The startup boom failed to build a creator utopia

Before we get started: all the cool kids are filling out the Equity listener survey. We want to hear from you! On today's episode, Alex had Eric Silver, Head of Creative at the podcast collective Multitude on the show to help us sort through: What the hell happened with Spotify's big podcast push, and its resulting layoffs. Why tech platforms have not yet found a way to make creative work lucrative enough to engender a new 'creator middle class.' The state of the ad market, and its impacts on creative work more generally. Towards the end we had a moment to comment on AI, but we kept that somewhat far from our central theme. Long-time Equity listeners will recall that we've covered the creator economy a few times on the show and the blog, including: Yeah, funding for creator-focused startups is drying up [blog] F*ck creator funds, we need a creator index fund [Equity] Not every creator economy startup is built for creators [blog] And if you need even more, this investor survey from 2021 on all things creator-economy is a great look-back in time! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex and this is our Wednesday show where we niche down to a single topic and we go deep. Today, we are digging into the state of the creator economy. Recent headlines in this area do appear to be more than a little bleak. We've seen Twitch fighting with its community. We've seen layoffs at Spotify, Reddit in the midst of a civil war with its own community overcharging for API access. Creator-focused venture capital has slowed and the ad market has gotten noticeably worse this year. So to help us understand all of that and more, we are going to talk with Eric Silver. He's the head of creative at the podcast Collective Multitude to better understand the state of making money from creative work on the internet today. Eric, hey, how you doing?

• 0:55Speaker 01

  I'm doing all right. It's fun to come on. I think about this podcast stuff, like the podcast business stuff, all the time. And I get to do it on a podcast. It's just, it's recursive and I'm really excited to do it. I also want to say, please, the ad market is bouncing back because companies are more afraid of the threat of a recession than a recession or a not recession. So it is bouncing back.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  I do want to say that I have about 35 pages of mental notes about the, is recession coming, is it not coming, doom forecasting we've had for the last three quarters. But we have other stuff that I think people will want to hear more from you and I than our own economic theories. So here's the thing, I've been podcasting for a very long time now. I've been writing on the internet my entire life. This is much like yourself. This is my main gig. This is what I do. And it doesn't seem like our world is in the best possible shape, but I wanted to get your take. So at a high level, how healthy is the creator economy today from where you sit?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good question. It's kind of like watching like a post-apocalyptic movie or playing a post-apocalyptic game where it's kind of like you see the institutions everywhere falling. It's like, wow, our president sure did get ate by a zombie and now he's a zombie. And I bet he's a boss that I'm going to have to defeat later in the game. But like, there are these enclaves within the world. They're like, yeah, we have running water and everything's better than it was before. So it's not to say that like the landscape is still tough.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  And as media companies and the acquisitions that happened a few years ago start to be grinded down and kind of erased from everywhere, content creators, the content creator space, the people who look at the thing that they make as almost a small business, which is how we view what we do at Multitude.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  We're doing all right. You know, people have really understood the value of the stuff they make ever since the pandemic started in 2020 and Patreon numbers have never been higher and podcasts get the highest like per capita stuff on Patreon. So like it's still, it's still good here and there is a way to do it. It's just no one wanted to do that before because they're all eaten by zombies.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  So skipping the zombie analogy just for a minute, we'll get back to that, but it's funny to hear you say that podcasting is doing well at, on Patreon and Multitude's doing well, your team. And yet, when I look at the headlines, Spotify is trying to, you know, gut its podcast division, dropping 200 people, about 2% of its total staffing. So on one hand, it sounds like you're saying that some indies are doing okay, but the majors are struggling. So what's the disconnect between Multitude hanging in there and doing well, congrats by the way.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  And kind of the train wreck we're seeing over at Spotify. They had more money.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. And they made that really smart decision to put all of that content they owned behind it, like only on Spotify, which the unions said reduced download numbers by 75%. They're so smart and they know exactly what they're doing, right? I also want to shout out those 200 people who got laid off and the two unions that got destroyed because Gimlet and Parcast don't exist anymore. So those unions are functionally non-existent.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Defunct.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  And I, it breaks my heart after how hard they fought for existence in audio, which didn't exist. Like they're at the vanguard of workers' rights and my heart goes out to those unions. Well, I'm really excited to be able to talk about the creator economy from a podcasting perspective.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Because like, I think podcasting is seeing everything that's happened in the creator economy over the last 25 years in warp drive. Like everything that happened in YouTube and everything that happened in blogging happened over like a decade and now this is all happening in a series of years. And I think podcasting also illustrates what people love about things that are made by people they like, which is the deep relationship. That people have with their creator and it comes out on a regular schedule. The niche dive as we're doing here comes out every Wednesday, right?

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  And podcasts come out on the same day every week or every other week. I think that really is like emblematic of what people love about independent creators making stuff for them. I also want to say that like multitude has a bunch of different arms. And when you look at your content creator business in a few different ways, like multitude, we're a podcast collective. We're an ad sales business and we're also a studio. We make stuff and do consulting for other people, but we get to work for ourselves. I think ultimately the biggest difference is that the people who own these companies and all over the creator economy. And also to like, as we're seeing with the writer's strike in TV and in movies.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  The people who own these companies think that we're the same as like making airplane parts or making tires, right? They want that 6% ROI. But in the creator economy, we're just happy this is our full-time job and we will do anything to continue this being our full-time job. And when those are your goals, it's certainly easier to hit your KPIs when it's like, I want to be sustainable and continue to grow and serve our audience in the way this should be served.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, this reminds me a little bit about what we've seen from Defector.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Which is a subscription-based blog that's doing rather well.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  And shout out to Defector.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  They call themselves the last good website.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Multitude produces the distraction, which is their flagship sports show. So I get to work with those guys all the time. It is truly incredible.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  But what they said recently in an interview was they just need to hit their margins. They just need to pay their staff and that's it. They're happy.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  And so to me, there seems to be this disconnect between major platforms trying to get into the content game, if you will, and expecting to see traditional business metrics from a medium that has a more human than business element to it and may not end up growing at, you know, 6% a year, 10% a year, whatever people expect. And so you end up with Spotify piling in, buying these podcast companies and then basically chewing them up and spinning them out in what felt like record time.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it's also baffling. I mean, this is the whole crux of the WGA. Mike Schur came on The Distraction, which is why I've been thinking about this so much. He came on before the strike started to explain why. And he's the one who kind of like put that airplane parts metaphor in my head that I've been thinking so much about. But those big companies, they broke the only good, like, creative economy model. They broke the cable bundle because they've been trying to be tech companies. And they ruined it, and they ruined it for themselves, and they ruined it for everyone else. So on every level, they're trying, capitalism and the companies that exist from it are trying to squeeze everything out of it. And that can't, that just doesn't make any sense for making stuff, making creative things,

• 6:57Speaker 01

  which is supposed to like make money, but also the thing should exist. You don't like look at your airplane turbine and be like, wow, that's inspiring me. That's deep. I love that.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  I mean, maybe you've never looked at a brand new airplane turbine and said, that inspires me. But I have seen some really, really cute ones on some really nice private jets. So I'm just saying, like, some things can be raised to the point of being hard, even if they're not that to start. Going back to what you said about podcasting, speedrunning, the same cycle we've seen in blogging that we have seen in online video via YouTube.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  I kind of bucket this as like music, podcasts, art, and the written word. And it does seem that there's this repetition of a bad experiment. So blogging has gone through its initial phase of hype back in the day. Corporations began to blog as well. Everyone got really excited about this. Blogs began to form networks. Those networks were purchased. They were owned by major conglomerates, and then they were eventually spit out the backend. And I'm kind of also speedrunning TechCrunch's own history here to a degree. Seeing this in podcasts, definitely with music to a large degree. Why do we keep doing the same experiment? Like, I feel like we keep making the same mistakes and expecting different results. And it feels a little frustrating at this stage to be watching yet another major company fire a bunch of creatives when I think you and I could have told them four years ago, whatever, that it wasn't going to work.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  I mean, it's hard. So in 2019, everything changed in podcasting. When Spotify bought Gimlet and Parcast for $350 million, it almost like, I'm gonna put giant quotes around this, legitimized the space, right? The market and the guys, capital T, capital G, were like, wow, look at this thing. We can pour money into it. But then it's always from a money perspective. I think the reason why this doesn't work is the people who are running the like, big picture thing are like VC guys who do want return on their investment, or the venture capitalists that end up holding the bag, holding the blogging bag at the end and like, well, I want a return. It's always about return on investment and doing it as fast as possible. And I think there's a level of disruption.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  How much disruption can you do to art, to an artistic medium? I'm not saying creation, I think that that's a really big question. But the inherent thing is like, let's make things for other people to enjoy. I'm not sure how much disruption there is. And when you try to like, you're hammering it, or you're trying to drill a hole into something, eventually you're gonna get that hole. But it's gonna be broken on the other side. And we saw this with what happened with the progenitor of Defector, as the Gizmodo group was given to Jim Spann, for I don't want to even say his real name, but given to him and he ruined it. And everything that's happening, like, so the legitimizing is also when like VC companies and like AI dudes kept being like, I'm gonna solve podcasting. I'm gonna do it. It's like, well, we don't need it to be solved.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  We're just out here making audio. We're just making stuff for people to listen to. And it's almost like trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist ends up breaking it more than if you just left it alone and was happy with what it did.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  We talk a lot about how these major platforms don't end up being what I think indie creators were hoping for. Like, yes, you can put your stuff on Spotify. For example, this podcast is on Spotify.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Oh, you have to be. You gotta be.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Sure, but I believe our Spotify revenue is zero from that, you know? And if you're a smaller band, you can be on Spotify. The distribution exists, but the monetization method that has now become the de facto norm doesn't work for you. Same thing with YouTube.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  So to me, it feels like these platforms that appear to be democratically minded. Can come, everyone can take part, really are actually set up in such a way that it's really the absolute, you know, top decile, the top decile that actually takes 95% of the revenue and everyone else kind of starves, even though it had the promise of being so much better for the individual creator.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, when we're talking about that speedrunning percent, which I guess is like, what? It's any percent, no glitches, run out of money immediately as fast as possible percent. I think that we're seeing this in podcasting and Twitch where there is no algorithm and it's also owned by very large companies, obviously Amazon owning Twitch and it's kind of like the only streaming platform in the game and podcasting inherently has no algorithm and it's breaking so many tech companies' brains that like Spotify ended up being old school Hollywood. The issue was, so we have our shows on Spotify, right? We're not owned by Spotify and they're the ones with the platform, which is where people listen to it and also the recommendations are. I don't know, you tell me if it's advantageous to promote things you own on the platform you also own. There might be something there.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  It is ever so slightly a good idea if you want to see a higher ROI from your content investments, in case no one caught the sarcasm there, I'm gonna spell it out for you.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. So it's just, it's tough, but at the same time, listeners will find you if they have a relationship with your content and you can make it and put it out wherever you want. I mean, it's also, it's a little more complicated because podcasting also feels like a sleeping giant, like Apple is a tech company and we also see this with TV, like what are they doing with Apple TV plus? Well, whatever they want, because it's not a really big deal to the company and how they make money. The same thing with Amazon and what you see from Audible, it's like they make money in a different way and they're kind of just like in the media business, like we're trying to make a living and they're just doing whatever and it's hard to kind of follow what's important because the goal ultimately for these big businesses is ROI. And like I said, we just want to keep making stuff.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  All right, we have to take a very short break, but when we get back, we will talk about tools for the middle class of creators.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  So one thing that I was encouraged, going back to this kind of like 2020, 2021 venture capital boom and creator economy startups to do really everything possible were being built. So I was thinking like, oh, cool. How, how nice is it that we're seeing so many new companies built to essentially cater to a demographic and a group of people that I love and also think have been a little bit occasionally underserved. And then it does seem that all that money went in and very little was built that I see talked about much in creative circles. And so from your perspective and the multitude perspective, was anything that kind of was put together during that one or two year venture capital frenzy useful to your business or kind of made it into your workflow?

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good question. I like that it made people more aware that transcripts should exist. Transcripts as a, like, I think it's an important tool to help all people enjoy podcasting and we do it by hand. We work with people who kind of like listen to it and transcribe it. And some of those companies are really great, like Trent is pretty good and Otter is pretty good.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  We love Otter.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  But you gotta clean it. You gotta clean it up. Can I say no? Am I allowed to say no?

• 13:18Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. No, for sure. The gist that I'm trying to get at here is, you know, we do cover a lot of stuff in the technology realm that is, you know, starry and does very well. Yeah. I mean, even in the world of ed tech, we've seen some pretty major successes in the last couple of years.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  That's a famously hard category to kind of like do well in.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Oh, I was a high school English teacher before. I know of all the things that you need in education and like Khan Academy trying to break stuff. I know that it's divisive, but also good. Listen, when they first had smart boards in classes, it still blew my mind of like, wow, look at all the things I could put on here and I could draw stuff. I was being a little glib by saying, can I say no? But I think that the dominating thing is Patreon. I think that Patreon has always been there and it's been there for a while. It's had its ups and downs and what it should and should not do for creators. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I think that, as I said before, more than ever, people realize that independent creators are people and also need money to keep making their things.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  So people have been using Patreon more and more, and they've gotten like infusions of VC and they've been hiring people and, and firing people. So the one that we end up sticking with through better and through worse is Patreon. And I'm always interested of why there isn't like a competitor that has been like challenging it at all. It's now almost becoming like the Kleenex of online stuff. It's like a Patreon means a way to give people money. Like I know Kofi exists and whatever happened with Drip.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  I wish you, I wish it'd continue with Kickstarter has its own problems as well. I mean, I guess Patreon is the one that has continued to stay.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  I think that's partially because it was focused on a subscription model.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  So essentially what Patreon did was give creators a way of saying, hey, you can support me, pick a tier, pick a level of access or rewards and off we go. The thing that I saw a lot of in that other adventure boom, because Patreon is much older than the time period that I'm talking about.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, 100%.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Is they were trying to build services they would charge creators for. And when you're, it's like selling cars to high school students. They're not really the demographic that has money. Do you know who has money?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  Older people. And so it felt like there was like a mismatch, like Patreon brings creators money, doesn't extract it per se.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  That to me is probably why it's done so well. And that was just missed by these other companies that wanted to like, do your taxes for you, or I don't know, just something like that. It felt like business people kicking open an art studio and be like, what do you guys need? I made this. Woo. And then it didn't land the way they expected it to.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  That's a really good, okay, let's run with that metaphor. Imagine someone kicked down the door and said like, I have a million dollars and brought it to like an arts high school. It's like, what do you want? What do you want? And they're like, better tools, more canvases, a bigger space. And they're like, you know what you need? It takes so long to paint. We're going to make this go as fast as possible. So you can make more stuff. And we're like, what? No. And then they're already throwing the money at us. That's only earmarked for painting faster.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Or, or just tweak that analogy slightly or metaphor. It's like offering like wider brushes. You can finish the painting faster.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yes.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  That's not the goal, but I can do understand from a business perspective, that's what they should be doing. Okay. So I was trying to get us towards, is there any material hope? That we are going to see a rise of a for-profit technology platform, which is to say a company in the digital creative space that is conducive to building creator wealth without being overly extractive.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  And it feels like, based on the chat we've had so far, that the answer is kind of probably not.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  I mean, it's interesting you say that. I remember the seeds of Patreon. I was remember Jack Conti got no money from YouTube AdSense and then started to make something. And like, what I like about that is like, well, he needed something and then he built it, right? And again, I'm also not saying that Patreon is perfect, but at least it came from intention.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  I think that once someone makes something that might actually Help creators, it would be helpful, but at the same time, the thing that we've learned over and over and over again is don't just throw in with one platform. Like, what is the point of only putting your podcast on Spotify? What's the point of only streaming on Twitch, which is what we saw with like Mix, the rise and fall of Mixer? And what's happening with YouTube streaming?

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Oh man, RIP Mixer.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like you can't just hold yourself to one place. It's never going to do the thing that you want it to, and then you're locked into one place and then you end up going down with the ship. But the thing is, you're the most valuable thing. The platform needs you. Cause you're making the thing that users love and want and will spend money on. So you're the most valuable commodity, not the other way around.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Yes, but kind of, right? So people like love to talk about the 1,000 fans thing. If you can get a thousand fans and they're willing to pay for your stuff, you'll do fine. The problem is, it's a bit of a misnomer because to have a thousand fans or believers, followers, contributors, supporters, Patreons, whatever, that will pay you X amount of dollars per month. You probably need 25x that many kind of casual consumers of your stuff.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  And so, oh yeah, the funnel, yeah, yeah, we love the funnel.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  For sure. And so you need to have such a wide imprint to get to that 1,000 kind of like true fans or whatever. That's pretty tough. And I think most creators won't get there. And so the thing that I'm afraid of is that maybe despite all of this technological innovation, despite all this money that's gone into this, the fact that we have new platforms, better distribution, free distribution of the internet. Creative work may still be this just kind of financial black hole. And like all this work that's gone in, hasn't fundamentally changed the fact that back in the old days, you had to have a patron to fund your art. And now you have a Patreon.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Hey, that's why they named it. And also it sounds like an evolution. That's why people love it so much. I want to say two things. Sure. One is, I love the funnel. I love the thousand true fans thing. But what I'm meaning about platforms is like, give them a bunch of different ways to support you. Is like, if a band came to your town and said, the only way you can give us money, we're not doing a live show. We're going to have a stand and you're going to have to buy t-shirts. You can only buy t-shirts, right? That wouldn't make any sense. So it's like, you want to do live shows, you want to sell merch and you want to be on every single platform. You don't want to just like, you want to put your podcast on all the things that exist. You want to put your videos in all the things that exist.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  I would like to come back and say, remember, it's okay if something doesn't make gangbusters money. Remember, because we're making things. The whole point was making things. I also think it's much easier to, I, I don't think it's necessarily a black hole, but if creators have business literacy and treat themselves like a business, they're going to try to break even, or at least be able, or make it sustainable. And then that's what we're going for. And that's a lot easier thing to do. I never think it's going to be a black hole, but it's certainly easier to be like, I'm going to keep making stuff and continue to make stuff than that ROI. And that's what I think we should be shooting for much more than not being a black hole. Because I think that when it's framed like that, it's like, either you're a black hole and you're in the red, or you are a unicorn and go gangbusters.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  So let me, let me retool what I said in light of what you just kind of threw in. Cause I think it's actually a good clarification of what I was trying to get at. And I think I was slightly wrong.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  So instead of me saying, all these platforms haven't fundamentally changed the economics of creative work. Instead, it sounds like what you're arguing is that they have created so many different touchpoints that creators, if they lever a number of these products that have been built in the digital era, they can in fact build something that's pretty sustainable. The issue is for each of those individual platforms, if they want to be a creator's be all end all, that will always be a bit of a fractured relationship because the power dynamic is probably incorrect when it comes to the tech company and the person making videos or writing blogs.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Correct. I think that like, do one, if you spend five minutes looking into your favorite creator, you're going to see they do a bunch of different things. A very, very, very, very, very small amount of people do their one popular thing and then tour and only do that thing.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  They might also do brand deals and the selling ads is part of that and being business literate, depending on what platform you're on, being able to sell ad, or what medium you do, being able to sell ads in a good way. Running your Patreon and doing bonus content is also on top of that. You might also like, you know, like I said in the beginning, multitude has three arms. We sell ads for other creators. We make shows and do consulting for other people and we make the shows that we do. I produce above four. Shows and one of them is Distraction for Defector and I also produce the three shows that I produce.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  So it's like you're doing a lot of different things and being able to do it in your field, using your creative skills. And hopefully not having a boss other than yourself and the grind is nice. It's good. And I think that's what we're shooting for as well. I think on a macro sense, though, we are seeing that this stuff is breaking from what's happening with the writer's strike. So it's like, yeah, remember, big companies did break the faucet because they thought streaming was going to get around stuff. And now with the mini rooms and the AI trying to do director and writer and producer jobs. I mean, now we're really starting to break the system. Was the faucet not coming out fast enough? Like, I'm confused on some level as well. It's about IP and it's about owning stuff.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  But they broke the faucet. So I don't, I don't even know what people are trying to do. They want money faster.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. I wonder if there's going to be kind of a, an inversion in the future because I do think that people will try to lever modern generative AI technologies to reduce content costs. And what they're going to end up with is stuff that is okay on a good day and pretty bad compared to the best stuff that humans can create. And I wonder if this is going to end up leading to a like, you know how in food, people are like, I don't want to eat GMOs.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  It is actually a, a point of politics that I don't agree with, but people say no to that. We want worse kiwis and smaller avocados. I wonder if there's going to be like a human bias in like 10 years from now, like this show was entirely made by humans. This post was written only by me. And I wonder if that's going to be like a value premium. That's going to distinguish what you and I do versus what a computer can kind of cook up on its own.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Well, as a cage free creator, I really agree with that. I can roam wherever I want and I make stuff there. Yeah, I think it's interesting. I mean, AI is certainly a tool. The thing is that we're looking at is that people are so freaked out about it because the guys are like, this is everything. Creators are stupid. So it's like, people are taking it ultimately in one direction. If AI is a tool, it's no different than Photoshop. Or it's no different than a DOR editing software. So it can help. I mean, didn't we see that AI was really helpful and across the spider verse in like changing something? I don't know about it that well, but it's like, if you use it to kind of simplify rote tasks. I mean, that's what computers are for. I'm also saying that they should not take away the creative process.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  There are things that only humans know how to do, both like generative ideas and coming up with good ideas. Instead of just like the throwing stuff of the wall that AI is doing. And how it's like a regurgitation of like of a corpus of language. And also like the finding tuning stuff, art, like it's gonna feel hollow. You know, when you look at an AI image? It always feels like that weird glossy thing. I look at an AI image and I'm like, something doesn't feel right here. And I think that's always gonna be there, even when it feels seamless. There's gonna be something in our lizard and monkey brains that's gonna be like, this isn't real. I don't like this. I think it's all, if it goes too far, it's gonna be the uncanny valley.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wonder if we should advocate for just more like competing platforms to kind of shake things up because I've gotten into a little bit more onto the YouTube side of things in the last six months.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  And one thing that always kind of bounces me out is when people get in trouble for like an accidental copyright strike or whatever. And they realize that like they're on very shaky footing. I wonder if there's any financial way, huh, that's dangerous. To create competing, smaller but similar platforms where people could have a bit more flexibility and freedom. But then as I'm saying this out loud, I'm thinking about server costs and you know, moderation and it just, it makes me sad that we have these massive pillars in the digital world. And they're owned by even larger companies and their creators are essentially stuck there doing the hard work without having the same control that they might have expected in a digital era when things are supposed to be easier, faster and cheaper.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Just makes me sad, Eric.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  I mean, it's the algorithm, right? I mean, you have to stay on YouTube and you have to follow what the algo says so that you can get service. I mean, here's the thing in podcasting, the backbone of podcasting is the RSS, a fossil of technology. And it is truly the great thing. You know what's really funny? In like one of those annual presentations that Spotify made, there is a woman who is on stage. And at one point there was a slide that had like a no, like the Ghostbusters no through RSS. Because Spotify doesn't like it because RSS only goes one way. It goes from creator to user and not the other way around. So you collect data. But like, that's just what podcasting is built on. And that's why you can listen on the various platforms. Spotify, Apple, Pocket Casts, whatever, Podcast Attic, whatever.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Hotcatcher you listen to until the creation of stuff gets loosed from specific platforms. The platform is always going to own the thing and that's why YouTube creators are always going to be at the whim of what YouTube creators on. That's why on Tik Tok, you gotta say I'm alive because Tik Tok said so. And you know, until you break that stuff out, there's only so much you can do. Um, it certainly doesn't help that our social medias and like Reddit, what's happening with Reddit, that even the places where we hang out are crumbling. Because the people who own it are being too greedy. They think the thing that they make is important, but really it's the users who participate. Let's, do you remember Dig Alex?

• 26:13Speaker 00

  Oh, do I? Dude, I used to game Dig with my friends back when we were like indie little bloggers in high school.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Did you, how much fun did you have on Dig?

• 26:20Speaker 00

  So much fun.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Do you know how much Dig was sold for?

• 26:22Speaker 00

  Oh, it was like 25 million or something like that.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Half, no, half a million dollars at the end.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  Oh, at the very end.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  In the shell, at the shell. Sorry.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Basically, when everyone's gone, when everyone's gone, it's worth nothing because it's a shell of itself. The users and the people who participate are the lifeblood and companies are trying to convince the creators that actually they are in debt to them when it should be the other way around. And that's fine. We're just going to keep making stuff on our own time.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Because we're business literate and we're going to make our own money and we're going to keep going.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  It's funny how much of this is predicated on RSS sticking around. Cause if you go back to why people loved Google Reader, it's because it was just a very basic RSS reader. And of course it wasn't big enough. It didn't make enough money for Google to want to keep doing it. And now everything is run through an algorithm of one type or another. But I mean, podcasting is pure in that way. And to a degree, music is as well, because you drop an album with a set track list and that's fair enough. And blog posts are still time series. I wonder if this all kind of boils down to just a question of who controls, in what order people are shown stuff. And if you hold that power, you can make it long-term. And if you don't, you're just going to end up being someone else's surf essentially, which is a reductionist way to think about it, but not probably entirely wrong.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  But at the same time, if you do it for long enough, you can get off of the platform and then you can, I don't know, start a Patreon, start a walled content, start a walled Substack.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Like there are plenty of places to go, but no one, again, you shouldn't be at any of these places exclusively, but there are various places. For you to do various things, you know, it's like at some point I realized that like unless you're in like the top, top, top echelon.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  I'm going to make my stuff and I'm going to make some stuff for other people. And I'm also going to make things that are going to be go directly to consumer. And the balance of all three of those things for me to live the life that I want to live is great.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  And hopefully, when I get to do stuff with other people, I get to work with people like defector, companies that are like staffed up in this way. Like there's a smaller version kind of of what doing with multitude here. And then there's a larger version of what defector is doing. They're they're an outlet, so they need to have a lot of employees. And then hopefully, everyone gets to work with each other and it's a lot of fun. I mean, we also just hired three people at multitude in the wake of 200 people getting laid off at Spotify. So it's a good feeling and you know, you're just trying to the the best feeling in the world is making a job for someone else. And being able to like grow both the project you're all working on and also being able to be like, I'm actually not a bad person. I'm not a bad boss, so hopefully I can do this well for someone else.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  That is so true. The the most rewarding things that I've done in my professional life, apart from individual bits of creative work that I'm proud of, has been working on teams or building teams where I've gotten to bring on great people and invest in them. And if you can do that in creative world, that's great. Really, maybe this to kind of close this up, it sounds like experiments in the monetization and rapid growth in the business of creativity, struggle because that's not really how creativity works. Platforms retain too much power and creatives really still, even to this day, should not put all their eggs in one basket. Or perhaps to summarize, there may be no ethical consumption under capitalism, but there may be a few ways to do ethical production under our current capitalist regime.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you're meeting people where they are, it might be a little bit more ethical instead of like trying to just jump into Disney plus and see what's there.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Listen, if someone made tools that were helpful, people would use it. Just go into the place and ask if you're walking to the art classroom, don't throw them a robot that makes art faster or bigger brushes. Ask them what they want, and if they made them, that'd be great. I also wish Patreon had a competitor to everyone would up their game.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Not because I don't like Patreon and I've been using it for years, but because like, because it's the only game in town. It's the only game in town. That's the whole monopoly thing, right? If folks were pushing each other, it would be better. For everybody and I would love that.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  And that's where you bring our shared lefty, union favoring perspective right into the importance of competition and capitalism. And the meeting point should be something that competes with Patreon. Eric, we gotta call it there. Thank you so much for your time. And also, we love what you're doing in a multitude.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 30:11Speaker 00

  Where can folks find you on the internet?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  You can find me on, I'm still lumbering through the corpse. It's like a, it's like a dead god flying through space of Twitter. I am L underscore Silveiro, E L underscore S A L V E R O. My name if I was a Lucha Libre wrestler. And you can listen to all the podcasts I make. Join the party, games and feelings. Tell me about it. And I also produce the distraction for Defector.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  And Eric has promised if you are playing Baldur's Gate 3 early access, he will come to your house and teach you how to properly lever all the Wizard of the Coast IP for free.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Stop. That is another, have me back. I will talk about what's going on with Wizard of the Coast, Dungeons and Dragons, and the Magic the Gathering. I will come back. And that's a whole other conversation. Listen, all, the main thing I want to end with is that you did this at the intro, but all of these things are related. The thing happening at Twitch, the thing happening at Spotify, the thing happening with the Writers Guild, the Reddit blackout, the Athletic layoffs, which is another one we can add. It's all the same. People mismanaging the creative outlets and breaking the faucet when it was working fine already. And just let people make stuff and stop messing around.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  That's my entire management style in a nutshell, Eric, so I cannot complain with that.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  Everybody, Equity is back on Friday. Of course, we come out three times a week, wherever you find podcasts. Just fire up your favorite RSS reader and you will find this fine show and of course, all the other podcasts out there that we know and love. Give Eric a follow. He's a lovely guy. We appreciate him and all his crew does. And that's it. We're out of here. Bye.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Equity is hosted by myself, editor in chief of TechCrunch Plus, Alex Wilhelm, and TechCrunch senior reporter, Mary Ann Azvedo. We are produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator. And a big thank you to the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.