AI Summary
5 min readThe price of creativity
In the 1940s, the US government—specifically the Department of Defense—began funding research into something called "creativity." Post-World War II, American officials worried about societal conformity and the need to compete with the Soviet Union. Social scientists studied artists and engineers, gave them Rorschach tests and Myers-Briggs assessments, and concluded that certain people had an internal drive to make things better. The government's idea: what if you could teach this skill to everyone? As entrepreneur and writer Yancey Strickler explains, "creativity" as we know it today is not an eternal human quality but a deliberately engineered concept—a "democratic form of genius" that anyone could access, developed with Cold War strategic goals in mind.
The origins of the creator economy
Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, calls himself a "second-generation creative American." He grew up in public schools where creative writing, brainstorming, and open-ended thinking had been integrated into the curriculum—all legacies of that 1950s push. The 1958 National Defense Education Act specifically promoted science and technology education to get kids thinking creatively. By the 1960s, creative writing entered American schools as a deliberate pedagogical strategy.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:54) **Introduction: The Ubiquity of Creativity** - Host Manoush Zomorodi introduces the episode's central question: where does all this modern creativity come from, and can it be a viable career?
- 2 (01:28) **The Surprising Origin of Modern "Creativity"** - Entrepreneur Yancey Strickler explains that the concept of creativity was deliberately engineered by the U.S. government in the 1940s.
- 3 (04:04) **The Payoff: A "Second Generation Creative American"** - Strickler sees the current creator economy as the direct result of 70-year-old investments in creative culture.
- 4 (06:51) **The Core Problem: An Economic Mismatch** - Despite a massive increase in creative output, the economic support systems for creators are failing.
- 5 (08:12) **Kickstarter's Origin: A Solution to the Gatekeeper Problem** - Strickler recounts co-founding Kickstarter as a direct response to the difficulty of getting creative projects funded.
- 6 (11:11) **The Post-Kickstarter Dilemma: From CEO to Struggling Creator** - After leaving Kickstarter, Strickler faced the same problem he tried to solve: how to make a creative community financially viable without starting a non-profit or a traditional company.
- 7 (16:09) **The Harsh Reality of the Creator Economy** - The episode uses dancer Shivani Shaw's story to illustrate the precarious life of a modern creator.
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