How did “America’s Next Top Model” captivate a generation of millennials? Here’s one reason: Showrunner and mastermind Tyra Banks loves to be extra.
Over 24 seasons, Banks’ reality TV competition sent wannabe supermodels through the gauntlet of unhinged photoshoots: They dangled from warehouse ceilings. They krumped. They posed with swarms of killer bees, donned dresses made of human hair, and doused themselves with olive oil inside jumbo-sized bowls of Greek salad.
But for Banks, going over-the-top is more than just a formula for a blockbuster episode—it’s a strategy for success in every aspect of life. And now, it’s the name of her Substack newsletter, launched live onstage at the Fast Company Innovation Festival: “The World of Too Much.”
The Substack marks Banks’ return to the internet after the model-turned-business mogul disappeared from social media, deleting all of her Instagram and TikTok posts. For the pop culture icon, it was a drastic move, borne out of her gripes with the limits of the medium. “I felt constrained,” Banks told the crowd at the festival. “I felt like I needed to post what was gonna hit the algorithm.”
That was stifling for Banks. She wanted a writing outlet where she could let her imagination run wild. She describes her newsletter as “the amusement park of my mind,” where each new edition will reveal “one land at a time.” There will be no ghostwriters—Banks will pen every word herself. According to Banks, the process brings her the same joy as a trip to Disney World.
“I write real crazy,” says Banks. She once tried putting her writing through an AI detection tool. Its conclusion? “‘This looks like 60% of this has been written by AI,'” she says, scoffing. “It’s like, ‘No, bitch, I’m clever.’ I know how to write just like a goddamn robot, if not better.”
‘I love to create worlds’
Writing—and dreaming up new ideas—aren’t new for Banks. Since her modeling days, Banks’ résumé has racked up bullet points: She founded Bankable Productions, published a young adult novel, went to Harvard Business School, and opened Smize and Dream, a boutique ice cream shop in Australia. Those ventures were all creative sandboxes for her to play in.
Take Santa Smize, for example: Banks’ self-derived alter ego, rolled out on social media to warm up ice cream sales during the slow winter season. Banks gave Santa Smize an elaborate backstory: She lives in the South Pole and was best friends with Santa Claus, before her cookie dough ice cream recipe made Santa so jealous that he trapped her in an avalanche and hijacked her sleigh (slay), before flying across the world to spread propaganda to children and steal spoons from their houses.
“I love to create worlds,” Banks explains. That was what inspired her to write a dystopian novel, Modelland, which was loosely based on Banks’ own history and published in 2010. According to Banks, the novel is a 576-page tome described as “Harry Potter meets Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, set in the modeling industry.” Her original draft to publishers was 1,000 pages long. (“I was creating IP,” she jokes.) But Banks doesn’t sugarcoat the numbers. It flopped, she admits. “The book was too damn long.”
“I was depressed about that,” Banks says now. “I thought it would be my next chapter.” But 15 years later, in a winding turn of events, a strange thing happened: The book blew up. Banks had dropped a promotional music track for the book online, and years later, a TikTok user reposted it with the caption, “Tyra Banks just wrote the worst song in the history of the universe.” It went viral, then fans discovered she’d written a book, too, and clamored to purchase it. No longer in print, the book’s old copies started selling for $2,000 on ebay. Cosplayers, themed escape rooms, and a stage play followed.
Banks says there are a few lessons she draws from that saga.
“Looking at the book now,” she says, “I should have listened to my editor, because my book should have been 300 pages. Listen to the experts. If you’re in Y Combinator or something, listen to them, child.”
“But there’s a hybrid,” she adds, citing the gut feeling of an entrepreneur—the one that drives her to create. Perhaps the book didn’t take off at first because “a lot of the things that I do are too early,” Banks says. “I don’t know how to not be too early. And I often feel like people try to squash me to be like everyone else.” She doesn’t want to let them extinguish that spark.
“I do think that if I listen to them,” Banks says, “I would have a higher net worth. But then, I would be worth less.”
