The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | But I thought I would start today's episode reacting to my own article.

00:00:05.920 | So the day before we're recording this episode, I published my, my latest for the

00:00:13.080 | New Yorker was a bit of a longer piece and I've been reading, writing recently.

00:00:16.600 | It was more of a 5,000 word, more of an Epic piece.

00:00:20.080 | And, uh, the title is the rise of the internet's creative middle class.

00:00:26.720 | And, uh, I thought I would go through just the big ideas from this article.

00:00:29.960 | And then I have a couple of follow-up points about some follow-up points, not

00:00:33.920 | in the article, but based on reactions I've gotten to the article since it's come out.

00:00:39.000 | So if you're watching this, instead of listening to this, I also have the article

00:00:42.200 | loaded up here on the HQ tablet.

00:00:44.760 | So you can actually see the words I'm talking about.

00:00:46.640 | If you're just listening though, I'll, I'll read what I'm saying.

00:00:48.600 | So you'll be able to follow along.

00:00:49.880 | All right.

00:00:51.280 | So I just want to give you the, the, the main bullet points is 5,000 words.

00:00:55.600 | There's, you know, a lot of details, but the, the article opened with me

00:01:00.280 | going to the studio of breaking points.

00:01:02.760 | So breaking points is a internet news show.

00:01:08.800 | Uh, it's hosted by Sagar and Jetty and Crystal Ball.

00:01:13.880 | So they both come from journalism backgrounds, Sagar from the right,

00:01:18.800 | Crystal from the left.

00:01:20.120 | So Sagar used to be the white house correspondent for the daily caller.

00:01:24.520 | Crystal was a host of a show on MSNBC.

00:01:29.040 | Uh, years ago, they came together to do a show together called rising.

00:01:32.760 | That was filmed at the Hill, the publication, the Hill here in DC.

00:01:38.040 | And the whole idea was someone from the left, someone from the

00:01:39.720 | right talking about the news.

00:01:40.960 | Uh, and then they went independent.

00:01:42.920 | And so a couple of years ago, they went independent and said,

00:01:44.600 | we can do this ourselves.

00:01:45.640 | And so I went to their studio.

00:01:46.720 | They leased some studio space downtown here in downtown DC.

00:01:49.760 | They have a cool set $60,000 camera system that films at a really high

00:01:55.640 | resolution so that you can stream this onto big screen TVs.

00:01:58.560 | And it looks really nice, real control room with actual, you know, upper

00:02:03.600 | middle-aged engineer control room type men in there working, try casters and.

00:02:08.040 | And the sound and it was a real professional operation.

00:02:11.120 | They do a new show.

00:02:11.960 | Uh, it's on the internet.

00:02:13.240 | If you subscribe, you get it on YouTube.

00:02:15.160 | There's a podcast version.

00:02:16.440 | They put clips of it on YouTube, uh, for free.

00:02:19.000 | So I went to visit this and visit them.

00:02:20.560 | If the names sound familiar, it's they've gotten a lot of

00:02:23.600 | exposure through Joe Rogan.

00:02:25.240 | So he likes them because they come at news from the left and the right.

00:02:29.920 | And so they end up in kind of independent territory as opposed to just trying to

00:02:33.760 | work backwards from what's our point.

00:02:35.240 | So they're on that show a lot.

00:02:36.160 | I think that's, that helped them grow, but they had a history from before them.

00:02:39.560 | Um, and I've been on, I was on rising to talk about one of my

00:02:42.560 | books before they went independent.

00:02:43.640 | I've been on Saugers podcast.

00:02:44.880 | So I've, I've crossed paths with them before.

00:02:48.320 | All right.

00:02:48.480 | So you look at that show, um, and you see that it's doing well.

00:02:52.000 | It's doing well.

00:02:54.360 | It does not require nearly the overhead of their old traditional TV shows.

00:02:59.600 | They have only eight hourly contractors and yet their viewership metrics are

00:03:04.640 | already outpacing their former show.

00:03:06.320 | So they have more views.

00:03:07.280 | If you look on YouTube, if you look at podcast downloads, whatever

00:03:09.840 | metrics you want to look at.

00:03:10.840 | They're doing better than the old traditionally produced TV show

00:03:15.320 | at a fraction of the cost.

00:03:17.960 | So my point is early in this article is, uh, that's interesting.

00:03:21.240 | And maybe there's a lesson to be learned there about the evolution of news.

00:03:23.800 | But the reason why I was focusing on breaking points, the reason why I wanted

00:03:27.040 | to introduce them to the readers of this article is that I think they

00:03:30.360 | show a more important trend.

00:03:33.280 | And here's my exact words from the article, one in which a dismissed

00:03:37.840 | prophecy about the potential of the internet to support creative work

00:03:41.600 | might be making a triumphant return.

00:03:45.600 | So they are my piece of evidence that a once dismissed prophecy about the

00:03:49.280 | internet might be finally coming true.

00:03:52.240 | All right.

00:03:52.640 | So what is that prophecy?

00:03:53.680 | Well, we got to go all the way back to 2008.

00:03:56.240 | Remember 2008 was a very different time than the web is today.

00:04:01.560 | This was at the beginning of the web 2.0 revolution.

00:04:04.720 | So this was the beginning of that idea that you as a consumer could

00:04:09.160 | contribute content to the web.

00:04:11.760 | As opposed to just going to websites and consuming content.

00:04:15.360 | We're used to that now, but it was a big deal back then.

00:04:19.120 | So it was in 2008 when web 2.0 was first becoming a thing that Kevin Kelly,

00:04:23.720 | the former executive editor of Wired, actually the founding executive editor

00:04:29.200 | of Wired, uh, and general techno optimist.

00:04:32.280 | So someone who, uh, provided a nice blurb for so good.

00:04:36.280 | They can't ignore you.

00:04:36.880 | He had a nice blurb for a world without email.

00:04:38.640 | So I've crossed paths with Kevin Kelly over the years.

00:04:41.000 | He wrote a very internet important, I would say essay called a thousand true fans.

00:04:45.440 | This is going to be the prophecy that this article is about.

00:04:50.400 | So the basic idea with a thousand true fans is Kevin Kelly was saying now

00:04:54.800 | that the internet is here, now that the internet is interactive, now that

00:04:57.040 | you can produce and post content as easily as you can consume it.

00:05:00.520 | This is going to be a boon for creative professionals because now as a creative

00:05:09.480 | professional, you can not only post your stuff online, you can interact with people.

00:05:15.720 | Online you have, uh, at your fingertips, this whole vast audience of the entire

00:05:20.800 | world's population and all you have to do, and this was his thousand true fans

00:05:24.080 | concept, all you had to do is find a, and cultivate a small, but loyal fan base.

00:05:29.920 | Of all the millions and millions of internet users.

00:05:32.360 | If you can find, this was his math, a thousand loyal supporters,

00:05:37.120 | each of whom is willing to spend a hundred dollars a year on you and your art.

00:05:41.440 | You're now making a good middle-class living doing creative work.

00:05:45.800 | Those was a really big deal essay.

00:05:48.920 | It was really influential because the idea was pre-internet.

00:05:52.720 | If you were a creative type, you only had access to the people who were

00:05:58.320 | proximate to you, the people who live near you, the people who lived in your

00:06:02.080 | town, unless you were one of the vanishing people, you were not going to

00:06:06.080 | be a vanishingly small few who had access to national international

00:06:10.640 | broadcast platforms like television or newspapers, but there was such a

00:06:13.880 | small number of people who could be in the movies or be on TV or be in the

00:06:17.360 | newspaper that almost everyone else who wanted to do creative work, you only

00:06:20.560 | had access to people who happened to be nearby.

00:06:22.600 | And it was probably going to be difficult for you to find enough real

00:06:25.840 | spans who lived within 50 miles of you to actually make a living.

00:06:30.600 | And Kelly's point is the internet changes that because now you can

00:06:33.920 | assemble these thousand true fans from anywhere around the world

00:06:36.240 | and make a living off of it.

00:06:38.200 | So now you've unlocked the economic potential for lots of different

00:06:40.960 | creative types to actually make a living doing creative work.

00:06:44.040 | As I argued, this essay hit right as the economic crisis of 2008 was picking up

00:06:50.720 | steam, so it was really aspirational.

00:06:52.800 | People's savings were going away.

00:06:55.080 | Their retirement accounts were disappearing.

00:06:56.760 | Their jobs were either they were losing them or they're having the screws

00:06:59.960 | turned to them working longer for less money because everyone was faltering.

00:07:04.680 | And this idea of, hey, with this new technology, forget this diminishing rat

00:07:08.680 | race, you can make a living, support your family doing creative work.

00:07:12.080 | Very aspirational.

00:07:13.040 | This essay became very popular.

00:07:15.920 | Right.

00:07:17.200 | Here's the part that most people didn't know about.

00:07:18.920 | If you go back and look at the reception of this essay, yes, it became very popular,

00:07:23.760 | but almost immediately there was pushback.

00:07:26.480 | And one of the strongest sources of pushback came from Jaron Lanier, whose

00:07:33.120 | work I talk about a lot on the show.

00:07:35.280 | Jaron knew Kevin Kelly.

00:07:37.120 | They've known each other since the eighties.

00:07:38.840 | When Kevin first met Jaron to interview him about his pioneering

00:07:44.200 | work on virtual reality, they were both techno optimists from the West coast scene.

00:07:49.960 | Jaron Lanier in particular was a really big open culture advocate.

00:07:53.560 | Software should be free.

00:07:55.280 | Bit should be free.

00:07:56.320 | The internet's going to create this sort of utopian world.

00:07:59.000 | What had happened to Jaron though, we've talked about this before on the show, is

00:08:02.560 | he took a hard turn towards skepticism.

00:08:05.480 | He eventually went back and renounced his techno optimist views and said, the

00:08:13.800 | internet is not going the way I hoped.

00:08:15.720 | And the internet is beginning to bifurcate the haves and the have not.

00:08:20.080 | And all the, all the, the value generated is ossifying at a very small number of

00:08:26.120 | companies and a very small number of individuals that have a lot of stock in

00:08:28.960 | those companies.

00:08:29.360 | So he had, he had had this turn towards skepticism around this point.

00:08:32.360 | And he looked to Kevin Kelly's a thousand true fans essay and almost

00:08:36.080 | immediately came back and said, Kevin, this makes sense on paper, but if it was

00:08:41.080 | true, we should see more people doing this successfully.

00:08:44.000 | So where are all of these artists and musicians that have a thousand true fans

00:08:49.240 | that they have cultivated online, making a middle-class living.

00:08:51.800 | The web has been around now for a while.

00:08:53.480 | Technologically, this has been possible for a while.

00:08:55.960 | Where are they?

00:08:57.320 | And this is, this is a little known chapter in this history, but, but Kevin

00:09:00.720 | actually posted a follow-up essay.

00:09:02.960 | It's pretty soon after.

00:09:04.360 | And he explained Jaren's hesitancy and he said, okay, let's, let's prove Jaren wrong.

00:09:13.680 | And I, in fact, I have the exact wording here in the article.

00:09:17.040 | He said, okay, to prove Jaren wrong, this is Kevin Kelly, right.

00:09:21.400 | Into his audience, simply submit a candidate in the comments, a musician

00:09:25.640 | with no ties to old media models now make it a hundred percent of their

00:09:28.480 | living in the open media environment.

00:09:31.520 | Right.

00:09:32.200 | So Jaren complained, Kevin said, no, no, I'm sure artists and creative

00:09:37.600 | types living on this model exist.

00:09:39.400 | And let's find them.

00:09:40.680 | And he challenged his readers and they couldn't find anybody.

00:09:44.200 | The way Jaren summarized it later in his book, you are not a gadget, which you

00:09:49.440 | should read if you have not very influential book for techno criticism

00:09:52.640 | circles, they identified a handful at most of artists who satisfy that theory.

00:09:59.680 | And if you really go down the rabbit hole on this and look at the artists they

00:10:02.880 | found, it was kind of questionable whether they qualified or not.

00:10:05.760 | Like they basically couldn't find anyone.

00:10:07.360 | And by the time Jaren published, you were not a gadget is a chapter about a thousand

00:10:12.040 | true fans in that manifesto where he's like, this just didn't work.

00:10:14.800 | That's a true fans was hopeful, but it wasn't actually something that we saw.

00:10:23.040 | Come to fruition.

00:10:23.840 | And so for people who studied the internet, it was sort of this sad case study of

00:10:29.480 | optimism that soon bled away.

00:10:33.240 | So what actually happened here?

00:10:35.400 | Well, I think Jaren Lanier has a really good argument that it was the structure,

00:10:40.120 | the evolving structure of the web itself that scuttled the feasibility of a

00:10:46.760 | thousand true fans, and in particular, the hijacking of web 2.0 by a small number of

00:10:53.040 | large social media platform monopolies like Facebook and then later Instagram and

00:10:59.520 | Twitter.

00:11:00.120 | And the way Jaren tells us, I think it's a really important critique is that Google

00:11:06.200 | ads came along earlier in the two thousands and they showed that embedded ads could

00:11:12.480 | make money.

00:11:13.160 | So in other words, putting ads on content that normal individuals made.

00:11:18.440 | So here's my website, here is calnewport.com and I'm doing Google adsense and it

00:11:23.120 | will automatically put ads onto the content I generated.

00:11:26.000 | This made a lot of money for Google.

00:11:28.320 | It became a basically a money minting machine.

00:11:30.800 | And there was this aha light that went on in the techno circles out in Silicon

00:11:34.800 | Valley, which is web 2.0 means lots of people are creating a lot of content.

00:11:39.560 | All of that content can be essentially the fertilizer for our advertising money

00:11:44.840 | trees.

00:11:45.160 | So social media came along and even though it originally pushed itself as being about

00:11:52.200 | connection and relationships and making it easier to express yourself and connect to

00:11:56.080 | others, that was not the pitch being made to investors.

00:11:58.760 | The pitch being made to investors is all of these millions of people are going to be

00:12:01.880 | generating content.

00:12:02.800 | If we can get that content generated on our servers, on our platforms, we get all the

00:12:08.040 | money from all the ads we can place on it.

00:12:10.280 | And so a small number of companies basically hijacked the web 2.0 revolution.

00:12:15.360 | It said, yeah, yeah, yeah, you should express yourself on the web, but you do it in

00:12:19.000 | our walled garden.

00:12:19.840 | We can control it.

00:12:21.600 | And that became, as Jaren explains it, the downfall of the thousand true fans model,

00:12:26.840 | because once these companies were making hundreds of billions of dollars evaluation

00:12:30.920 | appear out of nowhere, just off of the back of this digital sharecropping that was

00:12:37.520 | occurring out there in this hijacked world of web 2.0, they began pushing their

00:12:43.000 | technology platforms to optimize the money this made.

00:12:46.000 | And this, this eventually led to these streaming style models.

00:12:50.440 | Twitter led the way, but then Facebook and Instagram followed.

00:12:53.200 | These models where you were no longer even going to social media homepages of

00:12:58.680 | individuals.

00:12:59.400 | You were no longer posting on the wall of your friend on Facebook.

00:13:02.440 | Algorithms would just pull interesting information off of the platform and put it

00:13:07.280 | into an infinite scroll stream.

00:13:08.720 | And you as a consumer would just keep scrolling through this.

00:13:11.840 | Everything you were seeing was designed to hit your fancy, to give you distraction

00:13:18.600 | in the moment, to give you those little chemical bursts.

00:13:21.040 | In that setting, the thousand true fans was not going to survive.

00:13:28.120 | And here's the words I wrote.

00:13:29.480 | This relentless pace rewards passive consumption, not active interaction with

00:13:34.960 | individual creators.

00:13:37.120 | So here's why.

00:13:39.360 | As a creator, you can submit your creations into the stream, but once there, they

00:13:44.160 | will be chopped up and commoditized.

00:13:45.600 | If you're lucky, perhaps something will, you post will temporarily spark a surge of

00:13:49.160 | engagement, but the same spectators exhausted by the onslaught will soon shift

00:13:52.760 | their weary attentions to the next recommended item following close behind.

00:13:56.320 | So this is what happened when web 2.0 got hijacked.

00:14:00.880 | All of this user created content got chopped up and commoditized and put into an

00:14:04.200 | algorithmically optimized stream where it was dehumanized, barely connected to the

00:14:07.800 | individuals who created it.

00:14:09.080 | And we sit there and watch this just stream past.

00:14:13.720 | That was not an environment well suited for many different individual idiosyncratic

00:14:21.200 | creators to foster and create communities, small, but loyal communities based around

00:14:26.880 | their work that they could then monetize and make a living off of it.

00:14:30.240 | So that was why, at least in Jaron Lennar's telling, that is why the dream of a

00:14:36.880 | thousand true fans fell apart.

00:14:39.280 | But then we go back to breaking points.

00:14:42.720 | And what I wrote here is perhaps we were too quick to dismiss Kelly's a thousand

00:14:48.680 | true fans theory.

00:14:49.400 | It faltered in 2008, 2008, but 14 years later, it might be making a comeback.

00:14:57.160 | Because you look at something like breaking points and what you see is actually

00:15:01.080 | something very much like Kelly's original model in action.

00:15:04.640 | Sager and Crystal are not 20 million follower Instagram influencers.

00:15:12.680 | They're not one of these YouTube Mr.

00:15:14.840 | B style superstars that gets 26 million views on every video they put up.

00:15:21.440 | They have roughly 10,000 subscribers.

00:15:23.880 | So yes, it's a factor of 10 larger than Kelly's original prediction, but within

00:15:28.120 | that same ballpark, 10,000 subscribers.

00:15:30.040 | So a small number by any of those large follower count type scales, 10,000

00:15:36.640 | subscribers who pay them money because they respect what they're doing.

00:15:39.920 | They like the style of independent news that Crystal and Sager produce.

00:15:44.400 | Off of those 10,000 subscribers, they are able to produce the show.

00:15:48.800 | And they pay themselves.

00:15:51.480 | I, you know, I talked to him about it, salaries that are more or less in line

00:15:55.280 | with what they were making when they were hosting the show at the Hill.

00:15:59.000 | Right.

00:15:59.880 | So they're not trying to, uh, become immensely wealthy.

00:16:03.680 | Uh, they can cover their budget.

00:16:05.600 | They can cover the studio they lease.

00:16:07.160 | And those are hourly contractors that help work their equipment, the eight

00:16:10.120 | hourly contractors that helps pay for their time and it, and it works out.

00:16:12.760 | And when I pushed them, I was like, well, you guys want to go the route

00:16:15.160 | of the ringer or of Gimlet.

00:16:17.240 | You want to take on venture capital money and build up a huge staff and grow a

00:16:20.880 | large network that you can then sell for $200 million down the line.

00:16:24.560 | They had zero interest in that.

00:16:26.800 | Crystal was really clear.

00:16:29.720 | She wanted to get away from bureaucracy and giant offices

00:16:35.080 | and having to deal with staff.

00:16:36.040 | They just wanted to produce their show.

00:16:37.240 | They want to do news.

00:16:39.000 | They want to be able to do it full time.

00:16:40.080 | It's Kevin Kelly's thousand true fans come to fruition.

00:16:45.760 | When I go on the article and give a lot of examples, like we can actually find a

00:16:49.680 | lot of examples of this now of people who have modest size audiences of strong fans.

00:16:57.000 | Who pay them money for the content or whatever they produce, allowing

00:17:03.560 | them to make a good living, not to become rich, but can make a good living.

00:17:08.200 | Again, that's the Kevin Kelly dream.

00:17:09.640 | I gave two reasons for this.

00:17:11.840 | Number one, I think the rise of online news paywalls and subscription video

00:17:17.280 | streaming services like Netflix got us used to the idea of paying

00:17:21.640 | all a cart for digital content.

00:17:23.680 | When Kevin Kelly wrote his original essay, that was a time where people

00:17:28.960 | thought no one's ever going to pay money for digital content online.

00:17:35.080 | Everything has to be free.

00:17:36.640 | Everything has to be ad supported.

00:17:37.920 | Now we're used to it.

00:17:38.960 | We pay newyorker.com.

00:17:41.440 | We pay Netflix.

00:17:42.960 | We pay Hulu.

00:17:43.920 | We're kind of used to paying all a cart for digital content.

00:17:47.880 | So once we're used to that, when someone like Sager and Crystal comes along,

00:17:51.640 | we're like, yeah, it's just another thing I pay a little bit of

00:17:53.600 | money for to get digital content.

00:17:56.720 | The other thing to change was attitudes towards social media.

00:18:01.120 | So there was a time, and I know this because I used to get roasted, where

00:18:05.880 | social media was where all the energy is.

00:18:07.680 | So the idea that you would leave social media and interact with creators

00:18:13.800 | directly over the internet without using the intermediation of social media

00:18:17.840 | would have been considered risky or weird.

00:18:19.800 | Now, for all the reasons we talk about on the show, there's a lot of pushback

00:18:24.160 | and skepticism and distrust about social media.

00:18:26.760 | So this idea that I'm going to subscribe to breaking points using a small app

00:18:31.920 | like Supercast and they have MailChimp is going to email me direct link URLs.

00:18:37.680 | They're unlisted videos, a whole ecosystem I'm using to interact with them.

00:18:41.360 | It has nothing to do with social media.

00:18:42.840 | Now we're used to that or we're excited to do that.

00:18:46.120 | So we needed those two innovations, getting used to paying for digital content

00:18:49.000 | and to being comfortable leaving the walled gardens, the heavily controlled

00:18:52.520 | walled gardens of social media and interacting with creators

00:18:55.160 | through other internet tools.

00:18:57.280 | Those two things have come together.

00:18:58.760 | And I think we see this revolution of the return of people potentially being

00:19:04.040 | able to make a living online.

00:19:05.680 | One of the other big examples I give is podcasting.

00:19:08.280 | Right.

00:19:10.120 | I mean, what is a successful podcast, if not a perfect demonstration of

00:19:15.160 | Kevin Kelly's theory in action, you have this audience of dedicated fans who

00:19:20.560 | are willing to stream hours of your audio content each week from an

00:19:26.560 | advertiser perspective that is really valuable and you can monetize that.

00:19:33.760 | And with a modest, but really strong audience, you can make a creative

00:19:38.480 | living with a podcast. I worked out the numbers for this article.

00:19:42.800 | I mean, depending on the type of content, et cetera, et cetera, something

00:19:46.560 | like 30,000 downloads a week.

00:19:50.360 | So if you had 30,000 dedicated fans who had listened to one episode of your

00:19:56.080 | show per week and with the right number of ads, if you do the math somewhere

00:20:00.400 | in there, you get to Kevin Kelly's a hundred thousand dollars a year.

00:20:02.640 | So again, this is all within the ballpark of his original number.

00:20:08.240 | But we're, this is the optimism here.

00:20:10.360 | We are returning to a place where it's possible for a larger, more diverse

00:20:16.200 | group of creative types, doing a more diverse array of creative activities.

00:20:20.240 | Like Sager and Crystal, like a bunch of podcasters out there to actually really

00:20:25.960 | make a full-time living, doing creative work by leveraging the potential of the

00:20:28.640 | internet, it required that we escaped the social media walled gardens.

00:20:31.840 | It required that we got more comfortable spending money for digital content.

00:20:35.120 | But I think this is a good thing that's happening.

00:20:37.720 | All right.

00:20:38.000 | So that's what my article is about.

00:20:39.160 | Two quick follow-up points after that article came out.

00:20:42.840 | One, I talked to Kevin Kelly a little bit after it came out and he confirmed

00:20:47.360 | actually more recently, he gets more and more notes from people who read that

00:20:52.880 | original essay and are successfully making a living with a small, but dedicated group

00:20:58.200 | of fans.

00:20:58.600 | So he can confirm directly.

00:21:00.320 | He hears from people succeeding with that more and more.

00:21:06.000 | The other point, and I'll make this briefly, someone sent me a note and I hear

00:21:08.600 | this critique a lot, so let me just address it real briefly.

00:21:11.440 | They say, yeah, maybe it's true that there's more avenues now to make a living

00:21:18.000 | creatively online, but it's really hard and it often requires whatever timing and

00:21:24.520 | luck and Crystal and Sager already had media backgrounds and, and it's not just

00:21:31.360 | like anyone can just go and do this.

00:21:34.160 | And my reaction to that is yes, of course, making a living doing creative

00:21:39.920 | work is really hard.

00:21:42.200 | It requires talent and it requires luck and it requires opportunity.

00:21:46.200 | Now, I think what we're seeing with the thousand true fans model is that

00:21:50.400 | opportunity piece has vastly broadened.

00:21:53.920 | You don't have to be one of the vanishingly small few to get on cable news or

00:21:58.000 | have a newspaper column.

00:21:58.880 | Now there's a lot more opportunities with the internet to make a living creatively,

00:22:03.000 | but you still need the talent timing, luck portion of that.

00:22:06.920 | And most people just don't have that.

00:22:09.040 | But I think that's always the case.

00:22:11.760 | We're talking about the democrat democratizing any type of media.

00:22:14.880 | This is always the critique that comes back.

00:22:17.080 | Blogs come along and they say, Hey, this is going to, this is going to

00:22:19.520 | really revolutionize print.

00:22:21.680 | Now there's now anyone can publish print.

00:22:24.120 | You don't have to be in a newspaper.

00:22:25.360 | And the people said, oh, that, that revolution failed because most blogs are

00:22:29.240 | bad.

00:22:29.440 | Of course, most blogs are bad, but it did.

00:22:32.160 | Open up a lot more people who had a lot of talent and a lot of luck to actually

00:22:36.480 | find an audience that would have been able to before.

00:22:38.120 | Same thing with podcasts.

00:22:38.960 | People say most podcasts are bad and don't make money.

00:22:42.400 | That's true, but it opened up a lot more opportunity for a lot more people with

00:22:47.600 | talent and luck to actually go and do that before podcasts were available.

00:22:50.640 | So I think that's the key caveat I want to make is that there's no technological

00:22:55.000 | revolution.

00:22:55.360 | That's going to mean anyone who wants to make a living doing creative work can,

00:22:58.040 | that's always going to be really hard, but it used to be that you had an

00:23:00.960 | incredibly narrow group of people who even had a shot.

00:23:03.600 | Now, a lot more people have a shot to take.

00:23:05.920 | And of course, most people will still miss it, but we're going to have vastly

00:23:08.840 | more successful creatives because there's vastly more people out there with talent

00:23:12.680 | and the right timing and the right thing to say, or the right skill for the

00:23:16.360 | moment.

00:23:16.600 | There's vastly more people out there than there used to be opportunities to, to

00:23:20.320 | support them.

00:23:20.920 | And so I think that's all a good thing.

00:23:23.240 | So there you go.

00:23:26.560 | A little injection of optimism into a otherwise normally grim topic area.

00:23:33.040 | There are some good things happening with the internet.

00:23:36.160 | Did it take you a long time to write that?

00:23:38.160 | Uh, yeah, that took a little while, like 5,000 words.

00:23:43.160 | Those are, those are longer pieces.

00:23:44.480 | Um, but honestly this one was in production longer than it probably took me to

00:23:49.040 | write it.

00:23:49.400 | I mean, so what I did was there's kind of a break in my, my writing, my last call

00:23:54.800 | was in January.

00:23:56.560 | Uh, and then I, I had to kind of take a break because of administrative stuff at

00:24:00.280 | Georgetown.

00:24:00.840 | When I turned my energy back to this article, I, it took me a month.

00:24:05.040 | I went back and looked at it a month of solid work to get it done.

00:24:10.040 | I did that back in March and then there's just production just, you know, it takes a

00:24:14.000 | long time.

00:24:14.360 | So, so yeah, that took about a month of work.

00:24:16.840 | Whereas my column from last fall, it'd take about a week of work per column.

00:24:22.880 | You talk to Kevin Kelly a lot?

00:24:24.800 | No, just off and on.

00:24:26.880 | Yeah.

00:24:27.080 | We just kind of.

00:24:27.600 | How old is he?

00:24:29.000 | He's like in his sixties, right?

00:24:31.160 | Or is he older?

00:24:31.800 | Older.

00:24:32.200 | Yeah.

00:24:32.960 | Probably, probably now in his seventies.

00:24:35.560 | He's on Ferris's podcast every now and then, right?

00:24:37.960 | Yeah.

00:24:38.440 | He's a cool guy.

00:24:39.080 | Yeah.

00:24:39.280 | Yeah.

00:24:39.760 | Yeah.

00:24:41.880 | He sent me some stuff.

00:24:42.560 | I'm not going to talk about it now because I'm going to write about it.

00:24:45.520 | Yeah.

00:24:45.960 | But he sent me some new thoughts he had on some things.

00:24:47.640 | Really creative guy.

00:24:49.760 | Yeah.

00:24:50.920 | There's a classic Kevin Kelly article from five or six years ago on artificial

00:24:55.360 | intelligence and wired.

00:24:56.320 | Everyone should go back and read it.

00:24:57.320 | It's really good.

00:24:57.800 | Really prophetic.

00:24:59.760 | and read it, it's really good, really prophetic.

The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

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