Balaji Srinivasan and Taylor Lorenz on Creator Economy, Internet Freedom, and Decentralized Media | MTS Live

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Welcome back, we are live here in the Situation Room with Balaji Srinivasan and Taylor Lorenz, which might be their first time ever meeting.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:09)

I think so.

SPEAKER_1 (0:10)

Is this, wow. Certainly first time ever appearing on a podcast together.

We're-

Taylor Lorenz (0:16)

Livestream.

SPEAKER_1 (0:17)

Livestream, yes.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:18)

That's right.

SPEAKER_1 (0:19)

Yeah, we're really grateful to have you here. Thanks so much for coming on.

Taylor Lorenz (0:23)

Thanks for having me.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:24)

Good to be here.

Should we get started? Can I ask some questions? Good? Go for it. All right. All right. So first, just, you know, Taylor, clear the air. I have no issues with you. I wish you the best in life. I'm happy you've become an independent creator and so on and so forth. It looks like you're living your best life. Do you have any issues with me? Are we good?

Taylor Lorenz (0:46)

I don't think so. Yeah, thank you for saying that, Balaji. I think you are not- you had a different tune, but that's okay. I know how the Internet goes.

But yeah, excited to have a conversation and chat.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:58)

So, okay, so I have a few questions for you. So first, individuals versus institutions.

This is actually something, I think, that we both thought a lot about. There's been a trend of really prominent creators, like, you know, let's call them writers, Nate Silver, Glenn Greenwald, yourself, Iglesias, Jesse Singel, Barry Weiss, Tucker Carlson, from across the political spectrum, that have now gone and done their own sub stacks, their own podcasts. You know, you're right in the middle of that. How do you see that? What do you think catalyzed that? Do you think that's going to continue?

Taylor Lorenz (1:30)

Yeah, I wrote a book that's somewhere behind me, falling on the bookshelf back there, called Extremely Online, that actually charts the rise of the content creator industry, which I'm sure you know as well, but for people that don't, I think a lot of people, especially when COVID hit and everybody was pushed online in 2020, started to realize that the internet had sort of effectively become the default real world. Like, we're all getting more online than ever. The internet is shaping the sort of offline world increasingly. And especially people in Silicon Valley, even though they had invested in sort of these platforms, I think that's when they started to really recognize the influencer world, for lack of a better word, the content creator industry, distributed media, new media, whatever you want to call it.

You saw them funding, they invented the term the creator economy and they sort of started to like fund it. And so I think a lot of people in tech started to really recognize this shift in media that had been happening for quite a while. As I write in my book, this shift and people that follow a lot of these platforms, obviously know is not something that just happened in 2020 or happened even recently with social media. I started as a blogger. So I actually was writing on blogs, right? And that's how I got popular. You mentioned Nate Silver, Matt Iglesias. I think a lot of us millennials, like that was sort of the TikTok of our day, right? Was where you could go. So I started independent as a blogger and the blogger ecosystem was very robust in the 2010s even prior to sort of social media as we think of now. So I think this trend of media becoming more digital and more distributed is not... That's been happening for 30 years and will continue. And I think it gets press cycles come and go.

But I think that it's a sort of a broader trend than just anything that's happened in the past couple years. What's happened now is that it's easier for independent creators to monetize. Whereas back when I was a blogger, you could put some display ads on, but there weren't brand deals in place in the same way that there are now.

Balaji Srinivasan (3:28)

I think that's right. I think that's why you're right that creator economy was kind of a neologism and maybe a late-adopting thing. But I think the economy part is, as you correctly point out, the novel part, the fact that Substack rose and people can make careers. Actually, quite good money on Substack.

Taylor Lorenz (3:44)

But Patreon, I would say Patreon paved the way for that. Patreon launched in 2013 and really developed that subscriber, direct subscriber sort of relationship. It's just that Patreon was primarily doing that for video and Substack was doing it for writing. Of course, now all of them and Beehive are doing everything. Now they have podcasts, video, everything.