Creative Control

We’re hard at work developing season 2 of Creative Control coming this fall. In the meantime, enjoy this throwback episode to keep your creative juices flowing!

We’re hard at work developing season 2 of Creative Control coming this fall. In the meantime, enjoy this throwback episode to keep your creative juices flowing!

We’re hard at work developing season 2 of Creative Control coming this fall. In the meantime, enjoy this throwback episode to keep your creative juices flowing!

We’re hard at work developing season 2 of Creative Control coming this fall. In the meantime, enjoy this throwback episode to keep your creative juices flowing!

Over the past 15 episodes, we covered a lot of ground within the creator economy. For the season one finale, we're revisiting some of these topics with Kaya Yurieff, a reporter with The Information who's also been sorting through the ups and downs of this space. In this episode, Kaya gives her opinion on burnout, the creator middle class, and government regulation of social media, as well as her forecast for the creator economy’s next chapter.

Last week, we profiled a talent agency working specifically with deaf and disabled creators. This week, we're going even further into the space of marginalized creators with Annelise Campbell. Annelise is the founder of the CFG, an influencer marketing agency geared toward BIPOC creators like Monica Veloz, a lifestyle and beauty creator of nine years who, since linking up with CFG, has gained an entirely new perspective on value as an Afro-Latina creator. In this episode with Annelise and Monica, we cover everything from how creators of color should view their work to holding brands accountable for the work that still needs to be done.

According to the World Health Organization, 1 billion people around the world are living with a disability. However, it's safe to say that the majority of them still don't feel seen or adequately represented. It’s something Keely Cat-Wells set out to fix with C Talent, a talent management and consultancy agency working exclusively with deaf and disabled entertainers. As someone living with a disability, Keely wanted to make navigating the creator economy and Hollywood more equitable and inclusive. And in this episode, we cover how C Talent is doing just that, where brands are falling short, and how the creators C Talent works with are thinking about the dreaded “inspiration porn.”

One would think an inventor's job should be identifying a problem and building an innovative solution to fix it. Simone Giertz has been great about the first part but intentionally "shitty" about the second. For most of her career as an inventor and content creator, Simone has been the self-proclaimed "Queen of Shitty Robots" with inventions that were never meant to be anything more than a punchline. But a brain tumor forced her to stop hiding behind her shittiness and realize her dream of creating and selling products that actually work.

Rounding out this 3-episode arc of the current state of social media platforms is the question of government regulation. We know social media companies aren't as forthright as they could be about how their platforms work. And we know social media has fundamentally impacted politics and our health. So what's the government doing about social media? Top executives across Meta, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Snap have all been grilled on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers have introduced bills that try to take on issues like addictive algorithms and surveillance advertising. But so far, nothing concrete has taken shape. The European Union is way ahead of the US in regulating social media. So what will it take to catch up? And more importantly what does effective regulation even look like?

Does this sound familiar? You open Instagram or TikTok to kill some time, and the next thing you know, your eyes are dried out and your thumb feels like it’s about to fall off. It’s only then you realize how long you’ve been scrolling. For most of us, spending sometimes hours on social media leaves us a little achy but mainly just feeling guilty for having wasted a chunk of our day. But for some people, getting sucked into social media like that can have a major impact on their mental health. In this episode, I’m looking at where we are now at the intersection of social media and mental health—and I'm talking to a psychiatrist and a technologist who are trying to make these platforms a little less harmful.