Camille Hearst: belief

Transcript context

…This's a great segue to an area I want to spend time on is the creator economy and creators and artists and things like that. And along these lines, I think I have this issue too. I feel bad charging people but there's also... I don't think my stuff is worth enough to charge for and why would anyone ever pay anything for it and so I imagine you see that too. It's just like, "No one's going to pay for this. It's crazy." Yeah. It's funny because we live in a very capitalist and market dictate the price kind of society, but on an individual level, particularly when the commodity so to speak is art, there's so many emotions and feelings involved in that that it's hard for someone who's the creator to disassociate themselves from it and see what the market will bear. Which is why I actually think it's great that there's platforms who have stepped in and said, "Hey, we see an opportunity. Let us insert ourselves in the center, let us aggregate, and let us do the hard work of pricing and payment and tax and finance and actually create value where it would be really hard for an individual person who's a creator to do all of this work and facilitate that connection." It's almost like the perfect marketplace solution. But again, it's hard because if the supplier doesn't want to actually make money in some cases or shies away from optimizing or making money. And then there's the creative process. Sometimes, you're in a flow mode and you're producing a lot and then other times, you're in a drought spell and these things ebb and flow which is why I think companies like Patreon and Substack are really cool because what they try to do is smooth out that revenue and make it so an artist can actually have a predictable... They're not even artist, a creator can have a predictable sustainable paycheck so that they aren't bouncing around from job to job and losing the ability to have that burst of creativity because they're worried about their bills. I have that experience myself with Substack which is a subscription newsletter and one of the big downsides people don't think about with this life is once you start charging, people start buying, say, an annual subscription and that means I have to at least go for another year and in reality, I never really want to stop it because the revenue would just stop and that would be really sad. So you get on the treadmill where you don't really have an exit path. And I'm not sure exactly where this all goes, but it's been great. But that's something people don't think a lot about is this never ending, keep creating, keep creating life.…

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