you wish. Your primary relationships aren't about putting a finger to the wind and seeing if anybody loves me. **Jackson:** Today, you're a part of a network. **Yancey:** Instead, you're checking in with your chat. You're talking about a project you're doing together or something. Since Metalabel, especially in the last two years, and since doing the Dark Forest book where I brought together 10 writers to make a book together, almost all of 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 with "conspiring" projects. These just involve a phone call a month, an open chat channel where we're passing things back and forth, and a sense of a larger project we're a part of. I'm part of perhaps a dozen things like that. It's really fun. It's rewarding. It's a fun project. It's interesting. **Jackson:** It is. **Yancey:** I am still being myself. I am still writing as myself; I'm still acting as myself. Yet, there are 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. There were people I looked up to when I began Metalabel who are now my core network. If I look around—I know people show the Twitter graph of who tweets like you—I can picture actual humans I am making stuff with right now who are some of the most impressive people I know. **Jackson:** They're in the ring with you, and we're... **Yancey:** We're figuring something out together. I'm going to look back on this period of my life with real gratitude and think, "Wait, I got to post up with all those?" Really? It's going to feel uncanny. But it's all just been this going with the network spirituality, taking me and connecting me, and it just keeps flowing. So there's something there. Josh Citarella and I talk a lot about this. 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. **Jackson:** It's building. You have this amazing metaphor that describes so much of what you just said: the antidote to 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. **Yancey:** You're still a star. **Jackson:** 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, is collective creativity in some sense. **Yancey:** Well, it's not. I want to— **Jackson:** Please. **Yancey:** I was at this Toby event last night. Toby brought up the word "collective," and someone else said, "No, no, I mean that in a good way." And Toby said, "I mean it 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. How you are most true to yourself is a beautiful, important practice that we all should go through. **Jackson:** That is, in some sense, individual. **Yancey:** It absolutely is. It's about a sense of individual discovery. But someone like Jung talks about individuation, which is about learning to identify who you are by how you relate to a group. "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. **Yancey:** But it's just allowing technology. Technology narrowed our window to say the individual post, the individual path, is the one. So technology narratives that it's not about your peer group or friends; it's about how many followers you get. But now technology is going to change. We've already seen that it's a false crown. The follower crown is a false, faulty, "be careful what you wish for" type of crown. Now we have squad wealth, group chat. Now we have a different form of power, a different sort of network, and something that still exists beyond public prizes. It's still about relationships. No one can see whether my group chats are with "baller" people or not. They may or may not be. **Jackson:** And to the extent you're chasing legitimacy, you're doing so as part of this. **Yancey:** If I look at what led me to have the ideas behind a lot of this meta label, a lot of these things, it was seeing how early punk bands and hardcore bands, when no one would want to put out their record, would make their own label, which was just a logo and a P.O. 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? I want to be like you." So there's this form of collective—sorry to use that word—collective legitimization. This way, it's like a mimetic... **Jackson:** Self-authoring legitimization, or like the way... **Yancey:** An A-frame holds itself up. There's just 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, we're going to put out two books this year that are going to be iconic. One is Nadia's Anti-Mortality. **Jackson:** Nadia's coming on the podcast. **Yancey:** We have another one coming out later this year that will be iconic, iconic. But there's going to be a scene that did not exist before, and it solely happened because 15 people made a little whirlpool of just running around. Now it's bringing things in, and it's growing. Anyone can do that. ## [00:51:51] Labels & Conspiring Together in Practice **Jackson:** 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? What are the elements that make a successful label? I would also add that my vantage point would say labels almost never last longer than maybe a decade at best. What goes into a label's continuing success? It goes back to the inherent tension in the post-individual idea: the best labels have a high degree of individuality and this collective group thing. Maybe eventually that runs out, like Odd Future. Tyler's doing his own thing now. I'm curious. **Yancey:** There's a delicate delicacy to it. **Yancey:** My career began as a music journalist. Music is my first love. I started a record label before, but I never really thought that deeply about them. A lot of my music discovery is through record labels. 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 see what else they released. You're looking at names. You mail order something else from the label, and suddenly you're really into Louisville Math Rock, all because you bought a Slint record or something. They were amazing portals into whole universes, so lovingly curated and so specific. I've always been aware of them, but then I read about the Royal Society, which started in 1660. Sir Christopher Wren and a group of natural law professors were involved. Natural law was the term for science back then, and these were things only God would know. This group of a dozen professors started meeting at a pub in London—the pub is still standing today—on Thursday nights, beginning in 1660. They were all fed up because facts were proven by the Church or the King. So they started a group, and their motto, in Latin, was "Take nobody's word for it." They began publishing one of the very first zines, \*Philosophical Transactions\*, which is still in print today, 400 years later. **Jackson:** Creativity's 100 years old in zines. They were ripping in 1600 zines. **Yancey:** Fucking own this shit. In Philosophical Transactions, they published the first experiments because the idea was proving facts through evidence. Let's try to prove facts through evidence. This was a new idea. Through those pages, peer review was invented iteratively. The scientific method was invented iteratively. This is where the Babbage machine was funded, where Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment discovering electricity was published. It was an iterative process—not a product of science, not a top-down designing of something, but simply a point of view: Prove facts through evidence. A group of people agreeing to publish under that shared point of view, under this shared banner. They publish publicly, and there are some rules about how it operates. I saw that a punk label, the Royal Society, A24, and Mischief—they're all ultimately some brand, something that exists to promote a cultural point of view. It puts out work by anyone who reflects that point of view, and there are some rules to make it operate. Suddenly, I could see that hundreds of years of cultural production have generally flowed through structures shaped like this. In many cases, an artist themselves proves to be very successful and also proves to have a business mind and sees how to make something bigger. Or, with their success, they want to create a larger halo, so they start to support other people. **Jackson:** Or Tyler brings Odd Future with him as he rises. **Yancey:** 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. Zoetrope is still an important project today. What it made me see in the internet of today was this: one of the reasons I was sad as a creator, struggling with happiness issues at the time, was that I was really on my own. I was grinding and trying to make a dent in the universe through my emails. But if I look throughout history, there's a different model I can adopt—a way I can be in more of a conspiracy, in more of a relation to other people. It involved not using the technological primitives of today but, as I said, looking back. How do I approximate that? **Jackson:** There's something interesting here. With the Royal Society, and presumably a lot of the Dark Forest type organizations you're in, it's not just that you're producing with the label, but you're also each other's audience, at least initially. I think of Other Internet; it's a very critical part of it. That's a really powerful thing that wasn't totally obvious to me initially. **Yancey:** Internally to the Dark Forest and our Telegram, there are definitely different personas. There are definitely ideas that I propose that Venkat is like, "Hell no." For sure. That's the beauty of it. What I've found, and what I caution people about, is that collaboration theater is not real. The idea of "Let's all get together and make something collectively" is really hard, not easy. You could graduate to that, but as a first step, it's probably going to be painful. Most of these conspiracies need a ringleader, and someone will end up doing more of the work, more of the organization. **Yancey:** You've got to be the person who starts it. I personally don't mind that; that's like being a good dinner party host. But for anything to work, it's going to need that. I've also found that if I send a group message out to everybody, no one responds. But if I email or text each person individually, they'll all send me their thoughts. You just learn things like that about how to get a group of people to do something together. The Dark Forest Collective was kind of fake. It was me forcing everyone to be my friend until the book itself was printed and everyone got their copy. And then it was like, "Oh, this is..." **Jackson:** Just for the audience's clarity, it was basically a book of essays. **Yancey:** A book of essays that everyone had already written before. **Jackson:** But then you guys saw a through-line in what you were reading, right? **Yancey:** Yes, they all happened to reference me in this original piece. And they're all pieces that I had read and appreciated. **Jackson:** You were sort of squaring the circle, maybe at the time. **Yancey:** Yes, I was. And now it's manifested into something. Now, Nadia shows up and says, "I like the Dark Forest vibe. I have a new book. I want to be with you." Another artist is doing the same later this year. **Jackson:** Something hanging over all of this, and going back to the individualism stuff: The story of the last 30 years is that 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 is that it's great to be one of the few individuals at the top of the power law. But individuals have never had more leverage. We're in the peak creator era, and there are all these downsides. I'm sensing some tension, and I'm curious. It goes back to when we were talking about collectivism. I see some of the downsides of the creator economy as, one, audience capture—audience capture with a failure point of one person's decision-making or ego. Individuals with the most leverage have all the leverage, or most distribution of all the leverage. So the story of every creator business is that Mr. Beast rules, and then you hope he likes you. There's less collaboration, which, to go back to your idea, is perhaps fine. Also, going back to labels, it's harder for new creatives to emerge on the back of curatorial brands. The best part about A24, in theory, or Pixar—I was thinking about this the other day in Paris—is that they made a movie about a talking rat on some guy's head. We're on the back of this movie era of the last 20 years where people complain no one makes anything new. Yes, of course, new, creative, rambunctious, rebellious people will show up and make new things. But the wonderful thing about Pixar, A24, or a music label is they say, "Hey, we know this is new, but trust us, we think you're going to like it." It feels like we've lost that. What I'm wondering is, why shouldn't this hyper-individual creator internet thing, this one-to-many broadcast era, just continue? Why? Another side of that is, why haven't we seen more labels actually work or show up? **Yancey:** For sure, that is going to continue. And for sure, that will be a huge strand and energy of what happens. Of course, Mr. Beast is not just Mr. Beast; Mr. Beast is a team of people. And certainly, once you get to a certain level, that is the case. But I think that... **Jackson:** But there's a dictator and there's an army. **Yancey:** It's a specific type of relationship. I think that will continue, but there are other countervailing energies that are going to also be a factor. Number one, there's just so much stuff. The noise, sifting, finding an audience, cultivating an audience, as an audience member finding things you like consistently: all really challenging. This is why being a part of a network, or being on the 2025 version of a blog roll with other quality people, is so important because it just— **Jackson:** What is the 2025 version of that? **Yancey:** "You will always like or repost; I will always post your story." It's mutual republishing. "I'll read your—" **Jackson:** It's not super scaled. **Yancey:** No, it's not. **Jackson:** Hanging over some of this, certainly for me, is that I don't want to be in a Discord. I'm just not looking to be in a Discord or any more Discords. I hear some of this, and it sounds cool, even your dark forest stuff. But I'm also—no, you got... **Yancey:** To keep it all. To me, it's all WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage. It's just simple. **Jackson:** Very much the squad, just simple. **Yancey:** It's not 50; it's not trying to keep people happy. It is a work zone, but a zone around a specific project or strand of things. I think one of the ways we are discovering to have more outsized success as an individual in this market today is to have a back-channel conspiracy with other people where you are co-promoting each other. It's one of the best thing that works. It's why brands do collabs. It is one of the last things that consistently works. That is a force. Number two, the tools are different and are going to be different. Already, if you compare Substack to Patreon—two services that provide basically the same functionality, with very little difference in reality—Substack made later. Substack has more nuance around multi-authors and multi-publications. There's a more modern notion that someone will have sub-identities and other things they're going to do. Whereas Patreon is more of a Kickstarter derivative. It's more from that era where websites are about very basic things; it's an account. But I think you're already seeing some evolutions in how these tools can function. In the post-crypto world, which we are moving into, that world will equal things like what we're doing with Metalabel: splits, treasuries, and fluid money being a basic function of the internet that we become used to. The notion of money easily flowing between people, not so clearly being "mine" and "yours," but things that disperse, distribute. We get a little bit from here, a little bit from there. That also is going to change our relationships. Right now, we have a very monogamous, monolithic approach to creative output. I think the future is a lot more poly. You have your main and you have your alts, and the income is coming from these different places. Probably your main is where you're doing your core brand work, and probably all the group label things you're doing are the fun stuff. That's your balance. **That gives you enough:** 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. **Jackson:** That feels pretty different than being a part of a company. One other thing, hearing you talk about this, is that it almost feels like the role of the label. Unlike maybe in 1990 or certainly earlier, 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 studios, now they are not. Distribution is owned by individuals. Josh Citarella has a massive audience that he's bringing to the Dark Forest thing. As are you, as is Venkat. The role of the label seems to be less on the distribution end and more on how we work together, how we organize, and maybe who our first set of audiences is. **Yancey:** That's interesting. I could see that. It is a tool to amalgamate those audiences into a concentrated distribution source. **Jackson:** But maybe it's more niche, or at least... **Yancey:** But down funnel, you need it to give a sense of permission, because otherwise, what are we doing here? Josh, Venkat, Peter, Carly—it's an organizing principle. What are we? You need the very first release of Metalabel. It ended up being called 'Introducing Meta Label.' The first title for a long time was 'Psychic Infrastructure.' That's what the label is. It's an organizing function that, to me, opens up a new door. We could do it that way. Not all of your work has to go in that channel, but it's clearly another path that I think speaks to some of what's lacking. ## [01:07:15] New Forms & Kickstarter **Jackson:** You started to get at the last big category I want to talk about, which is new forms. Along with a tremendous amount of publishing creative work, the primary thing you've done in your career is work on new forms. This is something we talked about a little bit the first time we met. My belief, and it seems you might agree, is that new behavior at a foundational and scaled level—or at least large-scale behavioral change—is a combination of both cultural norms and new technology or mechanistic forms. A simple way to think about this is that 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 a new premise. Think about Twitch, Airbnb, Substack, or Patreon. Technically, they allow you to rent someone else's house or live stream, but it's also establishing new norms. For example, with Twitch, it's okay to pay for content that's already free via subscription, or it's okay to stream video games. With Airbnb, it's okay to stay in someone else's house. With Patreon, it's okay to pay your favorite independent writer for their writing. It seems to me that's a good way to think about what new forms do. Before we talk about specifics, do you think that's right? Would you add anything? **Yancey:** When you're talking about a web-based way of thinking about it, you're talking about platforms and the normalization of format. And industrialization would maybe be a 1950s word for it, but it's like: how do you create a complete cycle of whatever this action is? If you can deliver that, it has the possibility of taking on a life of its own. People will learn how the machine works. **Jackson:** Let's look back a little bit, then we'll look at the present and look forward. **Jackson:** You spent a huge part of your career on two forms: one being Kickstarter and crowdfunding, the other being the Public Benefit Corporation. What are your reflections on what worked and what didn't work? More broadly, to what extent do you think you were enabled by the cultural era that was in, and to what extent were you either inhibited or even prisoners of that period, as you look back? **Yancey:** We began when Perry Chen first had the idea in 2001. We became friends in '05 and started working on it together. That was a different Internet in a lot of ways. MySpace was just starting then, and we were looking at the broader culture, 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. Because of that, they had no options. The options were so limited, and we would get ourselves so excited talking about how fans could fill that gap. At the time, Arrested Development was being canceled—a great show, the lowest-rated show on TV, but a great show. So we tried to create a crowdfunding campaign to save Arrested Development. The word crowdfunding didn't exist yet, but that was one of our ideas for early Kickstarter. Perry really saw it first: this strong feeling that people know what they want. Especially, a tool like Kickstarter wouldn't be like American Idol; it would be more about powering all these niches to represent themselves. **Jackson:** The idea was very Internet-native, truly understanding what the Internet was about earlier. **Yancey:** Yes. When Perry first told me about the idea, I thought, "This is American Idol. This sounds terrible." Then he said, "No. Think of the kid in Nebraska who makes a sculpture that someone in New York would get, but maybe not their neighbor. You're helping that person." Kickstarter was years before it launched because it was a different Internet and we were non-technical founders. But it didn't have a hockey stick moment. It also never not worked. It was quite painful to try to explain crowdfunding to people for many years before you could show them. You could show a mockup, but it was hard; it was a very boring conversation. But people got the mechanics quickly, and it helped that for the first three years, every Kickstarter video was someone explaining how Kickstarter worked, until by year three, no one had to. **Jackson:** Pretty amazing. So, you just saw talking about a new form, right? **Yancey:** Yes, watching how a platform and people are iteratively learning from each other. For example, the idea of a stretch goal came from Alison Weiss's project in her third week; she invented it on the fly, and everyone learned from her. You see how knowledge is produced, how norms are made, and then eventually, how those things professionalize. **Jackson:** Yes. And by the way, every single bottom-up Internet thing is like this. Twitter, for example: they didn't invent the hashtag. You see this pattern everywhere. **Yancey:** Yes. There is that phase, and we reached it in the App Store, for example. You have the amateur period where you can make Flappy Bird, or you can just do things. But then there comes a point where it becomes fully professionalized, and then there's a clear "after." There's a clear "after" for a market like that. I saw that come for us too: the increasing professionalization of it. It's still active. My reflections are still active, and I just recently rejoined the Kickstarter board. **Yancey:** After eight years, starting to think about it in a real way again is very interesting. We always faced real choices. All three of us who started—Charles Adler, Perry, and I—had very punk rock, New York City hip hop, Detroit techno, Chicago techno roots. We were always adamant about never selling out, never going public, being the Green Bay Packers of the Internet—the people's champ forever—doing it the right way, and not being like those assholes. We were always very motivated by that. That's part of what led us to be one of the first companies to become a public benefit corporation. Albert Wenger at Union Square Ventures was a part of that, told us about it, and said, "Hey, with your politics, the way you want to run the business, and all that, you should look at this. This is made for someone like you that's trying to carve a different path." So we became really excited about not just having cafeteria posters about what drove you, but actually inscribing it on a piece of paper in a filing cabinet in Delaware. That felt way more meaningful. We were always aware that we were unusual entrepreneurs. There weren't other creative entrepreneurs that we saw. We had friends who ran restaurants, buddies. **Jackson:** Unusual in Silicon Valley. **Yancey:** In technology. We never met other founders like us. Never. But we wanted to set an example. We wanted to pave a path for someone who wouldn't think of this as being something that they could do. **Jackson:** Yes. **Yancey:** And we ourselves were conflicted about doing it. We didn't want to be business people. We were creative people who were inspired by this idea, excited about it as a project. So we were always having this thought of building a bridge to somewhere so that someone else sees themselves and can be that. That's a hard thing. I wouldn't give us an A-plus grade on that. It's a challenging thing. But that has always been the spirit that we brought to the project. And I continue to believe in it. Probably one of my favorite things doing there was making The Creative Independent, which we did right after becoming a PBC because it mandated this arts advocacy. I thought, "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 a 16-year-old company, get to understand what that's like, which is a whole new thing. **Jackson:** There's something in what you were just saying, and something that came up earlier in the conversation, that Virgil Abloh also talked about all the time. I think it's so important for creative or artistic stuff: people being able to see it and see themselves in that. It even goes back to the new forms and the platform thing. I always talk to people about this: the ultimate genius of TikTok was, "Hey, you don't have to make a top-to-bottom, totally new YouTube video. Just do your 3%, do your version of this thing." I think that applies certainly in the new forms, but I think it applies broadly to all creativity. On the Kickstarter thing, especially having rejoined the board: Is there anything that you are excited about or imagine, maybe especially for people who might have an idea, have used Kickstarter in the past, and perhaps have the cynical view of it as a pre-order platform? What are the ways that platform could evolve or be used in new ways? **Yancey:** TBD. TBD. **Jackson:** I won't make you say that. **Yancey:** I had my first meeting this week, so TBD. It's a huge customer base. It's almost $10 billion or something; in the next year, it'll hit $10 billion. It's moved through it. It's a huge economic driver. It's driving more money every year than Patreon or Substack. it's been around, so it becomes invisible. There are definitely certain categories where it's found real product-market fit, especially in technology products and games. In others, where the 'giant scoreboard of money' is the vibe, it's not as great of a fit. I think it continues to deliver audience and funding to people in a way that's still very reliable. **Jackson:** Possibility in some sense, right? **Yancey:** Absolutely. The attitude was always: The internet needs a place where anyone can get a chance, and how do you make that? 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 Metalabel is that we believe Metalabel itself is an entity that is alive, separate from us. It has desires and non-desires that make some things hard or easy, and you have to learn to listen. I think Kickstarter wants to be certain things, and we've struggled to listen. If you take an approach of asking what is this called to be, I'm curious what that looks like. **Jackson:** If we really listen. ## [01:18:44] Metalabel **Jackson:** You've mentioned it a whole bunch of times, and we've talked about 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, as I understand it, is a platform built on the premise that collective—well, I'm using that word again. What do we decide? Territorial creation—by way of distribution and economic tooling in particular. Probably a whole bunch of other things, including the legitimacy piece. What is the goal of Metalabel, and how are you enabling new legitimacy? **Yancey:** Metalabel will try some new language I've never said out loud before. Right now, Metalabel is a creative network. It's a system you can use to publish, sell, and catalog your work. It's meant to operate for you working on your own, as well as for 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 actual creative work, not like some random data in a database somewhere. **Jackson:** Or a social media post. **Yancey:** Or a social media post. It's more meaningful than Instagram, easier than Shopify, and you're in a network, so it's a place. **Jackson:** It seems to be a little more built around content. Is that wrong? **Yancey:** I think it's certainly. **Jackson:** Better for content than Shopify. **Yancey:** A release page is like a catalog page for you to both document the work and make it available. We sold half a million dollars worth of zines and art through Metalabel in the past year. There were 20,000 to 25,000 transactions. It's a place meant to honor the creative person as not just a poster. Creative work has context in which it is understood. Creative work often has many authors that are hard things to represent in specific places. It came from me feeling frustrated with how my work felt relying on Instagram and Twitter to be its home, so ephemeral. And then, having a Squarespace, Wix, or Shopify, where my work is just random data in a trapped server, that I lose the second I stop paying them X amount per month. I was always thinking, what is that other mode? It's a product where someone can make a page, begin publishing, sell work, and invite other people to collaborate. It makes all the money sharing, split payments, and getting a royalty on anything stupid easy, without crypto, all using Stripe, bank accounts, and things that we made. I've spent a lot of time the past year talking about these features that we've built because they were hard to make, and we felt, "Oh my God, we did it!" I 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, offering a degree of respect, and allowing them to establish a real relationship as a creative person rather than just treating them as a generic content producer. It's a quixotic project that has taken its time to find itself, and I think it's becoming clearer. This is a project on its path to becoming core Internet architecture, just like Arena, Craigslist, and Bandcamp. It's one of those things that does a set of tasks extremely well, is very simple, doesn't try to do too much, and proves to be useful. We're not trying to crank the marketing flywheel up to a million to drive huge amounts of growth super fast. Legitimacy is about time. Legitimacy is about proving yourself repeatedly, just showing up. I understand there's no shortcut to trust. If we behave with the same degree of integrity and vision we have to date for another two years, I think we're going to wake up and be: Substack, YouTube, Metalabel. What are the core parts of your infrastructure for where your work lives? It's that kind of thing. **Jackson:** If you used Substack, YouTube, and Metalabel, what part of your work or what part of your commerce is happening there, and why? Or Patreon maybe is a closer example than Substack. **Yancey:** Metalabel is where your drops are happening. 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. You could link to the YouTube store in that future world, or something like that. But Metalabel is where your one-off drops are, and where your catalog of actual works you're putting out is. **Jackson:** But it's content-forward or product-forward, rather than, "Maybe I subscribe to Josh on Patreon?" **Jackson:** But if I wanted to buy a specific piece or something... **Yancey:** 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 SKU. That's where I think he'll look at Metalabel: I have a following there, it plugs into my existing audiences and tools, I can sell digital or physical very easily, and I can make things scarce. There are 20,000 people who actively buy things there. I would hope that it becomes, "Hey, that's where I do that." **Jackson:** We're talking about new forms. Are there specific forms that you found are particularly emerging? With Kickstarter Classic, tabletop games became this crazy thing. What are the forms, both digital or physical, that are starting to emerge? **Yancey:** The two I can see so far—and I don't think it will be all—are, number one, the majority of Collects on Metalabel to date have been for digital things, and a lot of zip files. **Jackson:** Your pieces that we've been talking about are all available. It's really cool; you don't just get the blog post, you get your research and your little intro video. **Yancey:** I just try to make it so: how would I properly express this? If I really tried to, if I ask myself, what is at stake for me in this? **Jackson:** How would I share that, rather than doing so via the Instagram lens? **Yancey:** I'll still post something on IG; that's a billboard. **Jackson:** This is the thing. **Yancey:** If I really sit down and ask myself, "What is it about for me?" then I try to express that. You end up with a handmade digital thing. I've seen zips for five bucks—five bucks 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: a couple thousand dollars for a zip file. **Jackson:** We don't really pay for content. We either pay with our eyeballs via ads, or we pay subscriptions to creators. Paying for content is still extraordinarily rare. **Yancey:** $5 for a zip or PDF—people do it all the time. There is a price point by which someone will say, "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—there's not a good reading experience or any of that yet. **Yancey:** That, I think, is interesting. The other one that has been around forever and is part of labels and punk forever; but I think we, especially with things happening soon with us, are going to make our zines—self-expression—a whole other level. 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 back from the publisher and I saw my name on it, it was a major moment. **Jackson:** You—the Dark Forest thing. It's a bunch of blog posts that are really cool. And to put that in context, this is happening for Toby—Toby from Other Internet—something that I and so many other people have enjoyed for so long. There's a website, but it's kind of this spread-out collage, and you're creating an artifact that embodies it, which is really powerful. **Yancey:** The majority of projects on Metalabel have been zines. People self-releasing 500 or less of something. 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, SF, or New York, it's crazy how many tables there are and how many people there are to buy things. It's a big scene. We've made more zines happen than ever. Digital zines are a real thing. We're going to have a product update coming. **Jackson:** You help produce the zines? **Yancey:** No. In some cases... **Jackson:** Have a list of Nadia's book. Presumably you're helping produce and publish. **Yancey:** Yes, there are ones where I'm personally the publisher. I've made a lot of these in the past year, so we have a list of printers that we like, et cetera. We're going to have a product coming in June where you'll be able to take a link—a Substack or a link to anything—and within five minutes, sell a print-on-demand zine that contains as many things as you want. It could be 30 things you've written. In less than five minutes, you can be selling a print-on-demand, professional, beautiful zine through Metalabel, legitimizing yourself like that. That's an important step for people to look at themselves differently and to feel like I did. **Jackson:** I've done something and reflect on this waterfall of ephemerality. **Yancey:** Imagine soon, you're getting a Substack. Under the tops, it says: "Get the zine. Five bucks. Commemorate this." You like this post? You like my work? Here you go. Cool. That, to me, is very much about legitimacy, ways of standing out. Of course, the way culture works is, eventually, so many people will make these, they will lose their power, and then it moves somewhere else. If you look through again, following the early labels thing: what do you do? You self-publish. You self-legitimize by being alongside other people. That is often enough to get the flywheel going, bring other people in, and suddenly you have a culture. Being at Toby's thing last night, watching people talk about the history of the Internet [Toby was leading it], I also heard people mention the word 'lore'—not thinking of him. Several people had lengthy things about dark forests, and just talking about them is a part of our understanding. There's a shared space that we're navigating. I feel the world is evolving to meet us, and we are evolving to meet it. **Jackson:** 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, The New Creative Era, which is quality of reach. And this notion that, to go back to all this other stuff we were talking about and creators, you can play one game. This is a metaphor I love from C.T. Nguyen. He writes about games and a whole bunch of other things, and how what we measure defines our values. He gives the analogy of a tweet versus a classroom: the teacher who says something to a room of 30 students, and 29 don't care, and one of their eyes lights up—that's high fidelity to them. Meanwhile, you post a tweet and it gets 30 likes, and you don't know if that means 30 people loved it or 30 people incrementally liked it. This obviously gets into 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 is: what do I do? I actually want to deliver something for the people who really, truly care about what I have to make. **Yancey:** A fully opt-in environment. 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, open up new possibilities, and actually treat creative people as businesses and not just a... **Jackson:** Revenue behind the crypto stuff too? I just think unfortunately, the layer of speculation doesn't necessarily fit super well with the super hardcore fans, as much as we want. ## [01:31:56] Creativity and Commerce & A Brand New Form: The Artist Corporation **Jackson:** 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. 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 that comes from Broadway, which is amazing. It really feels like it describes most people's experience of making things on the Internet. But you also say the great benefit of capitalism is collective wealth creation: you don't just make money from your own labor. This is a really powerful idea that has certainly been internalized by startups and companies but hasn't been internalized by artists or creatives. 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, is this new form, this new legal structure that you're working on, going to help enable this path? **Yancey:** We love bold claims. I believe it. I had a moment. The Dark Forest work was going well, and I was working on Nadia's book last year. I could foresee that our little collective, which was a Telegram group, was going to have six figures worth of sales in a year. I thought, I should be more real about this, and started looking into legal structures for us and felt uninspired. **Jackson:** Just to be clear, for the collective. **Yancey:** For the collective. I felt uninspired by being an LLC, which is a default because it's just a legal shield. I didn't feel it reflected anything about us, and C Corp and nonprofit were both non-starters. I jumped to that experience watching PBCs become law, where I had a third-row seat to watch how part of that happened. I thought about the steps necessary to create a new legal form and had this flash. I think because I've been thinking so much about collective value creation through Metalabel already, I had this flash of: what if you could create a new legal structure for the type of project we were doing? I reached out to a friend who knew a lot of lawyers and had a team of two lawyers answering some questions for me. After a few weeks, they came back and said, "Congratulations, you found something. There's a gap here that you could address." The idea I'd proposed to them was that we make a new legal form called an artist corporation, or an A corp. An A corp would be like an S Corp, which is a small business corporation, or like an LLC. It would be a for-profit entity with a creative purpose alongside a financial or sustainability purpose. As a for-profit entity, it would be able to accept commercial revenue and 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 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. Then, an artist corp would be able to fractionalize into equity, create shares, and operate like a startup would, which is not something available to creative people now. Additionally, artist corporations give access to healthcare benefits and other things you get by being part of an entity. **Jackson:** Historically, you could do this with a brand, but critically, not with any of these other permutations of identities. We just spent a couple of hours. **Yancey:** We started digging into this legally. That started last July, August. Since then, for the past almost year, I've been speaking to many artists, managers, and industry people at every level about this idea. I have never had doors open up or people be as welcoming as I've experienced with this. 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. For example, you see big companies like Hipgnosis are now like Blackstone, buying Bruce Springsteen's catalog for $600 million. They're treating songwriting as a capital asset that they're acquiring to generate— **Jackson:** An incredibly durable idea. An incredibly durable one. **Yancey:** Artists themselves, the money they make is looked at as straight income. It's not equity; it is not a form of capital. It is an income stream. Yet a financial entity can turn it into an asset in a way that an artist or creator cannot. 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, if you worked on Friends or something, you'd get residuals forever—that's the equivalent. But there isn't that same level of access. I believe a lot of that is a mix of things. Number one, art and creativity are recent, so these are still nascent spaces that aren't that sophisticated in some ways. The number of people making a living in these professions is quite small because it's been gatekept; there are only so many movies a studio puts out a year. All of those things are so different now. We have reached a different environment where 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, that whole world is dying. It's not real anymore. **Jackson:** Institutions ironically held the space—held enough space—to not require something like this for a while, whether in academia, Hollywood, or music. **Yancey:** Now we're in a place where, again, more people than ever are acting as creators. Some people are doing very well at it, yet we all basically function as 1099 NPCs. We're not real players in the larger economic system. We're rounding errors. Yet we are where culture is going. We are where the economy is going. We are one of the fastest— **Jackson:** Growing future of small businesses. **Yancey:** One of the fastest-growing business types is this. Every other business type has its own corporate form. You have a C corp for startups, an LLC for law firm partners. Everything has its own form. My belief is that art, creative practices, and cultural production have reached a level of size and maturity, and have needs specific enough, that creating a dedicated form, a new capital base, and a whole new area of the economy is necessary. Our goal is to do this. You have to pass laws at the state level. We have a plan for how to do that. Optimistically, a first law could be passed next year in a specific state in 2026. There could be a pilot program to make sure the first 100 are treated well. I expect the first few years of this to be slow, with a lot of figuring out the right way to structure these things, the right PE ratio, and so many other things to be determined. But by year 10 and on, and especially generations from now, artist corporations will be extremely competitive. The next Disney and the next Pixar, things like that, are going to be A corps. In many areas, they will compete against C corps. They will compete against businesses as we think of them today, and they will outcompete them. In a world of AI making everything a function of input-output, the special traits of the artist will continue to be valuable. AI becomes a tool they also use. **Jackson:** We also think about this notion—it's not exactly the same idea—that there could be a billion-dollar, one-person company. That's adjacent to this. It depends on what specifically they're doing. But software and media are increasingly starting to look similar. **Yancey:** I've come to feel that this is a new door that we will open up. Just as I experienced with crowdfunding, once it was out in the wild and had oxygen, it felt incredibly obvious, and iteratively we learned what to do with it. My feeling is the same can happen here. 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. The ultimate outcome is more capital moves into creative spaces. Creative people are empowered to operate as real businesses and not infantilized as a quasi-permalancer or something. I think you begin to see a different sort of creative economy take shape. **Jackson:** 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, et cetera, even Kickstarter, have 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. Maybe it's Patreon. **Yancey:** It's a basket of things. Some of it is for sure patronage. Probably the biggest spins will be paid. Both the smallest and the biggest spins might be a form of patronage. **Jackson:** Which is just at its very simple core, "Hey, I like what you're doing. I'm going to support you with a little bit." **Yancey:** I'm into you. And that love is still the biggest driver. After that, I think there's an interesting mix of things. If I play this out to its full mature capitalist place, what do I see? Number one, I think A Corp equity is just like startup equity. The notion of being a part owner of Throwing Fits or Tim Ferriss or Beggars Banquet or whatever is like to be on the Uber cap table. At a certain point, that really meant a lot in status and meaning, and a whole lot in access to wealth. I think you will see proximity and access and ownership to certain creative projects similarly having a mix of status and wealth that come as a part of it. Advertising has made up the gap in creative income for people at the top of the food chain, especially in music. Syncing and ads has replaced what was CDs, and in many cases, people will do better, the right artist. I think that only grows. You see it with influencers being paid to endorse products. I think all of that just keeps going. Right now, if you're a musician, a label will advance you money that is recouped against, and you get like 12% back. In the future, I think some of that is more like 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 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. There's a lot of ways to think about that. A lot of them would probably be distasteful to the Yancey: of 15 years ago. But I've taken 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 made through human, certain predictable mechanical instruments. **Jackson:** Intrinsically scarce. **Yancey:** Yes. That defines whatever till 2022, or I don't know what the line will be. Now we're in a new period of permanent modernity where our cultural memory is completely reset every 48 hours. And what creativity is, it's all a whole new thing. But at its best, the same force of God, the same human energy, the same truth will be channeled through it. I believe that force is more powerful than anything, more powerful than any model. It sits at the top of every pyramid. It is way above the API line. That will continue to govern, I think. We will keep trying to control it, but it's what we're all ultimately a part of. ## [01:46:22] The Long Game: Supporting the Artistic and Creative Life **Jackson:** You recently wrote a piece about the long game. You've also talked about this idea of praxis, which is: 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 overnarrativize 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? **Yancey:** I've never had a forward-looking narrative. I'm more constantly self-critical and self-doubting. I have a hyper-puritan temperament, and I like to work hard. The harder it is, the more I'm going to throw myself into it. I don't know what sort of sickness I got, but it is nonstop for me. I'm always pulled to understand my own feelings. There's a lot of this circular thing I go through. It's why so much of the Sherry Turkle stuff really resonates with me. Writing the Dark Forest theory is a way of understanding my own behavior. I'm trying to express it, look at it, and see what I think. I have learned I've found my product-market fit or my format fit—the things that click for me. I've come to see that it's about creative forms. I recently went through a life planning exercise someone encouraged me to do, which I was quite resistant to. Then I talked to some very impressive people, and they said she had them do it, so I decided to do it. It ends up with: What are your two purposes in life and what is your obituary? It's a long process that takes several weeks, with iterations where you have to stop and come back. Ultimately, it comes down to that. One thing popped out from that which makes sense now, but I hadn't seen. One of the outcomes of my life is to be someone who did a lot to support the artistic and creative life. Doing that by being it, doing it with Kickstarter, with Creative Independent, with Metalabel, with A Corpse. We'll see if other things happen or whether those things stand any test of time. Knowing that isn't going to change what I do, because I'm just going to keep being interested and curious. I can't wait to have a week off so I can write about astrology. I can't wait for ten years from now to write a series of fantasy novels that have been a side project for a long time. There are so many places I feel drawn. Maybe at earlier parts of my life, ego was calling the shots. One of the great gifts of Kickstarter was to satisfy that ego, allow it to shut up, and be a little bit more still. Now, I hope I'm being called by the source. I hope it's something real. Every time I'm in the midst of a project, I feel the same panic: I don't know what I'm doing. This is maybe a waste of time. Oh, my God. Then, for me, just when I'm falling on my face, I catch a glimpse and see the flash of, "Oh, it's that. It's that." And then you keep going. I always think about the Virgil Abloh line: No work is as good as being able to make the next one. **Jackson:** 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. 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, and a father. If what you were just talking about is what you would want to be known for, who do you want to be known as? **Yancey:** It isn't you. It takes a while. I was talking to someone about this today that Metalabel is still me. It's not only me. It's the group of us; it's all of us. But A Corp's is already not me. I can feel it. A Corp's is like a Rottweiler I found in an alley that's like, "Hey, who does this belong to?" and it's just going to unleash itself on the world. It is not mine. It is not mine. Metalabel still is. But there's a good friend of my family and my wife, an 88 or 89-year-old man, Paulie Paul Waters. He talks about how he's happier than he's ever been in his life, every day, because he just learned to love himself, appreciate himself, and not look externally for anything, but simply to love himself the way he would a friend. Imagine your friend who you just think the world of. Think of the way you look at them and their actions; look at yourself that way. For him, the ability to do that is something he still learns every day, and it brings him infinite joy. He can just look inside, and he'll spend a whole day just writing his memories. He's a brilliant man, and it just brings him immense joy to see them and to feel them. I have a core friend group, maybe six to eight people who have been best friends for life, all of life. We will always. I see them all at least once a year. They live all around the world, my best, best friends. They said to me before, "In all your writing and stuff, you're so serious. You're always so serious." But the experience of me as a person, I think, is not that at all. I can be deep, but I'm quite light, and I joke around a lot. I grew up in a family where you give each other shit to give love. There's a lot of nuance to how to be and express. I'm so comfortable with that being something that is a part of my deepest friendships, and it's a part of who my spirit is. But it doesn't have to be flexed; it doesn't belong. Maybe I'm algorithmically optimizing by thinking, "Don't try my corny jokes. Don't fucking mock people, many selves." But I'm good with it. I'm good with it because I'm learning to love myself. That's about my relationship to me. The better that is, the better my relationship is with my wife, with my friends, and with my partners, and the more I'm able to be honest. That is the biggest journey and quest in life. It's infinite reward. Infinite reward. Knowing, appreciating, understanding yourself, letting go of that tension we feel of not knowing how to show up, just being able to be, getting over that—it's infinite reward. Infinite reward. It never stops, and it just keeps giving you that. 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 your heart is in it, you will have wonder. You can do the exact same thing inside of yourself and have all the same feelings, all the same realizations, and all the same truths. Life is an invitation to discover that. And I say yes. **Jackson:** Yancy, thank you very much. This is wonderful. **Yancey:** Thank you, brother.