How Human Creativity Stays Ahead of AI

Justin Levinson (00:00)

Hey guys, welcome back to the Agency Side Podcast. I'm your host, Justin Levinson. I'm really excited for you guys to hear this conversation with Natalie Silverstein, Chief Innovation Officer at Collectively. Natalie has one of the more unique paths I've come across in our industry, starting her career in environmental advocacy and communications before helping build one of the world's leading creative marketing agencies. Today, Natalie sits at the intersection of creative marketing, technology, and AI, helping some of the biggest brands in the world navigate a rapidly changing landscape. We talked about the future of creator marketing, how AI is reshaping the industry.

Why human creativity still matters and what agencies need to be thinking about next. I learned a lot from this one and I know you will too. Let's roll it.

Hey Natalie, it's great to have you here. Yeah, so let's start with your ⁓ origin story here. I'm interested to learn how you got into this world.

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Natalie Silverstein (00:48)

Hey, thanks so much.

Yeah. So I'm I definitely don't have a traditional agency background. I came to creator marketing, which is where I focus have have been focusing my attention for the last almost nine years. I came through it kind of circuitously and kind of more around entrepreneurship, actually. So started my career in San Francisco during kind of like dot com boom and worked for a number of startups, did a lot of like wear many hats type jobs, like many of us did.

and just always was really interested in how ideas travel through the internet or how ideas travel through culture in general. And more of my focus at that time was kind of the intersection of media, content, early content, we called it, didn't call it that then, and like online organizing and activism around political and environmental causes. So I kind of was at this interesting inner intersection place and worked more on the environmental movement for a number of years, and then really

kind of caught the innovation bug in the early 2010s and really felt like that was the space where businesses, like big corporations were being transformed around things like purpose and values, but also seeing how technology was really accelerating the pace of change across lots of different things. So I kind of found myself in more of a management consulting type organization and learned a lot there about how good companies are run.

And always having this interest in how ideas travel through culture. I was just seeing how social media was just taking over kind of every major media essentially and had an opportunity to join a a small influencer marketing firm on the leadership team and really help grow it and what ended up being this company called Collectively. We have definitely been you know had a strong hand in helping to build this industry in the US and are one of the bigger influencer marketing firms now in the world.

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Justin Levinson (02:42)

Yeah. For folks that might not know collectively, can you just give a background about what what you guys do in the marketplace?

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Natalie Silverstein (02:48)

Yeah, definitely. So we're a creator marketing agency. We were one of the first, if not the first, founded in San Francisco in 2013. And we since day one have been able to work with a lot of really amazing major brands. All of our clients are companies that you probably know and love. We ⁓ are are very well known for a lot of the work that we do with Unilever and Dove specifically. So we look after most of Dove's US influencer marketing work, very award winning business. we were acquired by the brand tech group.

which is a marketing holding company, small, you know, kind of more innovative marketing holding company with a a real orientation towards AI and tech. So we joined them in twenty twenty and have really accelerated our investments and focus on AI and tech enablement for creative marketing since then.

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Justin Levinson (03:33)

I love that. What's your particular like what's the core of your role and and function there?

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Natalie Silverstein (03:38)

Yeah. So as chief innovation officer, my responsibility sits across a lot of things, but primarily it's technology and all of the relationships that we have with the social platforms and you know all the emergent spaces where creators are showing up, making sure that we understand how those platforms work. We have the right relationships. I also look after all of our measurement practice, our paid media practice, as well as just like any new services that we need to spit up or just what's changing in the industry. I am the one that's kind of out in the world.

Going to conferences, understanding who's doing what interesting and really bringing that back into the agency and figuring out how we develop new new offerings essentially.

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Justin Levinson (04:17)

Yeah. Are there any cool conferences that you've been to recently?

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Natalie Silverstein (04:20)

I went to Possible for the first time this year, which I think has historically been like a little bit more ad tech oriented, but with creator tech being a bigger piece of the overall picture now, they're they've started to kind of open up more of a a creator track there. so that was interesting. I had actually had never been to Miami before, which was fun. What else? I've also done like some stuff more that sits in the AI world. So there's a a group that's called Artist in the Machine. It's a a small, definitely growing conference series. I think they go back and forth between

Los Angeles and New York, but it's looking at how the entertainment industry and the creator world and brands are thinking about AI and really showcasing some of the best work that's coming out of using that technology as an artistic expression, not as slop to feed the unending content beast that exists for brands, but rather like how how are people seeing these technologies as ways to

accelerate their expression and really talk about it as an artistic medium, which is, you know, kind of challenging, I think, some of the the criticism that we're seeing right now about AI. So that it isn't it isn't that right. So that was an interesting conference that I got to participate in, I think later, late last year.

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Justin Levinson (05:30)

Cool. I I noticed something that maybe you had posted that is the gen AI Creator Residency. That's that's maybe you could tell us a bit about what that is all about.

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Natalie Silverstein (05:39)

Yeah. So that was a collaboration with our parent company, the Brand Tech Group. And we basically the the impetus for it was seeing that this technology was coming for, you know, marketing firms, advertising firms needing to really understand how this these tools work, figure out how they could be used ethically and well within, you know, bigger remits from brands to just deliver like every single piece of ad creative that, you know, that

they need for retail media and their display ads and their in-store and on and on and on, right? So seeing that that was coming and knowing that we needed to upskill our entire seven thir seven thousand person agency group, the way we wanted to think about it was finding the people who were really doing things well. Again, like really elevating the artistic potential of the tools and collaborate with them over the course of a month on a specific piece of content, sometimes with a brand, sometimes not.

And then have them lead master classes about how they actually did that work. So it was really fun. We identified, you know, a number of folks from all over the world, just really, really creative, cool people from a lot of different backgrounds. Some were, you know, VFX artist types, animators, et cetera. Others were filmmakers and, you know, other types of storytellers. Others were just like one was just an av not just, but a really brilliant advertising.

creative director who had historically been much more of a copy editor and a copywriter, but saw that she could now actually bring her visual ideas to life without having to have those, you know, the the technical skills around graphic design, let's say, and the sort of and encoding. So she had all these ideas of like what used to take, you know, weeks to make some sort of little prototype app. She could just spin up overnight.

So just some of these very wildly creative people who are just pretty fearless about trying things with the tools. So it was a a year long program that I led and we just found these people, got to collaborate with them, got to, you know, bring more people into their processes and just learn from them overall. So and introduced them some to some brands too.

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Justin Levinson (07:39)

That's really cool. Were there any particular tools that people were using that were they were finding to be, you know, really successful for them?

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Natalie Silverstein (07:47)

I mean, it the thing is, is that was, you know, it ended 18 months ago. So things are moving so fast that like the workflows and the tools that they were using then are a bit outdated now. But we what yeah, our assumption in collaborating with them though, and and really having them teach their ways even then is that there are core principles, right? So no matter what tools you're using, some of the processes or some of like the ways to think about collab collaborating with AI definitely ring true.

But like, you know, at that point, you know, some of them were using stable diffusion for imagery. But like now, I think they would probably be using nano banana, for example. Or whatever. You know, it's just kind of at that time they had to stack up a lot of tools. And now that's consolidated quite a bit, I would say. So like for AI filmmaking, let's say, there was a lot more that you had to do just within editing software versus now you can do a lot more within.

the actual AI tool, you know, you can get a longer clip essentially, you know, kind of more richness in if if that's what you're doing. So it's pretty wild how fast things are changing. Sure is in general.

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Justin Levinson (08:50)

Yeah. Hold my hat. How are how are the brands working with embracing all these changes?

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Natalie Silverstein (08:56)

Yeah. So in the creator marketing space specifically, and just again, I feel like I didn't necessarily get super into exactly what c collectively does with brands, but essentially we're hired to take their whole influencer marketing budget, let's say, for a whole year. So sometimes up to twenty, thirty million dollars. If it's a huge brand, people are spending a lot more money on creators. And we're asked to basically build the strategy and then execute all of that creator marketing on on their behalf. So it's everything from big celeb type.

Creators, digital celebrities plus traditional celebrities, events and you know, brand trips and things like that, the kind of splash your stuff all the way down to, you know, big scale campaigns where we're sending thousands of creators samples of products and asking them to post. Maybe we're paying them, maybe we're just giving them, you know, just asking them as of if they'd like to post as opposed to you have to post, you're uncontracted to post. So we do all c all types of creator marketing. and it shows up on

all types of social channels and also increasingly things like podcasts and substacks and these other spaces where creators are are really kind of dominating the channel. So that's what we do. In terms of AI adoption in creator marketing, we're definitely seeing brands less eager to work with like synthetic people creators. I think because the the reaction to those types of of AI applications are are typically

Not great. So if you look at the comments on something that feels AI but like sort of deceptive, where it's like it it's a fake UGC creator sitting in their car talking about a product, right? People the audiences do not like that, right? And that's not good for brands. especially like the types of brands that we work with, which are typically tied to publicly traded conglomerates that are risk averse for any kind of major backlash, right? Where we're seeing more interest is in the types of content and creators.

That are using AI very like obviously and deliberately. It's almost like the main defining like border is like, are you deceiving us or are you are is everybody on the same page that this is AI? You know what I mean? Like it's like it's becoming sort of a new aesthetic, right? And a new thing of like outlandish, crazy animation or a different type of storytelling, right? But it's not like pretending that it's not AI, you know.

So that's where I think there's more interest and like pushing of like, okay, well, what could be possible here? Are there people that are people or you know, accounts that are kind of gaining traction? That's where I'm seeing more experimentation on the content side. Then on the back end, you know, I think everyone is looking for efficiency. So there's a lot of back more back office AI operations stuff that's happening everywhere of just how can we make things faster? How can we make things, you know, how can we, how can we support.

Creator marketing at scale. So it one individual person doesn't have to shoulder the entire responsibility of reviewing every single piece of content in minute detail. For example, like there's a way for technology to help feel confident that things are on brief and, you know, not violating various rules that we've sort of set out. So that's where technology is definitely happening. AI technology is definitely being applied to the back end of things. and then the third area is that ⁓ brands are more and more needing to figure out how to show up in.

generative engine answers. So as more and more people turn to ChatGPT or Claude or even just as Google is evolving to really focus more on those AI answers, they want to be in the in their responses. If somebody says, like for example, for Dove, like, what's the best, you know, what's the best body wash for someone who's whatever, early 40s with eczema, they want to show up in that, in those answers. So how does all of the content that you're creating that gets put onto the internet that a model, most models will be able to ingest?

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Justin Levinson (12:14)

Yeah.

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Natalie Silverstein (12:42)

How is that optimized to be able to support showing up more? So that's being kind of a it's a new angle on creator marketing because it's a it's a it's a a a big flywheel of what's being created.

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Justin Levinson (12:53)

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely people are going to the AI to Chat GPT to find their answers and that makes sense why you'd want to be up there up in quick results just like you would in a Google search years ago. Do you think there's ever gonna be like a ⁓ like right now, you're saying with the AI content, it's c like it's clear it could be absurd that this is AI and so it's like a it gets a pass because it's being used, you know, creatively in that way. Do you think like it's ever gonna get to like

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Natalie Silverstein (13:03)

Exactly.

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Justin Levinson (13:22)

The gap is gonna close where it's like you're not gonna be able to necessarily tell the difference between the AI and it's gonna be even more blurred, or do you feel like it's gonna kind of stay like this? Thanks for tuning in, folks. This episode is brought to you by Coming Up Creative, a relationship-first boutique creative recruitment agency. We disrupt the creative ecosystem by running sophisticated multi-channel campaigns with custom video and voice outreach that actually gets responses.

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Natalie Silverstein (14:08)

Yeah, I I mean it's definitely gonna give me more blurred. I mean even just some of the things I've been seeing recently in, you know, even in like political advertising is pretty crazy. And you have to be pretty discerning to know that it's fake, right? So there's sort of the like bending of reality in that respect that's concerning. Yeah. And the creator space

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Justin Levinson (14:17)

Crazy. Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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Natalie Silverstein (14:29)

Yeah, the the main premise of creator marketing to date has been that people want to know what other people are doing and are interested in. Like we're just so social creatures and therefore we're kind of just wanna know what other people are into, right? Yeah. And so it it's kind of been the buzzword has always been authenticity. And the more a creator can perform authenticity, the more likely they are to be trusted. Yeah. So I don't know if

you know, the puppet masters behind an AI creator can achieve that. Maybe. And there was a a New York Times article over the weekend about the AI actress Tilly Norwood, who made some there was a lot of press about her, it, whatever it is, in the last few months. And one of the journalists, New York Times journalists who's like well known for doing celebrity profiles. Her name's Taffy Rodiser Achner, she did a profile on on Tilly and like

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Justin Levinson (15:00)

Yeah.

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Natalie Silverstein (15:23)

But really the profile was on the creator of Tilly, who is a a a person who has a background in performance and is, you know, is a creator, right? And so she's sort of like using Tilly as her proxy in a way. Right. So yeah. So it's like, okay, what are we doing here? You know, there's in in China, there are fully automated AI creators for sure that exists. From what I've seen to date, there's there's still like, again, the sense of like somebody is making this, at least even if the AI is.

able to kind of respond in conversation and whatnot. Somebody is prompting that. Somebody has shaped that personality. So I don't know. I mean, we're just getting into like super black in your territory.

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Justin Levinson (16:03)

Yeah, I I mean I I mean for me, I I mean also I'm a big music fan, obviously, and it's ⁓ you know, there's been viral artists like Velvet Sundown. I they were like featured in Rolling Stone. It like an AI band that like went like, you know, crazy popular. ⁓ but there's something for me like and I think this is where that authenticity thing is, is like I wanna know who the songwriter is. I wanna know them as a person, I wanna know their feelings, I wanna know like there's still something to that story, you know, I'm like a Beatles freak. So it's like

I can't imagine anything ever replacing like the magic of that story from Liverpool to, you know, Ed Sullivan. ⁓ yeah. So.

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Natalie Silverstein (16:39)

Right. It's like it's the art it is it I don't know. I think we want to know who our the artists are, who we who work we who resonates with us and like can work resonate with us if it doesn't actually con you know, it's it's it's great art is like one person's inner life being expressed and you feeling like you're seen through that, right? In some way or another. I wouldn't say that all creator marketing is art, let's be real. But like there is something about like the human connection that I I just

I don't know if a like a dead-eyed fake person is like gonna be able to do that. I don't know. I mean, I we just I think we also have to kind of recognize our like my millennial brain is very different than, you know, folks who are coming up now who are growing up in in this world, right?

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Justin Levinson (17:24)

Yeah. I'm saddled with that same millennial brain. ⁓ curious, with like you were talking about the budgets and everything for all these creators and and and everything you guys c create. How do you how do you calculate ⁓ success, like in terms of like clients spent five hundred thousand dollars? What do they expect to get? What does that kind of look like?

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Natalie Silverstein (17:28)

Yeah.

Yeah, it totally depends on the campaign, the program as we're kind of chopping things up. But we'll look at things like, you know, reach and engagement. Those are typically, you know, kind of primary metrics for creative marketing. And then also different kind of effectiveness metrics around what resulted from said reach and engagement. So any like direct action that is taken, sales, et cetera, if we're able to track that depending on the type of brand and and what the activation was.

Then things like brand lift and you know, again more of these kind of effectiveness measures around the content. There's also kind of cultural resonance. So what are we seeing in terms of broader ripple effect of, you know, a a ton of con you know investment in content? Are we seeing then a lot more organic mentions in social listening and kind of broader chatter? We also look really closely at the conversations, you know, around specifically video content and like what are

What are people saying about this work? What are they saying about the brand as a result of this advertising of these messages? Are we seeing shifts in the way that or in the public perception? Are we seeing purchase intent, those sorts of things? So we're looking at a lot of different dimensions, but more and more we're able to get closer to kind of direct attribution for sure.

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Justin Levinson (18:57)

Are you building your own tools to track these different metrics?

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Natalie Silverstein (19:02)

Yeah, so the social platforms, you know, spit out a lot of metrics, performance metrics proposed. So mostly it's everybody kind of is dealing with the same data. It's really then a question of how you're looking at that data and what other data sets you're you're able to access to kind of layer into that. So collectively has our own models of just like how we how we think about communicating value, but we don't necessarily need and and technology is part of that for sure. And more and more AI is kind of coming into that because we're able to to you know kind of accelerate.

the kind of data science side of things and experiment a lot more than we would would have been a few years ago for sure. Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (19:38)

I I imagine a lot of part of your role is just kinda like like you know, trying to predict what things are gonna be like in a couple of years from now. Yeah. I mean, do you have any sort of like ideas of where, you know, you do you have a crystal ball that you can share with everyone?

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Natalie Silverstein (19:53)

I mean, I think we're all like, you know, even just like recognizing that we're only halfway through this year, it feels like I feel like I've aged January. But I think that no matter what, AI is gonna be a bigger part of things. And whether it's, you know, liter literally AI repla replacing or trying to replace like a creator type, the the type of creator dynamic that we've had to date or not. In general, content generated by AI is gonna be a bigger part of everybody's feed. Right. And so

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Justin Levinson (20:00)

No.

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Natalie Silverstein (20:22)

what that will mean for creator marketing as we've known it is that creators will need to be even more distinctive, human creators, more distinctive, more entertaining, more able to connect and find ways to almost like do kind of proof of life like actually human, I imagine. So we're seeing even an emphasis on more human formats, lives, events, podcasts, et cetera. I mean, I know podcasts can be synthetic, but it's pretty obvious right now when they're synthetic. But in general

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Justin Levinson (20:50)

Lymphoxic

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Natalie Silverstein (20:51)

Exactly. Yeah. So it's like got all my verbal ticks, you know, train that model on all my likes and ums and Southern California isms. But yeah, I mean, I think that that's that's just gonna be real. So I think there's gonna be more pressure on creators to just be more interesting. I think that the you know, the creator economy is not slowing down. I would say bigger picture, general economic precarity for people is pushing more and more folks into.

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Justin Levinson (21:07)

Yeah.

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Natalie Silverstein (21:20)

Creating online businesses of all kinds and communicating about that business essentially makes them a creator, right? So that means that there's more like inventory, if you will, of creators, a supply of different types of creators to engage with and showing up on different platforms. So we've done a lot of work in the B2B space with a number of ⁓ like kind of personal finance brands and you know, SaaS brands, like you know, Salesforce into it, et cetera. And so the communities of like entrepreneurship.

creators or small business, various types of small business creators or whatever. I mean, that that world has really expanded quite quite a bit and they live on mostly on like YouTube and LinkedIn, let's say. Right. So there's just like an expansion overall and just more complexity, I think, is what we'll see.

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Justin Levinson (22:08)

Yeah. You it we had you'd mentioned earlier on we were speaking about ⁓ I'm correct me if I'm wrong, but you were interested in in environmental issues. Was that something that you had mentioned? So I guess like if you know, from what I'm putting together that, you know, ⁓ it's probably important to you that things are done ethically, like now. Do you sort of sh share that same I'm kind of reading in between the lines, but do you sort of feel like, you know, that's analogous to to how you see like, you know, AI being used, you know, ethically

Morally just

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Natalie Silverstein (22:40)

You know, I'm I'm I think all of us that are in this world and and integrating these technologies are trying to learn about them. ⁓ I think everybody has concerns about the environmental impact of just flagrant, you know, growth with no like unfettered growth of data centers and whatnot. Like that is extremely concerning. And so it the what it makes me think about is like where is where is AI added? Where is it doing something important that we couldn't do before versus where is it

just swapping something that we could have done with existing technology for less impact, you know? So as we think about integrating AI into our operations, I'm thinking about like, okay, where is it truly making an impact? Whereas it's versus it's just kind of like a little trick. Yeah. You know I mean? but I I mean I'll be candid that I I I am conflicted about a lot of it, you know? Yeah. Just like how how a

to navigate. It's just it feels very difficult as an individual person to kind of think through like, you know, how do we make sense of this kind of unstoppable tidal wave coming for us, but also stand our stand firmly in some sense of our values, you know?

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Justin Levinson (23:49)

Yeah. It's tricky. Well, from the a recruiter seat, I definitely see a lot of agencies always asking me for AI innovation people. It's becoming a really popular role. People are asking me for it. So ⁓ I'm out excited to learn but I've been excited to learn about, you know, you and your role and your and and so it's good education for me. Wha are you finding like I guess what roles are you finding

that are kind of the hardest to to fill within the agency right now. What you know, what what kind of people have you been looking for the most? What kind of talents?

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Natalie Silverstein (24:20)

Yeah. I mean, I think we're still mostly focused on, you know, like producers and and people who really understand social and understand creator marketing and how to do it at scale efficiently and with a lot of integrity in terms of just the the way they they treat creators, the way they treat clients, like, you know, high high level of client service and, you know, able to hold a lot of details, right? I think the it's not that it's hard, but it's more like I think.

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Justin Levinson (24:43)

Yeah.

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Natalie Silverstein (24:50)

Finding folks who are extremely curious about a lot of different things is kind of what's necessary in the agency world right now, working in social, just to be able to kind of track, be inter to be authentically interested in like lots of different dimensions of the social world, right? Like that kind of, especially for our strategists, right? Who are like, d what what pulses do they have their fingers on? You know, do we have coverage across most areas that our clients are going to be interested in? It's like,

We have some folks who are really like, okay, they know a lot of about what's going on in sports. Others are like, okay, they're they got the Bravo world covered. Like other people are like, music, I know everything there is to know about what's going on in music, right? Like kind of having that coverage because everything is so the work that we do requires just a real kind of up-to-date cult cultural fluency across a lot of dimensions. So I would say that's tricky. And then on the on the tech side of things, we're definitely, you know, in that kind of like,

hiring AI operations type people who are able to like sort of assess process that exists now and define, help us define where should things be shifted into more like AI enabled, AI enabled workflows versus full automations that may or may not be AI oriented and maybe other systems, but should be automated. What are the juncture points for human intervention and editing or oversight? So

This this idea of like an AI operations division is definitely something that I think we're we're in right now. We have some really great talent and we're playing kind of a a lot with a you know a variety of different tools and kind of building our own systems, but then also kind of incorporating some of the foundation model tools that are just like incredible, right? That can kind of layer on to things. So it's a very different like technology paradigm than it was a couple of years ago.

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Justin Levinson (26:17)

Yeah.

Yeah. In terms of all those pieces of culture where people have specialties, where where do you think feel like your strength is? Yeah, like interest that you feel like you're you kind of know the know the niche.

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Natalie Silverstein (26:42)

My personal one?

Yeah.

⁓ I don't know. I've I'm like a quite a I'm kind of interested in a lot of things. I feel like I definitely ta track technology. I definitely track I feel like I I I like know enough to be dangerous about music. I'm like I feel like I have in a way kind of like I feel like I'm trying to be down with the kids a little bit. I forget that I how old I am and I'm like when I have like twenty two year old colleagues, I'm like, yeah, like I don't know I don't necessarily know like that genre, but ⁓ anyway. But I I like

I like music. I I feel like the I definitely track like creators, right? Like who's cool. I feel like I'm less like a YouTube person than I am like an Instagram TikTok person. I don't know. I'm just like imagining my current TikTok feed, like what is on there. I definitely track politics because I you know, the impact on everything that is the economy and everything else. So I don't know.

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Justin Levinson (27:39)

Yeah, that's cool. What what music kind of music do you like?

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Natalie Silverstein (27:43)

That's such a hard question. Well, I actually admitted to my full off-site, full company offsite recently that I'm like a later in life Swifty. Did not, was not, I missed Taylor. I'm too old for like the original Taylor Swift and like was way too cool at that point. It was just like very in my like hipster 2000s hipster life, ⁓ indie rock, et cetera. but anyway, current turns out I like Taylor Swift. And but that's obviously like kind of the most pop side. But I I do like pop music. I think it's always interesting to track pop music because it's such a reflection of just like what is.

the sentiment, you know, of people and how is pop music being being packaged and what are the values that are sort of being communicated through pop music. I think that's interesting. Just like a media literacy perspective. But personally, I mean, I love like kind of like some of like the kind of bedroom pop, like female singer, songwriter indie, but like a little bit more

Dreamy like soccer mommy and some of these, I don't know, like more indie type things. My husband isn't in c is very very tapped into music and so he just like makes me still makes me mixes, like makes me playlist essentially. So most of my new music discovery comes from that and he's very cool. So I sort of draft off of his coolness, but I don't know. What about you? Or what are you into this? I

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Justin Levinson (28:52)

I I love the Taylor Swift stuff too. I mean, I feel like that new record, like Fate of Ophelia and and Elizabeth Taylor, like it's she's definitely like writing from a a deeper place than, you know, we are never ever ever getting back together, you know? She's got like a

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Natalie Silverstein (29:08)

I mean it's the it's the B tracks, you know. Anyway, yeah. I mean think I ⁓ I think ⁓ it was not cool to be into Taylor Swift, but it's I just think that we should r respect the game. You know what I mean? How do you create that kind of dominance, you know? It's like

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Justin Levinson (29:22)

I know. Yeah, I mean it's like to be able to like write those kind of songs, to, you know, have the charis like charisma that she has, but like get up on stage in front of all those people. I mean, she's just like to sing and to write and to have that stage performance and dancing and choreography, it's like it's pretty like even if you don't dig it, it's still pretty jaw dropping how just she's just like larger than life in terms of like our generation, I feel like.

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Natalie Silverstein (29:51)

Yeah, I agree. I agree. And yeah, I think in general, like I I tend to gravitate towards ⁓ just w women's voices. So I love Beyonce. Also huge Beyonce fan in terms of like big, big artists and stuff. And I don't know. There's just there's so much good music. I think in the same way that we're just seeing so many, whatever your kind of interest area from a creator perspective, you can find people who are talking about things you're interested in and just and from a taste perspective, there's just so much good music.

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Justin Levinson (30:18)

Yeah. And it's just it's it's just everywhere too. It's like, you know, I was hearing an interview with Weird Ow where he was just basically saying like he could do parodies because everyone was looking at the same music on T V so it was easy to be like, I'm gonna do, you know, make fun of, you know, a Michael Jackson song or or a you know a Nirvana tune. But now we all have our own little pockets of like, I like surf rock or I like, you know, you know, dreamy, you know, female. So we're all sort of like, in a way, it's like everything is

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Natalie Silverstein (30:19)

That's overwhelming.

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Justin Levinson (30:46)

accessible and out there, but we're all sort of like in these sort of like sub niches, which is kind of weird compared to how it used to be.

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Natalie Silverstein (30:52)

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Speaking of kind of like worlds where things used to be they used to like mass culture. We've started like in the evening, sometimes instead of watching shows on TV, we'll just watch YouTube. I think this is also something that's pretty yeah, big shift, right? It's like YouTube set top YouTube. But they some creators or I don't know if it's labels or whoever, but has remastered a lot of old recordings, like even like classic rock, like The Rolling Stones in nineteen sixty six.

They've remastered the video using AI tools, like essentially like upscaling using AI. Yeah. And so like Mick Jagger, like at 24 in like perfect 4K, or like The Beatles or whoever, like there's all these videos now that make and even like we w even watched MGV Unplugged Nirvana, which is like very millennial in my heart, but it like looks like you shot it with your iPhone. Do you know what I mean? so there's like the way that AI is kind of finding its way even into like

reimagin like basically like kind of reintroducing some old stuff to people is crazy. It's very cool.

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Justin Levinson (31:54)

There's actually that new music video that's out of the Rolling Stones where they're all like really young that's just out. They have a new album out and it's crazy. Really? Yeah. It's AI them. And I don't know if he'd like he's they're probably they're like, I don't know, probably in their like twenties in the video and Keith Richards and Nick, and it's just like really, really bizarre. And I saw Billy Joel did a really weird video too, where he was like young, like in like probably the early like like eighties and then sort of morphs to him being his current age, sort of like

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Natalie Silverstein (32:03)

Is it is it actually them or is it AI them?

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Justin Levinson (32:25)

It's weird.

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Natalie Silverstein (32:26)

It's weird. It's weird. But I think like the fact that this these when we see old footage, even like the there's a Beatles documentary about the you probably watched that. This like the Apple TV documentary was like four part documentary. Incredible. But I think so much of sort of history we think of like the footage we have of the past feels so distant because of the quality of the recording. Yeah. And if they can now using tools like take that same recording, but like make it feel so current, it's like time collapses in this really cre crazy way.

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Justin Levinson (32:47)

Yeah.

Yeah. ⁓ they pulled John Lennon's voice out for that Beatles single, ⁓ Now and Then Then, I think. Yeah. It was super cool because like they couldn't pull that lead vocal out before and now you can just take out a piece of a recording, which is just like crazy. When I was a kid, we had these like, you know, Tascam four track cassette recorders and we'd be making noise. Everything was all just like

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Natalie Silverstein (32:56)

That's fine.

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (33:22)

crap and sounded terrible. And to think that like I mean honestly to even think about how that it got onto computers and to that now you can isolate and take things out, remix them is just like it is absolutely mind boggling. But it's it's cool.

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Natalie Silverstein (33:36)

Yeah, super cool. But you know, but now it's like, okay, so the what is masculine, you know, what what does everybody listen to? Every I I I just kind of speaking of like what I track or what I've focused on, every every person under twenty five that I encounter, I interrogate them about their media habits and what they're into. Just you know, it's like I don't have kids, so I don't have quite as much connection, but it's like all my little nieces and nephews and godchildren. I'm just like, tell me what's cool. What do you think is cool?

Like how are you using Snapchat? Snapchat. What are you listening to? You know? ⁓ because I think it is so kind of tribal in a way of like what people are into. So we just don't have that like everybody listening to top forty radio, you know.

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Justin Levinson (34:14)

I do have two kids, two little girls, and I am bombarded with all their crazy stuff, like the six seven thing that still doesn't seem like it's ending.

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Natalie Silverstein (34:25)

Yeah, but it's like I think, you know, the in some ways because of the internet, it's like older people can be vultures to young people c to youth culture in a way that is super off-putting, I'm assuming, for them. And like there's a need, there's like a it seems like there's sort of a developmental need to rebel and you know, create distinctive expression and generational, you know, unique things, right? And it's like the issue now is that because it's like the the the stage on which that's all

played out on is the one same one that companies and marketers and just anybody can sort of snatch, right? And and inter in in criticize and like whatever versus I think there used to be a little bit more space to explore. And that's like there's some kind of interesting things happening on like I'm not really as tapped into this, but like, is it called far TikTok? I think it's called far TikTok. There's basically like ways that people have

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Justin Levinson (35:00)

Yeah.

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Natalie Silverstein (35:22)

Created to tap into like weird stuff, create, and then like almost like create codes, like entry codes to find it, like within these corporate behemoth algorithmic monsters. I'm pretty sure it's called Far TikTok. So check it out. Far TikTok. Did know what I'm talking about?

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Justin Levinson (35:41)

I've heard I d I don't know actually, to be honest with you, I've not I've heard of this before.

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Natalie Silverstein (35:44)

So apparently the way you access it is by searching with very, very crazy strings of letters and numbers because that's how that content is tagged in like in a way that the algorithm would like never understand. It's a way to sort of like trick it and like have this stuff sort of live in this other again, think of it sort of visually as like spatially, it's like the far corners, if you will. Then there's like I don't know if it's brain rot type content or just other stuff that kind of exists in these.

kind of invisible spaces. Like they're online, but they're l they're more invisible. And like in some ways, like maybe some things are incubating in spaces like that that we don't know about.

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Justin Levinson (36:23)

That's cool. Well, I'm trying to be, I'm trying to not let the old man in and be judgmental about the kids' content that I see. Cause you know, I can like come into a room and they can be like watching a show where there's like people are playing with Barbies and talking, and you're watching a video of people playing Barbies. I'm like, we used to just play Barbies. Now we're watching videos of people playing Barbies. This is really weird. Like, is this healthy? Like, should we be like encouraging this? And just like very like it's just some strange content. My I mean my youngest three.

She was really into watching AI cats sing that Bruno Mars song Appetit, or whatever it's called Apartment APT. Yeah. Just watching AI cats like sing that song and like scrolling through thousands of these and being like trying to be like, well, when I was your age, I was watching like you know what I mean? I I go into like the things I'm trying to like not let the old man in, but it's easy to get judgmental about some of it, you know, coming from a different.

time period. Like I kind of yearn for more like thought, I guess, and just like the content sometimes where I'm just like, can I I want more of a story or more like I even I know I like the way old cartoons are shot because it just feels like there was so much work put into put into them. I mean not that there's n work put into them now, but just in my letting the old man brain in, I just somehow can convince that what I grew up on was of higher quality when it, you know, not necessarily is, but

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Natalie Silverstein (37:49)

I mean, it was just done really it's we this is a different world. That world doesn't exist anymore. So I think that's the

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Justin Levinson (37:53)

Yeah.

I've got

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Natalie Silverstein (37:58)

That's

like the millennial conduct conundrum is 'cause we're like the last ones who sort of have a had a foot in the old world and now I'm from this new world. Yeah, exactly. Or just in general, the internet, hardly, you know. So I mean I think it's important to be discerning and like

critical and not just like let this stuff wash over us uncontested, but also we just live in a different world now. I don't know. I if I I think it's really I I imagine being a parent is really challenging. So and I know it is for people that I'm close to to kind of help help your, you know, your kids navigate and have media literacy. To me that's that's the thing is like media literacy is a is a much trickier endeavor now because there's just so many more dimensions to understand and to ⁓ you know

If you're thinking about the economic incentives of the people that are making the stuff, that's kind of one dimension. You think about like, okay, what is this story saying? Is it saying anything? Should it be saying something? Do I expect it to be saying something? what am I taking away from this subconsciously or consciously? You know, all that I think is is probably the conversation to be having rather than trying to fight against.

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Justin Levinson (39:00)

Exactly. If you just fight against it, it just gets cooler. But yeah, I mean I remember like growing up in you know, you'd get like you know, have Joe Camel, you know what I mean? Or you'd have you'd get you get like an al like people like family members would w get awards for smoking. You'd get like a Joe Camel fishing lure and I'd be a little kid casting out a Joe Camel fishing plates so weird, you know. I'm sure there's those secret, you know, a advertisements and things that are that are going on with the content the kids are watching too, and you know.

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Natalie Silverstein (39:19)

Hold on.

Yeah, or it's values, you know. It's like

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Justin Levinson (39:29)

Yeah,

or value something that is not necessarily positive for them to learn.

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Natalie Silverstein (39:34)

Yeah. Right. It's not like kind of government funded Sesame Street that's like for the public good. It's something else, right? There's a different incentives. So yeah, I don't know. I think it's everyone is sort of living and getting content from so many different sources now that it's hard to it's hard to sort of have command of all of them and really understand all of them. Yeah. I think a world, I don't know if you I feel like I when I started my career, I f I would feel like every day I would like

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Justin Levinson (39:38)

Yeah.

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Natalie Silverstein (40:01)

kind of get through the news and kind of feel like I got a s I have a good sense of what's happening in the world. I have a good sense of what the like culture blogs are saying today. And you kinda get to the end. You know what I mean? And like that world is like there's just no way to sort of have command of everything and sort of that feeling of like you are constantly trying to keep up is

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Justin Levinson (40:21)

Yeah. Or even having like the emotion of something that like being able to like like when some this I'm not explaining this well, but like, you know, you something really like huge could happen and it would have a real you know, effect on you, but now something else comes in so quickly or you're desensitized from it because you're like, Yeah, that's happens all the time now. You know, you're just sort of like, Yep, on to the next one.

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Natalie Silverstein (40:43)

Yeah. I mean a a little bit, right? It's kind of like how right. Yeah. Like how much the the medium that we are engaging with stuff is is impacting the way that it's it's taken in, you know, are we all just sort of transfixed by the idea of a feed and flipping from one thing to the next? I don't know. Yeah. It's these are the the challenging things. But, you know, I think for for me working in the in social media again, being interested in how ideas travel through culture.

I think there are ways, you know, to to you know, have brands distribute their resources to people that are doing cool stuff, being creative, making a living off their creativity. I think that's still something that I I really stand behind. Used to be that all of all of the marketing dollars would funnel from one company to another big company and typically everybody involved looked the same. Right. And that's not how it is anymore.

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Justin Levinson (41:36)

Totally. There are tons tons of positives. I didn't mean to throw throw any shade at it too. I was thinking more like long form content and children stuff. Like there are there are so many amazing brands that, you know, and causes and things that, you know, positive things that come through creator content. And it does really give everybody the opportunity to, you know, you know, it doesn't give you know to to if you want to be a creator, you can do it. You don't need to have like some deal with, you know, whatever.

T V station anymore, you know, you c if you have an iPhone, you can you know, it doesn't mean you'll be like successful, but you can at least put your skin in the game, you know.

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Natalie Silverstein (42:11)

your voice out there and like in some ways like you know brand partnerships typically are one of the if not the biggest you know piece of the pie of a creator's con ⁓ overall income right if they're you know at a certain level and so in some ways like brands help subsidize people who are talking about lots of things like it could be that they're you know a cooking creator who talks about healthy eating but they also talk about body image and they also talk about whatever right and they are really real about this that and the other but like

Their cooking content helps fund their ability to continue to kind of explore their voice and make a positive impact to the people that follow them. You know, like there's just dif a lot of ways to think about it. I don't know. Yeah. Of course, also some nefarious actors, of course. And like anything, it's not everything now is just way more complicated. But but I do think that there is the internet is still a place where people can connect and feel seen. And I don't know. It's an interesting moment.

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Justin Levinson (43:08)

Yeah, I agree. This is a crazy time to be alive. But yeah, Natalie, thank you so much for being on here today and and offering value and sharing sharing your story and what you do. And you know, it was really fun to to to learn from you today and I I appreciate your time.

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Natalie Silverstein (43:21)

Yeah, thank you. Really appreciate it too. Take care.

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Justin Levinson (43:23)

Awesome. Take care.

Bye.