Creative Control

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.

It feels strange to think back to a time when we weren’t so concerned with social media algorithms. For years, we accepted this idea that algorithms were there to serve us more of what we love online. Which is true…to a certain degree. Since 2016, that rosier depiction of algorithms has completely disintegrated. Now when we talk about algorithms, we’re talking about issues like mental health, addiction, political interference, and government regulation. I wanted to get a better understanding of where we are now with social media algorithms. And it's a lot to unpack so I'm going to be tackling this topic in three separate episodes. Up first: what we know (and don’t know) about algorithms.

When Lilly Singh started her YouTube channel in 2010, she was all about the hustle, which led to a number of opportunities including acting roles and a late-night talk show. But in that hustling, Lilly admits her value system got out of whack. She was so focused on accolades and awards that she never thought to tie her value to things like mental health or self-growth. But now she's turning it around—and she’s encouraging us all to do the same in her new book “Be a Triangle.” In this episode, Lilly unpacks how her YouTube career and stint in late-night has had a major impact on what she values and how she views content creation today.

Last week I discussed burnout with therapist Kati Morton and got into the nuts and bolts of what happens in our brains when we experience burnout and how to recover from it. But I also wanted to get the perspective of a content creator. Mayuko Inoue is a software engineer who's worked for Intuit, Patreon, and Netflix. But she left her stabile career behind to become a full-time creator in 2020. So I wanted to unpack burnout with a creator who jumped out of one fire in working tech and into a completely different fire as a content creator.

Before the World Health Organization officially recognized burnout as a syndrome in 2019, there was already a mounting wave of high-profile creators speaking out against what they felt as pressure from platforms to consistently churn out content or their channels would suffer. And, unsurprisingly, the past two years have only made burnout worse. But therapist and content creator Kati Morton explains the small (and unconventional) changes you can make to put out the fire.

Since starting her channel in 2017, Emma Chamberlain has amassed more than 11 million YouTube subscribers, in large part because of her wry comedic tone and signature lo-fi editing style. Not being overproduced in both the look and content of her vlogs made Emma more relatable to an audience that increasingly has favored content creators removing the literal and proverbial filters from their lives. And part of Chamberlain being so candid has been admitting to her audience (and herself) that she needed a break from YouTube. She’s shifted her focus to building out her podcast Anything Goes and her coffee company Chamberlain Coffee. I wanted to talk to Emma to see how she’s redefining her relationship with YouTube and how she’s finding her place in the coffee industry—potential haters and all.

Doctors are taking to platforms like TikTok and Twitter to make medicine less of a mystery for people—and becoming celebrities along the way. But the ethics here are in a very grey area. We’ve seen how misinformation can run rampant on social media. And we’ve also seen that it doesn’t take much for anyone to gain a following online. So I wanted to explore this to get a better understanding of what it means when your doctor becomes an influencer.