But I thought I would start today's episode reacting to my own article. So the day before we're recording this episode, I published my, my latest for the New Yorker was a bit of a longer piece and I've been reading, writing recently. It was more of a 5,000 word, more of an Epic piece.

And, uh, the title is the rise of the internet's creative middle class. And, uh, I thought I would go through just the big ideas from this article. And then I have a couple of follow-up points about some follow-up points, not in the article, but based on reactions I've gotten to the article since it's come out.

So if you're watching this, instead of listening to this, I also have the article loaded up here on the HQ tablet. So you can actually see the words I'm talking about. If you're just listening though, I'll, I'll read what I'm saying. So you'll be able to follow along. All right.

So I just want to give you the, the, the main bullet points is 5,000 words. There's, you know, a lot of details, but the, the article opened with me going to the studio of breaking points. So breaking points is a internet news show. Uh, it's hosted by Sagar and Jetty and Crystal Ball.

So they both come from journalism backgrounds, Sagar from the right, Crystal from the left. So Sagar used to be the white house correspondent for the daily caller. Crystal was a host of a show on MSNBC. Uh, years ago, they came together to do a show together called rising. That was filmed at the Hill, the publication, the Hill here in DC.

And the whole idea was someone from the left, someone from the right talking about the news. Uh, and then they went independent. And so a couple of years ago, they went independent and said, we can do this ourselves. And so I went to their studio. They leased some studio space downtown here in downtown DC.

They have a cool set $60,000 camera system that films at a really high resolution so that you can stream this onto big screen TVs. And it looks really nice, real control room with actual, you know, upper middle-aged engineer control room type men in there working, try casters and. And the sound and it was a real professional operation.

They do a new show. Uh, it's on the internet. If you subscribe, you get it on YouTube. There's a podcast version. They put clips of it on YouTube, uh, for free. So I went to visit this and visit them. If the names sound familiar, it's they've gotten a lot of exposure through Joe Rogan.

So he likes them because they come at news from the left and the right. And so they end up in kind of independent territory as opposed to just trying to work backwards from what's our point. So they're on that show a lot. I think that's, that helped them grow, but they had a history from before them.

Um, and I've been on, I was on rising to talk about one of my books before they went independent. I've been on Saugers podcast. So I've, I've crossed paths with them before. All right. So you look at that show, um, and you see that it's doing well. It's doing well.

It does not require nearly the overhead of their old traditional TV shows. They have only eight hourly contractors and yet their viewership metrics are already outpacing their former show. So they have more views. If you look on YouTube, if you look at podcast downloads, whatever metrics you want to look at.

They're doing better than the old traditionally produced TV show at a fraction of the cost. So my point is early in this article is, uh, that's interesting. And maybe there's a lesson to be learned there about the evolution of news. But the reason why I was focusing on breaking points, the reason why I wanted to introduce them to the readers of this article is that I think they show a more important trend.

And here's my exact words from the article, one in which a dismissed prophecy about the potential of the internet to support creative work might be making a triumphant return. So they are my piece of evidence that a once dismissed prophecy about the internet might be finally coming true. All right.

So what is that prophecy? Well, we got to go all the way back to 2008. Remember 2008 was a very different time than the web is today. This was at the beginning of the web 2.0 revolution. So this was the beginning of that idea that you as a consumer could contribute content to the web.

As opposed to just going to websites and consuming content. We're used to that now, but it was a big deal back then. So it was in 2008 when web 2.0 was first becoming a thing that Kevin Kelly, the former executive editor of Wired, actually the founding executive editor of Wired, uh, and general techno optimist.

So someone who, uh, provided a nice blurb for so good. They can't ignore you. He had a nice blurb for a world without email. So I've crossed paths with Kevin Kelly over the years. He wrote a very internet important, I would say essay called a thousand true fans. This is going to be the prophecy that this article is about.

So the basic idea with a thousand true fans is Kevin Kelly was saying now that the internet is here, now that the internet is interactive, now that you can produce and post content as easily as you can consume it. This is going to be a boon for creative professionals because now as a creative professional, you can not only post your stuff online, you can interact with people.

Online you have, uh, at your fingertips, this whole vast audience of the entire world's population and all you have to do, and this was his thousand true fans concept, all you had to do is find a, and cultivate a small, but loyal fan base. Of all the millions and millions of internet users.

If you can find, this was his math, a thousand loyal supporters, each of whom is willing to spend a hundred dollars a year on you and your art. You're now making a good middle-class living doing creative work. Those was a really big deal essay. It was really influential because the idea was pre-internet.

If you were a creative type, you only had access to the people who were proximate to you, the people who live near you, the people who lived in your town, unless you were one of the vanishing people, you were not going to be a vanishingly small few who had access to national international broadcast platforms like television or newspapers, but there was such a small number of people who could be in the movies or be on TV or be in the newspaper that almost everyone else who wanted to do creative work, you only had access to people who happened to be nearby.

And it was probably going to be difficult for you to find enough real spans who lived within 50 miles of you to actually make a living. And Kelly's point is the internet changes that because now you can assemble these thousand true fans from anywhere around the world and make a living off of it.

So now you've unlocked the economic potential for lots of different creative types to actually make a living doing creative work. As I argued, this essay hit right as the economic crisis of 2008 was picking up steam, so it was really aspirational. People's savings were going away. Their retirement accounts were disappearing.

Their jobs were either they were losing them or they're having the screws turned to them working longer for less money because everyone was faltering. And this idea of, hey, with this new technology, forget this diminishing rat race, you can make a living, support your family doing creative work. Very aspirational.

This essay became very popular. Right. Here's the part that most people didn't know about. If you go back and look at the reception of this essay, yes, it became very popular, but almost immediately there was pushback. And one of the strongest sources of pushback came from Jaron Lanier, whose work I talk about a lot on the show.

Jaron knew Kevin Kelly. They've known each other since the eighties. When Kevin first met Jaron to interview him about his pioneering work on virtual reality, they were both techno optimists from the West coast scene. Jaron Lanier in particular was a really big open culture advocate. Software should be free.

Bit should be free. The internet's going to create this sort of utopian world. What had happened to Jaron though, we've talked about this before on the show, is he took a hard turn towards skepticism. He eventually went back and renounced his techno optimist views and said, the internet is not going the way I hoped.

And the internet is beginning to bifurcate the haves and the have not. And all the, all the, the value generated is ossifying at a very small number of companies and a very small number of individuals that have a lot of stock in those companies. So he had, he had had this turn towards skepticism around this point.

And he looked to Kevin Kelly's a thousand true fans essay and almost immediately came back and said, Kevin, this makes sense on paper, but if it was true, we should see more people doing this successfully. So where are all of these artists and musicians that have a thousand true fans that they have cultivated online, making a middle-class living.

The web has been around now for a while. Technologically, this has been possible for a while. Where are they? And this is, this is a little known chapter in this history, but, but Kevin actually posted a follow-up essay. It's pretty soon after. And he explained Jaren's hesitancy and he said, okay, let's, let's prove Jaren wrong.

And I, in fact, I have the exact wording here in the article. He said, okay, to prove Jaren wrong, this is Kevin Kelly, right. Into his audience, simply submit a candidate in the comments, a musician with no ties to old media models now make it a hundred percent of their living in the open media environment.

Right. So Jaren complained, Kevin said, no, no, I'm sure artists and creative types living on this model exist. And let's find them. And he challenged his readers and they couldn't find anybody. The way Jaren summarized it later in his book, you are not a gadget, which you should read if you have not very influential book for techno criticism circles, they identified a handful at most of artists who satisfy that theory.

And if you really go down the rabbit hole on this and look at the artists they found, it was kind of questionable whether they qualified or not. Like they basically couldn't find anyone. And by the time Jaren published, you were not a gadget is a chapter about a thousand true fans in that manifesto where he's like, this just didn't work.

That's a true fans was hopeful, but it wasn't actually something that we saw. Come to fruition. And so for people who studied the internet, it was sort of this sad case study of optimism that soon bled away. So what actually happened here? Well, I think Jaren Lanier has a really good argument that it was the structure, the evolving structure of the web itself that scuttled the feasibility of a thousand true fans, and in particular, the hijacking of web 2.0 by a small number of large social media platform monopolies like Facebook and then later Instagram and Twitter.

And the way Jaren tells us, I think it's a really important critique is that Google ads came along earlier in the two thousands and they showed that embedded ads could make money. So in other words, putting ads on content that normal individuals made. So here's my website, here is calnewport.com and I'm doing Google adsense and it will automatically put ads onto the content I generated.

This made a lot of money for Google. It became a basically a money minting machine. And there was this aha light that went on in the techno circles out in Silicon Valley, which is web 2.0 means lots of people are creating a lot of content. All of that content can be essentially the fertilizer for our advertising money trees.

So social media came along and even though it originally pushed itself as being about connection and relationships and making it easier to express yourself and connect to others, that was not the pitch being made to investors. The pitch being made to investors is all of these millions of people are going to be generating content.

If we can get that content generated on our servers, on our platforms, we get all the money from all the ads we can place on it. And so a small number of companies basically hijacked the web 2.0 revolution. It said, yeah, yeah, yeah, you should express yourself on the web, but you do it in our walled garden.

We can control it. And that became, as Jaren explains it, the downfall of the thousand true fans model, because once these companies were making hundreds of billions of dollars evaluation appear out of nowhere, just off of the back of this digital sharecropping that was occurring out there in this hijacked world of web 2.0, they began pushing their technology platforms to optimize the money this made.

And this, this eventually led to these streaming style models. Twitter led the way, but then Facebook and Instagram followed. These models where you were no longer even going to social media homepages of individuals. You were no longer posting on the wall of your friend on Facebook. Algorithms would just pull interesting information off of the platform and put it into an infinite scroll stream.

And you as a consumer would just keep scrolling through this. Everything you were seeing was designed to hit your fancy, to give you distraction in the moment, to give you those little chemical bursts. In that setting, the thousand true fans was not going to survive. And here's the words I wrote.

This relentless pace rewards passive consumption, not active interaction with individual creators. So here's why. As a creator, you can submit your creations into the stream, but once there, they will be chopped up and commoditized. If you're lucky, perhaps something will, you post will temporarily spark a surge of engagement, but the same spectators exhausted by the onslaught will soon shift their weary attentions to the next recommended item following close behind.

So this is what happened when web 2.0 got hijacked. All of this user created content got chopped up and commoditized and put into an algorithmically optimized stream where it was dehumanized, barely connected to the individuals who created it. And we sit there and watch this just stream past. That was not an environment well suited for many different individual idiosyncratic creators to foster and create communities, small, but loyal communities based around their work that they could then monetize and make a living off of it.

So that was why, at least in Jaron Lennar's telling, that is why the dream of a thousand true fans fell apart. But then we go back to breaking points. And what I wrote here is perhaps we were too quick to dismiss Kelly's a thousand true fans theory. It faltered in 2008, 2008, but 14 years later, it might be making a comeback.

Because you look at something like breaking points and what you see is actually something very much like Kelly's original model in action. Sager and Crystal are not 20 million follower Instagram influencers. They're not one of these YouTube Mr. B style superstars that gets 26 million views on every video they put up.

They have roughly 10,000 subscribers. So yes, it's a factor of 10 larger than Kelly's original prediction, but within that same ballpark, 10,000 subscribers. So a small number by any of those large follower count type scales, 10,000 subscribers who pay them money because they respect what they're doing. They like the style of independent news that Crystal and Sager produce.

Off of those 10,000 subscribers, they are able to produce the show. And they pay themselves. I, you know, I talked to him about it, salaries that are more or less in line with what they were making when they were hosting the show at the Hill. Right. So they're not trying to, uh, become immensely wealthy.

Uh, they can cover their budget. They can cover the studio they lease. And those are hourly contractors that help work their equipment, the eight hourly contractors that helps pay for their time and it, and it works out. And when I pushed them, I was like, well, you guys want to go the route of the ringer or of Gimlet.

You want to take on venture capital money and build up a huge staff and grow a large network that you can then sell for $200 million down the line. They had zero interest in that. Crystal was really clear. She wanted to get away from bureaucracy and giant offices and having to deal with staff.

They just wanted to produce their show. They want to do news. They want to be able to do it full time. It's Kevin Kelly's thousand true fans come to fruition. When I go on the article and give a lot of examples, like we can actually find a lot of examples of this now of people who have modest size audiences of strong fans.

Who pay them money for the content or whatever they produce, allowing them to make a good living, not to become rich, but can make a good living. Again, that's the Kevin Kelly dream. I gave two reasons for this. Number one, I think the rise of online news paywalls and subscription video streaming services like Netflix got us used to the idea of paying all a cart for digital content.

When Kevin Kelly wrote his original essay, that was a time where people thought no one's ever going to pay money for digital content online. Everything has to be free. Everything has to be ad supported. Now we're used to it. We pay newyorker.com. We pay Netflix. We pay Hulu. We're kind of used to paying all a cart for digital content.

So once we're used to that, when someone like Sager and Crystal comes along, we're like, yeah, it's just another thing I pay a little bit of money for to get digital content. The other thing to change was attitudes towards social media. So there was a time, and I know this because I used to get roasted, where social media was where all the energy is.

So the idea that you would leave social media and interact with creators directly over the internet without using the intermediation of social media would have been considered risky or weird. Now, for all the reasons we talk about on the show, there's a lot of pushback and skepticism and distrust about social media.

So this idea that I'm going to subscribe to breaking points using a small app like Supercast and they have MailChimp is going to email me direct link URLs. They're unlisted videos, a whole ecosystem I'm using to interact with them. It has nothing to do with social media. Now we're used to that or we're excited to do that.

So we needed those two innovations, getting used to paying for digital content and to being comfortable leaving the walled gardens, the heavily controlled walled gardens of social media and interacting with creators through other internet tools. Those two things have come together. And I think we see this revolution of the return of people potentially being able to make a living online.

One of the other big examples I give is podcasting. Right. I mean, what is a successful podcast, if not a perfect demonstration of Kevin Kelly's theory in action, you have this audience of dedicated fans who are willing to stream hours of your audio content each week from an advertiser perspective that is really valuable and you can monetize that.

And with a modest, but really strong audience, you can make a creative living with a podcast. I worked out the numbers for this article. I mean, depending on the type of content, et cetera, et cetera, something like 30,000 downloads a week. So if you had 30,000 dedicated fans who had listened to one episode of your show per week and with the right number of ads, if you do the math somewhere in there, you get to Kevin Kelly's a hundred thousand dollars a year.

So again, this is all within the ballpark of his original number. But we're, this is the optimism here. We are returning to a place where it's possible for a larger, more diverse group of creative types, doing a more diverse array of creative activities. Like Sager and Crystal, like a bunch of podcasters out there to actually really make a full-time living, doing creative work by leveraging the potential of the internet, it required that we escaped the social media walled gardens.

It required that we got more comfortable spending money for digital content. But I think this is a good thing that's happening. All right. So that's what my article is about. Two quick follow-up points after that article came out. One, I talked to Kevin Kelly a little bit after it came out and he confirmed actually more recently, he gets more and more notes from people who read that original essay and are successfully making a living with a small, but dedicated group of fans.

So he can confirm directly. He hears from people succeeding with that more and more. The other point, and I'll make this briefly, someone sent me a note and I hear this critique a lot, so let me just address it real briefly. They say, yeah, maybe it's true that there's more avenues now to make a living creatively online, but it's really hard and it often requires whatever timing and luck and Crystal and Sager already had media backgrounds and, and it's not just like anyone can just go and do this.

And my reaction to that is yes, of course, making a living doing creative work is really hard. It requires talent and it requires luck and it requires opportunity. Now, I think what we're seeing with the thousand true fans model is that opportunity piece has vastly broadened. You don't have to be one of the vanishingly small few to get on cable news or have a newspaper column.

Now there's a lot more opportunities with the internet to make a living creatively, but you still need the talent timing, luck portion of that. And most people just don't have that. But I think that's always the case. We're talking about the democrat democratizing any type of media. This is always the critique that comes back.

Blogs come along and they say, Hey, this is going to, this is going to really revolutionize print. Now there's now anyone can publish print. You don't have to be in a newspaper. And the people said, oh, that, that revolution failed because most blogs are bad. Of course, most blogs are bad, but it did.

Open up a lot more people who had a lot of talent and a lot of luck to actually find an audience that would have been able to before. Same thing with podcasts. People say most podcasts are bad and don't make money. That's true, but it opened up a lot more opportunity for a lot more people with talent and luck to actually go and do that before podcasts were available.

So I think that's the key caveat I want to make is that there's no technological revolution. That's going to mean anyone who wants to make a living doing creative work can, that's always going to be really hard, but it used to be that you had an incredibly narrow group of people who even had a shot.

Now, a lot more people have a shot to take. And of course, most people will still miss it, but we're going to have vastly more successful creatives because there's vastly more people out there with talent and the right timing and the right thing to say, or the right skill for the moment.

There's vastly more people out there than there used to be opportunities to, to support them. And so I think that's all a good thing. So there you go. A little injection of optimism into a otherwise normally grim topic area. There are some good things happening with the internet. Did it take you a long time to write that?

Uh, yeah, that took a little while, like 5,000 words. Those are, those are longer pieces. Um, but honestly this one was in production longer than it probably took me to write it. I mean, so what I did was there's kind of a break in my, my writing, my last call was in January.

Uh, and then I, I had to kind of take a break because of administrative stuff at Georgetown. When I turned my energy back to this article, I, it took me a month. I went back and looked at it a month of solid work to get it done. I did that back in March and then there's just production just, you know, it takes a long time.

So, so yeah, that took about a month of work. Whereas my column from last fall, it'd take about a week of work per column. You talk to Kevin Kelly a lot? No, just off and on. Yeah. We just kind of. How old is he? He's like in his sixties, right?

Or is he older? Older. Yeah. Probably, probably now in his seventies. He's on Ferris's podcast every now and then, right? Yeah. He's a cool guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He sent me some stuff. I'm not going to talk about it now because I'm going to write about it. Yeah. But he sent me some new thoughts he had on some things.

Really creative guy. Yeah. There's a classic Kevin Kelly article from five or six years ago on artificial intelligence and wired. Everyone should go back and read it. It's really good. Really prophetic. and read it, it's really good, really prophetic.