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Radio War Nerd EP #644 — The Creativity Con, feat. Thomas Frank (Patreon)

Published:
2026-10-21 19:36:15
Edited:
2026-10-21 21:42:58
Imported:
2026-10
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Guest: Thomas FrankRecorded: October 20, 2026

Author Thomas Frank returns to RWN to discuss his new book, The Creativity Con, about the ruling class's dominant ideology over the past five decades - "Innovation", "Creativity" - and all the destruction this ideology has wreaked on everything from politics & class to actual creativity itself.

Buy Tom's new book, The Creativity Con: How Innovation Became America's Biggest Racket (Penguin Books)

*Further listening: -RWN #239 — The Anti-Populists, with Thomas Frank

*(NB: John should be returning to the pod later this week to talk about Taupo.)

Total time: 1:03:18Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

John's new essay collection, To The Crows, is available to subscribers. You can also order a hard copy on Amazon - read it, know it, review it!

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Files

Comments

Matt Colston

Thomas is just describing the decline in the rain of profit that marks calls out if capital especially volume 3.

drizzly_november

You’re not wrong, but you could say the same about anyone writing perceptively about *gestures towards any given subject in modern America*

Matelda

My first job out of college was at a medical research nonprofit where every friday was "innovation friday" and we had this MBA boss trying to model it after Google somehow

Kyle Erickson

When I used to work in suburban Ohio I often drove past a big office/warehousing complex surrounded by cornfields, titled “Innovation Drive”. I applaud the real estate genius who marketed that

Schaeffer Mallory

Watching drywallers in action will immediately deflate the myth that blue collar workers aren't creative, even in the limited definition of freaks like Osborn

Schaeffer Mallory

I really resent the mainstream narrative that goes "well the dot com bubble was bad, but it left us with the internet!" It's like, hell yeah a financial crash that led to a complete cultural and social implosion

Larry Dimes

I was reading a book about the John the Baptist of Fascism, D'Annunzio himself. The discussion of "creativity" sounds a lot like his belief in "Superior People", meaning artist and martial types like himself, just changed for an American and liberal economic context.

Larry Dimes

Also, I think a big part of the push for deindustrialization in the 1980's and 1990's, beyond the Wall Street types (who secretly adored Chinese communism apparently, and did everything possible to help its rise), were the Boomer and Gen X cohorts who went to college in larger numbers than ever before. They hated their factory working parents and wanted to prove themselves as part of the new, innovative "knowledge class". So they happily cheered on the destruction of America's industrial heartland from their upper middle class office suites.

That Guy

Damn what a great interview

ggmacd

sordid tidbit about Sam Altman: he wanted to be a novelist when he was young but became too cynical about it to ever pursue writing a novel. So he's effectively spent his whole career ripping the controller cord out of the game console for everyone else. A man held together by jeggings and a pure hatred of joy.

Angus

Thomas Frank the absolute madlad is back! you love to see it

Joshua

Hey Mark, young here. I love the strokes and Julian casablancas. He grew up rich, estranged son of a mobster, but he writes about the criminality of the regime. Really brilliant musician. Appreciate the culture episode! This was a nice change of pace

CR

The history of the west over and over and over again. It was a backwater shithole for most of human history and will be soon enough again. The future belongs to everywhere else. The U.S. and Europe are done. Good riddance.

CR

First as tragedy, then as farce.

CR

How the fuck did it take 57 minutes to get to Epstein?

CR

175 years ago?

Matt Colston

Its like a saturation point where capital exhaust itself when too much capital is expected as a return on investment yet those returns are diminishing as more investments are made. In our case a system with this much weight at the top forces monetary policy to be inflationary because the shareholders expect more and more every quasrter. The literal amount of money has to go up because constant growth. Its the reason why a product or a meal in 1940 was like 25¢ and now its 60 times in 2026.

Kevin Walsh

Re board games, I think the prevailing view is that American printers cannot compete with the knowledge base that Chinese printers have, and would struggle to physically produce games with the same component quality.

THEKILLERWHALE

On the AI discussion, I think it is misplaced to blame chatbots as the drift away from more artisanal forms of creative work has been ongoing for years now. If you look at music, the high end of the industry has consolidated around a streamlined, assembly line type production with session people doing most of the actual music and a face in front of it. In software engineering, teams have been embracing more and more modular / standardized coding for years in order to increase efficiency but also make themselves more replaceable (because they are depraved little boot lickers).  This has made coding eminently replaceable in comparison to the more artisanal days before and the speed with which this is no longer a viable profession is staggering (there are also much more exploitable datasets when it comes to coding). So, to me, AI generated music makes sense because we started to say that Taylor Swift was music, instead of banal corporate crap. We made ourselves replaceable.

Conor

Thomas Frank securing the coveted RWN bump

Kamran Husain

pepsi is ny based while coca is georgia so the political ties likely go back to the old southern dems

Schaeffer Mallory

Very powerful interview. The discussion about the death of underground music hits very close to home

T

I’ve always thought that creativity was the result of the human mind over coming boundaries and limitations. Boggles the mind how anyone can expect those with limitless resources to be creative when they literally have zero boundaries or limitations.

Viroquan

I was born the same year as Thomas too and also, like him, grew up in the Midwest, went to college and then moved into a 1980s squatting/art scene in the East End of London (pre-gentrification.) It’s rather embarrassing to remember how convinced of our cool-dom we were. However, I am so grateful to have been a young adult in a time where unconventional living was a possibility. My daughter moved back to London and people her age (without inherited wealth) cannot slot out of nose to the grindstone, work work work just to survive.

radiowarnerd

The blame is much more on internet centralization, streaming services, Silicon Valley-pushed piracy, all the ways that the tech oligarchs centralized music revenues and distribution making it near impossible to eke out a living (and it was always hard enough as it is).

Ian Firstenberg

Wonderful interview. Spectacular writer. Excellent show

kenzel

Fascinating thank you. I'm struck by how this is one of the tools that keep people in a state of complete fixation on the ideal society, yet never actually consider what the ideal society is to them.

Peter Z

Careful with productivity - it's used as an excuse by economists to suppress employee rights like a 4 day work week where ironically productivity would increase due to worker happiness.

John

This was fantastic. Made me nostalgic to when i started listening to podcasts back in 2012 - 2014 era. When people were interestint and funny and not complete cunts.

Ty Drown

George Gilder also co-authored a very interesting post-mortem of the 1964 Republican primary called “The Party That Lost Its Head” that was Thomas Frank-esque in its dissection of the Goldwater victory and anti-intellectualism in the Republican Party from the perspective of two liberal Rockefeller supporters. They identify Congressmen Gerald Ford and John Lindsey as two to watch (John Lindsey left the Republican party as NYC mayor a few years later and Reagan primaried Ford). His co-author also stayed right wing and headed an “intelligent design” think tank. Interesting read and strange time capsule and alternative history had the Goldwaterites and Southern Strategy formed the new leadership of the Republican Party.

Jennifer Wiren

I'm reminded of a scene in the Simpsons, where Bart gets what he wants, fame and fortune, all this and he goes on Conan and does a sad little jig in his chair and is told, "Only I may dance." And he is stripped of even that sad little jig in his chair. We're kind of like that. But I also couldn't help think of Woody Guthrie. A lot of his music centres on the dams, "Your power is turning our darkness to dawn." And like, I don't know, technology could have saved the World or whatever, but no, this is what's turned up. I wonder why.

Doktor Buzzo

Thomas Frank’s RWN appearances are always informative and shed light on aspects of our cultural biases and blind spots where the fungal class possessing wealth, power and malignant objectives thrives, unseen and therefore assumed absent by our compliant pet media. A brilliant explainer of these people and their ideas for the rest of us just trying to survive. A joke you the RWN hosts may take for yourselves: his name is Richard Florida because Nathan Arizona was already taken. Thanks very much Mr. Frank for all of your books and be well!

GG Allin Dulles

as cliche as it sounds I really think these people deeply envy the struggling artist, the scrappy garage inventor etc. I think they know deep down that they are cut off from the real inspiration and ingenuity that only come with struggle, from a core part of the universal human experience really, and they feel hollow as a result. but the idea that there's something they can't buy is so alien to them that they're driven to meticulously cultivate this larping-esque image of an "innovator" in the hope that recieving praise for paying a bunch of engineers (who need to think outside the box to remain employed) to build an app that lets you gamble on the outcome of a murder trial or split the cost of a big mac into 4 easy payments will be equivalent to the satisfaction of triumphing in the struggle to bring a crazy idea they themselves had to fruition

Hector Jaime

Great episode. Can’t wait to read the book. I cringe every time one of my design colleagues praises Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, which is the classic example of the creative con. People I know who have worked with Rubin confirm he’s an asshole and doesn’t do shit in the studio. Now with AI, I notice the words “creativity” and “innovation” have been replaced by “taste” and “judgement.” Barf.