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So let's click on upgrade to see the ants. Okay, so here we go. So here are the options if you want to subscribe, it's $7 a month or $7 a year. All right, so what you get on here, it says the free gives you occasional public post. And if you go to $7 a month, you get subscriber only post and the full archive and you can post comments. I looked at this earlier. It looks like at the moment he's posting every day and only one post a week is subscriber only. You get a lot of content even if you're not a subscriber. But for $7 a month, you will get all of the posts and you can participate in the comments. All right, so here's the question then we want to ask. Let's start with how much money is he actually making? So how do we figure that out? We want, if we want to understand the substack economy, the newsletter economy, let's use this example first. Is it true that he's seven figures? Well, we need to dive into the numbers here. So I'm going to start with what substack itself, the formula that Substack itself says to use. We look this up, and substack says for, you know, a standard newsletter with a free tier and a paid tier, you can expect somewhere between 5 to 10% of your subscribers to pay for the paid tier. The low end of that would be more like 3%. All right, so I'm going to load up here a table that we put together, and what we have here in the far left column is we have a row for different percents, right? So different percents of the. So maybe that different percents of the subscribers that might have converted to pay. Right. We don't know the answer for Krugman, but we'll look at three different scenarios. Okay? 10% of his total subscribers paying 5% and 3%. Then for each, we can calculate how many paid subscribers would that percent give us, how much monthly income that would then translate to, and then what does that shake out to per year? To simplify things here, I'm not taking out sub stacks. Cut. But we could just, you know, reduce it by 10% if you wanted to do that. All right, so let's look at the really optimistic scenario for Krugman, which is that 10% of his 500,000 subscribers are paying for the tier. That would mean he would have 50,000 paid subscribers. In that case, 10% of 500,000, which would work out good work if you can get it, Jesse, $350,000 a month of subscription fees, which is a little over $4 million a year. All right, so let's look at the lower end of the range that Substack said to expect, which would be 5% of your subscribers pay. That would work out to be about 25,000 paid subscribers, which is $175,000 a month and a little over $2 million a year of income. Even if we jump down to the pessimistic scenario where only 3% of his subscribers pay, that's still going to be 15,000 paid subscribers, which is $105,000 per month of subscriber fees, which is about $1.26 million of average revenue. All right, so the answer to our first question, what is Paul Krugman doing? Is we can say, look, in every reasonable scenario, his seven day a week substack has him doing much better financially than he could have been doing at the New York Times. And if he's in the best case scenario, he is actually building up real wealth. He's making many millions of dollars a year. All right, second question in our investigation, how much does a newsletter like this actually require to run. Is this easy? Is it hard? They get some insight here. We don't have Krugman himself talking in too much detail about his habits, but we have a similar blogger. Not blogger, I guess, newsletter writer, they would say, who did write about the process. There's this article I'll lit on the screen here for people who are watching Nate Silver, who I think when I looked it up was ranked number 12 on the sub Sex Politics leaderboard as compared to number seven for Krugman. So they're very similar size substackers. Silver wrote this article Always Be Blogging My seven Tips for a Successful Substack. So we can look at Silver's article to get a sense of like, what actually goes into being someone who has a lot of subscribers like him or Paul Krugman on Substack. So he has seven pieces of advice. Number one, we'll go through them real quick. Always be blogging, he says. I have to tell you that producing Silver Bulletin is really hard work. It's often creatively fulfilling and enjoyable and this year it was financially rewarding. But professionally I'm the happiest it's been in years. But it's a lot of work. And if you scroll down here a little bit more, he says he keeps in mind he has a picture here of Alec Baldwin from Glen Ross with the Always be closing chalkboard. And he's changed the last C to a B so it now reads Always Be blogging like you gotta be writing a lot, right? That's what if you want to have a large subscriber base and a good conversion to paid. He's saying you have to write a lot at a minimum three articles a week. How long does that take? Well, he says if you ask me to chart out how I spent my time in the way that the American time you survey does, you'll find that I'm not actually working all that often. Sure, 40 or 50 hours a week, but I take most nights off from work. I travel a lot, both for work and for fun. I play a lot of poker, a wonderful but time intensive habit. And I have my share of weekday leisurely lunches. I do tend to put in some working hours on the weekend mornings, afternoon. Still, it's not a crazy schedule. First of all, Jesse, can I just put a little aside here about like the elite class of knowledge workers? In his mind, he's like, look, I know this isn't really a hard job. I'm just working 50 hours a week because, you know, he came out of you know, he was running, he was at the New York Times. Then ESPN put all this money into him building out this giant vertical that did sports and election predictions. When you're in those situations, you're just working all the time. So he's like, oh, I know it doesn't look like I'm working all the time because I'm not working at night. I think for people in that class, that's like, oh, I'm lazy. But I think the key number in here is 40 to 50 hours of work week. So it takes about like a normal full time job, a normal person full time job. The other tips I'll go through quickly, they're a little bit less important, but they're kind of interesting. All right. His second advice, if you want to succeed at Substack, is to stretch singles into doubles. So you got to know how you have, like a good idea, how to make it a great idea, make the headline better, a better lead, like a better image, like that matters. 3. He says home runs come from timely, differentiated content. I definitely have seen that on Substack. So you need the article if it's timely to something that's actually happening in the world. Like, if you're a sports writer, there's a big thing that just happened like that day in sports, and you get it out fast. But you also have a take that's different. If all you're doing is like summarizing what's going on, then who cares? But if it's timely but unique, that's where the real numbers pop up. So he gives a kind of a cool example about this. He says the most popular post in Silver Bulletin history is the one on Ann Seltzer's Iowa poll. So this was back from the presidential election last year. Dubiously and wrongly. So this poll dubiously and wrongly had Kamala Harris leading in Iowa. Right. So I don't know if you remember this, Jesse, but like, this one poll came out that was like, wait, Kamala Harris is doing unexpectedly well in Iowa. And people are like, oh, maybe that's a harbinger, that she's actually doing better than we think, because anseller is a good pollster, but she just got it really wrong. But he wrote a post on this that he claims gave him a different angle. So if we look at what he actually wrote, a shocking Iowa poll means somebody is going to be wrong. All right, so it was timely and he came at it with an angle of like, wait, someone could be really wrong here. All right, what other advice? Measure twice and cut once. Yeah, you know, be prepared. Five, take a nose to tail approach to the newsletter. That's just him saying, like, maybe you end up cutting something because it wasn't working in your post. You might be able to use that in another post like a Q and A or Roundup. So don't waste stuff that you already wrote. 6. Writing well quickly is essential. I've got that skill. Jesse. I think you would, you would admit, yes, over the years I have learned how to write. You would be surprised. Some of my email newsletters that seem kind of detailed take me like 45 minutes to write. It's just I've been doing it for a long time. And then seven, play the long game. So take time. All right, so how much work does a newsletter like this require? The answer we learned from Nate Silver, who has a comparable sized newsletter to Krugman, is that it's more or less comparable to like a full time journalism job. Not like a really high end. I'm the publisher of the whole paper. But just like, yeah, this is similar to a job like in the 90s if you commuted to the Houston Chronicle and you worked and you were a journalist and you kind of commuted home in the evening, it's like, it's not less, but it's not a lot more. And it's flexible. As Silver says, you can go play poker, do other things because you are your own boss. All right, we're making progress here. We're picking apart the numbers. What's going on with the newsletter economy? Question number three. I want to tackle how many other people are making a good living on Substack. All right, this is a tricky question and a critical question. Krugman's killing it. We crunched the numbers. Silver's also killing it. He's a little bit smaller than Krugman, but he's doing very well. Are they the only two? Are there a huge number of people? This is a number that's hard to get. A substack doesn't like to break this out because it's like with influencers on Instagram. They want everyone to think that you never know, like you could be rich tomorrow or you're only one viral video away. So they don't really talk about these numbers. So we're going to have to try to pick this apart. How many people are actually making this type of making a good living? So let's start with the narrower question. How many people are making like a Krugman style living? Million dollar plus income from substack. I found A reasonable source on this. Let me load this on the page. Now, it's from a website called really Good Business Ideas. But they took these numbers from other sources. They had a key number in here that I am going to scroll down to. Okay. They went through all of the top categories in Substack. And Substack has leaderboards where they order by subscriber, count the different newsletters, and they went by categories and counted how many newsletters in each category had 500,000 or more subscribers. So that is exactly where Paul Krugman is. And remember, we did the math that said if you have 500,000 unpaid subscribers or total subscribers on Substack, you're probably under almost any scenario doing million, if not multimillion dollars a year. All right, so here's what they found. I'll zoom in this. This is from just last year. So, like not long ago, US Politics had 15 newsletters with that many subscribers or more. Business had four, technology had four, three. Food, drink, and finance both had two. And then the other categories they looked with all had just one newsletter with 500,000 more or subscribers, which works out to be 34 total newsletters they found that were at the Krugman level. All right, so how many substack millionaires are there? It's like 34. It might be more because if you're a little bit below that and you have a good conversion. But like the number of newsletters that are in Paul Krugsman, Paul Krugman's category, that's pretty small. It's, you know, it's going to be on the. We could think of it in the order of like 50 or so newsletter subscribers. It's not very many people. But let's refine this question a little bit more and let's ask instead not how many people are making a million dollars plus, let's instead ask how many people are making a reasonable living on Substack. And there's a lot of ways we could try to figure this out, like what we mean by reasonable living. But let's just try to get a broader understanding here of how much money are people making when you're below that sort of very top of the heap type of newsletter. So here's the way we went. After doing the research for this, we decided we would take five main categories. Looked at Politics, culture, technology, business, and finance. So some of the major categories and some of the smaller categories. And for each, what we looked at was the number 20 biggest podcast or newsletter on the leaderboard. So we, we wanted to Drop down to that 20 spot. Like when you go down 20 spots in these categories, how many subscribers do they have, and how much does that work out in terms of annual money? Because everyone above that spot would be making more. And then you can kind of imagine if we're doing some sort of distribution, that the money will fall off from there as you head down the list, but maybe with some sort of gradualness. Okay, so that. That's given us a sense. If we zoom out now to the. The top 20 in each of these categories, where are we? So let me load this on the screen here for people who are watching. Politics is by far the most popular of the categories. The number 20 in the politics category, the number 20 most popular newsletters. Actually, Andrew Sullivan, D.C. native. I like Sullivan a lot. He has right around 200,000 subscribers. If we use the same numbers from Krugman, I don't want to look up the individual subscription fees for each. Let's just use $7 a month, because that's like roughly what a lot of substackers do. And let's use the moderate prediction with the lower end of Substack's expectation and what we would think of as the moderate prediction of a 5% conversion that would lead to, in Andrew Sullivan's case, $840,000 a year. Now, I think that's probably accurate because I heard him multiple years ago talk about his shift over to Substack, and when he first he was saying something like, at the time, I'm making $600,000 a year or more. This is great. Why would I ever go back to magazine journalism? So probably like 840 now, that makes sense. I would guess he's probably actually over a million because he has a high conversion rate. All right, the Culture category. Now, this is slightly less popular. The 20th biggest newsletter had 130,000 subscribers. That works out to about $550,000 a year. With our assumptions, when we get the technology. Now, the 20th biggest only has 95,000 subscribers, but with our assumptions, that still works out to around $400,000 a year in business. Interestingly, you think this would be bigger. There's 21,000 subscribers at the number 20 position. With our assumptions, this works out to $88,000 a year. And then if we look at finance, the number 20 was 16,000. And with our assumptions of $7 a month, that works out to about $67,000 a year. We got to be a little bit careful with business and finance because from what I understand with those categories, it's not about having massive subscriber basis, it's about having high end subscriber bases that will pay a lot for your insights. If you're a finance newsletter, you don't need 500,000 subscribers, right? What you need is 1,000 people that are going to pay $500 a year because it's really valuable information for them. So almost Certainly those number 20 ranked newsletters in business and finance are making a lot more than that. But we'll just stick with our assumptions for all categories to try to keep things fair. All right, so if we're going to answer this question of how many people are making a living, if we use something like $150,000 a year as like a cutoff of like, oh, a really good living you're making off a substack, we see that in politics, culture and Technology the top 20 newsletters are well above that. And then if we get to business and finance, the top 20 are a little bit below it. But they're actually probably there because they're charging a little bit more. If we count up the total number of categories that we're being conservative, the number we came up with is you're going to end up with somewhere 500 plus, somewhere between 500, 1000, let's just say 500. To be conservative, you probably have like 500 plus people at this moment making a really good living like $150,000 a year or more off of their substack that they publish gross revenue. All right, so now we have numbers I want to move on to try to figure out what does this mean in terms of substack's attempt to replace the failing print media. So question number four. I want to ask can this newsletter market grow to a comparable scale the print newspapers? Let's look at some numbers about the print market and say, can this, are we going to get close to being comparable or will this always be much smaller than whatever newspapers actually were? It's kind of hard to find numbers. But we, we looked into it and we, we've, we found various stats and statistics about the newspaper industry. I'm going to point out a couple here and then we're going to put them into a chart and compare them to what we know about substack. All right, so this, there's this great 2023 fact sheet from Pew, the newspaper fact sheet. I have this on the screen for people who are watching. It has a lot of numbers, but there's a couple I want to focus on. Here is the total estimated circulation of U.S. daily newspapers. You can see that this kind of plateaus and peaks in this 1980, 1990s, and it's around 60. 60 million is its estimated weekday circulation. And then it falls. So if we look back at this, it falls off a cliff. And by the time we get to 2022, it's. They estimate us down to about 20 million. So at its peak, yet 60 million daily newspapers, that was the circulation like printed, and it's down to 20 million. So we can think of it like there are 60 million subscribers to newspapers and its peak. And now we're down to about 20 million. All right, how much money were they generating? There's another table in here. Estimated revenue. We got to scroll down a few and then we'll find in economics, estimated advertising and circulation revenue of the, of the newspaper industry. So you know, they make money off subscriptions and advertisements. We add those two things. We'll look at advertising primarily because the circulation money is small. Advertisings for the money is again we see a peak, interestingly came later. It's over here right around like 2005, 2006. You peak around $50 billion of the total newspaper industry was how much they were making off of their advertising. This really drops as we get down to these estimates for 20, 20, 2022. This gets down to like 9, around 9 or 10, 9, 10 to 11 billion, just depending on how you look at it. All right, so newspapers were pulling in as much as $50 billion. And they have. It's sort of the climb now quite precipitously, and it's more like 9 to 11 billion dollars in the sort of post pandemic era. There's one other number. I don't have it to show you, but I just. We found it from another source. How many people were working in this industry? Well, we got to narrow it down because that includes like the people who, the janitors and the buildings and the people who run the printers and the trucks. But if we narrow it down to how many editors and reporters were employed by the newspaper industry. We found a source that said the peak happened in 1990. There was around 56,000 reporters and editors. By 2011, that had fallen to around 41,600. I'm going to guess today that's probably more into like 20 to 30,000 range is how many like reporters and editors are employed by newspaper print media. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump back to our tables and let's put that, let's put these numbers all into our Table here to try to make some sense of them. All right, so just as a reminder, we are going to look at newspapers and we'll look at both their peak and the more recent numbers because we have to see how they fell. Right? So if we look at circulation, we had 60 million subscribers at newspapers peak down to something more like 20 million today. We look at revenue, they've gone from like 50 billion at their peak in 2005 to now, if we're being generous, somewhere around $11 billion a year. Sort of where the industry is now in terms of writers and editors employed. It's gone from 56,000 at their peak. And we estimate now it's probably around 25,000 people are employed. All right, let's now compare that to the numbers we found about. We want to compare that to the numbers we can find about newsletters. Are they anywhere near that now? Is there a reasonable scenario where newsletters could get to comparable numbers? Well, let's remember what we already established. We already established that there's somewhere between 550, 5001000 to 1000 riders making a full time living on substacks. Look at my numbers here. We found another source that said that substack brought in $450 million in revenue in 2025 total. 10% of that went, you know, Do I have that backwards? I think that's right. I think that's what we found, $450 million in revenue and that it had 5 million paid subscribers. So let's add those numbers to our table. So like what we've added now is our equivalent of circulation for newsletters is the 5 million paid subscribers. So I'm not counting free newsletter subscribers. If you're not paying, I'm not counting you as equivalent to someone who was paying for a newspaper. We have 5 million paid subscribers. That's the circulation revenue is around $450 million. And the journalist are, I'm going to say 500. Right, because we calculated there was like 500 to 1,000 people making a living, a good living. And so I think that's the apples to apples comparison to, you know, journalists and editors in newspapers. All right, so if we load back up this table, we'll say, okay, these are much different. Right? So right now the newsletter economy is much smaller than the newspaper economy. You know, 5 million circulation versus even right now, newspapers are at $20,450,000,000 in newsletters versus right now newspapers at 11 billion. Most notably 500 kind of professional or full time writers compared to something more like 25,000 right now. All right, let's take a quick break to hear from one of our sponsors. It's the new year, which means it's time to finally make progress on all those goals that you've been procrastinating on. Now, for many, this list includes making sure that you have enough life insurance and to take care of the people that you love. Now, why do we put this particular chore off? Because it seems ambiguous and confusing. So let me tell you how you can solve this problem this new year. Fabric by Gerber Life Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done today. It's made for busy parents like you. It's all online on your schedule, and you can do it right from your couch. 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That's pipedrive.com deep and you can be up and running in just minutes. All right, Jesse, let's get back to the show. But what we care about is where this is going. This is all kind of new. So what we need is a good estimate of where we think the industry is going to go in terms of these numbers and to get a optimistic estimate that we're not just making up. We found this article here. This is an interview. This comes from a New Zealand newspaper because I guess Hamish McKenzie, the co founder of Substack, is from New Zealand. So they did a article about him. This is from two months ago, this is from November. And they're just, they're talking about him and he's giving a lot of information and thoughts about how Substack is doing. But here's the key thing I want to pull out. They sort of ask him at the end, how big can this grow? What's your goal here? And here's his line. I don't see anything in the laws of physics that should prevent Substack from getting to more than 50 million paid subscribers. So they're at 5 million now. He thinks the Internet and the environment, based on their data, their goals are we should be able to 10x that. We should be able to, if we grow this right, to have about 50 million people who are paid subscribers on Substack. So let's use that as our index for the best case future for Substack. And here's what we get. We now say, okay, what is their circulation? Well, they have 5 million paid subscribers now, but that would go up to 50 million in this scenario revenue, they have 450 million. Now if we just 10x that, that goes up to 4.5 billion and 500 people making a living again, we'll straight up to next that to something more like 5,000. Now this is getting interesting because what we are seeing is newsletters now, or in this sort of best case scenario of where they're hoping they'll go, don't compare and don't really compare to newspapers at their peak. The exception here will be in circulation because newspapers had a circulation of 60 million at their peak versus 50 million page substack subscribers. In this future scenario. When we look at revenue, newspapers were bringing in 50 billion versus more like 5 billion in the optimistic scenario for Substack. And they had, you know, 56,000 people working as compared to 5,000 in substack. But if we compare that future scenario for substack to where newspapers are kind of right now, it's comparable. So we could kind of imagine a split. Like substack has many more paid subscribers and there's current newspaper circulators. It's bringing in comparable revenue to what newspapers are. It's an order of magnitude off in terms of number of people working full time. But it's in the realm of what we have right now, full time in newspapers. And if we look at these numbers with an even more optimistic hat on, we can actually inflate. There's a case to inflate some of these. So let's put this back up on the screen here for a second, Jesse. We can inflate this revenue number. So, yeah, right now they're making 450 million. So if you 10x the subscribers, you can imagine 4.5 billion. There are other ways to make revenue. Once you have a successful substack, which, you know, newspapers, that's going into their revenue numbers. We could also factor that in here. Like, for example, you have to factor in something like paid ads, right? So you could, you could have ads on your free version of your newsletters. This is something I did some numbers. Let's see if I can find these. I have some numbers on this from our own ad agency. So right now, for example, you can get a. If you have. It's possible to get a $35 CPM on just a display ad that you put on your newsletter. So that means you get $35 for every thousand people that read your newsletter. So you could use this to convert unpaid subscribers into a revenue source. So if you have, for even numbers here, 100,000 subscribers and you have a 50% open rate. So you have each email generates 50,000 people read them. So use that 50,000 reading. That's what the CPM is calculated on. That works out to be about 1700 $50 a newsletter. For each newsletter you send out, that ad, if 50,000 people actually read it, will generate about $1,700. If you're publishing, like Nate Silver recommends, three newsletters a week that are getting those open rates, that's quarter million dollars a year. So there's more revenue that's late in here. There's also events, there's also speaking. There's also higher tier. So, you know, I think this is the right way to answer this question. Can substack become comparable to print media? Or maybe we should say paid newsletters more generally. And the answer is like, yeah, it can be comparable to sort of where maybe not in all ways the peak, but sort of where that industry is now as it's like two thirds of its way down its descent. So we can imagine the two charts of their successes. Newspapers come down, paid newsletters can meet it relatively soon and maybe go a little bit and then go beyond that. As those fall offs, there is a sense of a little bit of a replacement being possible. All right, question number five. Is substack media, newsletter media more generally better or worse than the newspaper media that it's replacing? So let's say it does do this. Are we better or worse? I think we can make a couple arguments for each. There's certain ways in which paid email newsletters are worse than newspapers. Newspapers have fact checking, copy editing and content editing. They also have large liability exposure. So they're very careful about, you know, traditionally what they print. Remember, like the Washington Post, you know, was quick to print something that would have been completely. It was what was being echoed all over social media. We talked about this before on the show. This was the Covington kids at the mall and there was like a picture taken of one of the kids and a Native American. They were looking at each other real closely. And social media was like, yeah, these kids are terrible and they're just being arbitrarily mean to indigenous people. And the Washington Post was like, great, we'll publish that. They're kind of feeling the vibe of social media and the kids family's like, that's not what happened. And you defamed us and we're going to sue you. And it was somewhere between 20 or 50 million dollars, some huge victory they had on that because there's huge liability exposure. But because of that, as a reader of print newspapers is different than looking at social media or really looking at a newsletter where the exposure is smaller. You realize they have to be kind of careful, right? If they're saying something, it's been fact checked, it's been copy edited. There might be biases in how they say it, but they also have large liability exposure. So we can sort of. There's a trust there that when you take. Get rid of that infrastructure, you lose that. All right? Newspapers can also send experts to locations to report on the scene and have special expertise. So, you know, there's something going on, you know, in Venezuela, the New York Times is going to have someone in Central America who's been stationed there who can walk around and see what's going on. Right? So you lose like boots on the ground reporting when you move away from centralized journalism in the age of. This is not as true now, but in the age of advertising being the main revenue for newspapers, you had to appeal to as many people as possible, but you didn't have as many biases in newspapers. And so they were like a pretty good sort of consistent descriptor of reality, because when you make a living by department store ads, you don't want to alienate any possible audience if you're a major city newspaper. Now, this is different today in an age of paywalls, where it's better to delight and thrill your paid subscribers than it is to try to reach the broadest possible audience. And so now we have a lot more, I think, biases reporting. But at least in its classic form, newspapers could give a pretty consistent view of reality to a nation. And just because of their fixed format, they would expose you to ideas and information that you otherwise might not have sought out on your own. But because it's right there on the same page as something you are reading, you would learn a lot of things. Here are the ways in which newsletters, however, could be better than newspapers. As mentioned, in an age of social media and paywalls, media has moved away from its neutral observer status. It's more important that you delight your paid subscribers, and that's what really matters. Because of this, though, that means that you have much more partisanship in newspapers, but they still talk about it as if they don't. As if it's still back in like the 1990s days of Department store ads, pay the bills where these really were trying to be down the line. Because of that mismatch, we now have plummeting trust in news media. We see this on both sides of the political spectrum. No one trusts the traditional media, so that's kind of crumbling. I think you're actually better off from a bias perspective with an individual writer, because what happens is when you're engaging with a writer like Paul Krugman, as opposed to an institution like the New York Times, we are very used to as social beings of assessing and understanding individuals, their perspective, their social, cultural context and where they're coming from, we can place humans very easily into different categories and adjust what we're hearing accordingly. So, like, if you read Paul Krugman, he's classically left, and that's going to be the angle. He's going to take on everything. But it's really easy to understand that with him. You know that from him. He's not tricking you and he's not trying to be otherwise and you just filter it through it. If you're someone who's far on the right, you're like, I'm probably not going to subscribe at all because that'll annoy me. But if you're like a centrist, you're center left, center right. You're like, yeah, I can just adjust for what I'm hearing from Kruger. I'm not mad at him. That's just who he is. And he has a lot of interesting information. He's a good economist, he has a Nobel Prize. And I can kind of filter out like where, you know, he's being off the rails and where there's like really good insight. So actually trust and comfort with new sources. When you're dealing with individuals with a known profile, we as humans actually can deal much better with that than large centralized news sources that are just claiming this is just like a neutral observation of reality and you're kind of noticing all the ways in which it's not. The newsletter economy also has a really good star making system. If a newsletter is popular for it has a lot of subscriptions, it probably has gone through a pretty competitive process of earning every one of those eyeballs, which means the writers are good at what they do. You don't necessarily have that in newspapers. You have a lot more people working their way up the, up the chain and they might be okay, they might not. You know, hey, you're here, you're a fact checker and now you're a cub reporter. And now we're putting you on this desk and like you do fine, you have a lot more just sort of like okay writers, but in a competitive, infinitely scalable marketplace, like digital paid newsletters, the winners are gonna be really good. So you're actually gonna get really good writing. Remember, like Nate Silver was being paid millions and millions of dollars by the Times and then again by abc, ESPN because of like the skill he has and whatever his audience being excited about what he's doing. You also have a resistance to corporate advertisers or political pressure on these individual newsletters in a way that if you're a really large centralized corporation, you might not be able to free yourself from. So the answer to this question is I think it depends. Newsletters are different than newspapers, but it's not necessarily worse than like the current age of print newspapers now. So I have some optimism there's. All right, final question. How might this vision most go awry? Right. We're being pretty optimistic here, but we should consider the possibility that email Newsletters sputter and fail to deliver anything like this traditional media replacement that we are discussing. I found an article that I think presents some good critiques. This from Jon Gruber's daring Fireball newsletter and blog. He wrote this back in 2024 and it was called Regarding and well against Substack. And he goes through some things that he is upset about, but among others, and I'm going to let me find the right thing to read here, here he is upset with people talking about Substack like it is a publication as opposed to a delivery mechanism. So the quote he has at the top here that's upsetting him is, I'll read it here. We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to quote, read my Amazon. A great director trying to promote their film by saying click on my max. That's how much they picked your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as my substack. There is only your writing and a forever fight against a world of pure insidification. And so he's, he's upset about this move that Substack is making. Like no, Substack is the thing. Like Netflix or Twitter, it's a platform that serves you information. And writers are just serving Substack. But you as a consumer are consuming Substack, not the writings of Paul Krugman and the writings of Heather Richard Cox Richardson and the writings of Nate Silver. And there's this sort of creeping fear that what Substack is going to try to do is say it's not our goal to have 5,000 really good writers making a living with newsletters and offering like a sort of competitive media ecosystem that can push back against the sort of insertified digital attention tools. They might say, that's not our problem. Our problem is trying to become a hundred billion dollar valued company. And the way we get there is we gotta have our 50 million users using this thing constantly. And so what we need to do is take and mix and remix content and everyone's just providing us text. And we're gonna create AI enabled customized newsletter snippets of stuff that's popular and selected by algorithms pulled from everyone else. And that's what we want, is we want to enter that world of a sort of stream of distraction. Just our stream happens to be text based. There's a real fear that that's what they're trying to do. And that's why you hear this terminology of like my substack. I substack what's going on on Substack in a way that as Gruber points out, you would not hear about other neutral delivery platforms. I do not say, you know, like, hey Jesse, I don't know if you, I don't know if you read my WordPress but like I WordPress and on my WordPress I talk about, you know, whatever. No, like WordPress is the software on which I run my blog. I don't call it my WordPress. I don't say like, hey, I don't know if you've listened to my simple cast. That's the hosting company that hosts our podcast. Like no, have you listened to my podcast? Right. So this is the biggest danger and it is probably for me a major, my number one concern about this optimistic scenario is that I have a hard time imagining Substack cares about trying to create an alternative to print media. They don't want a thousand or five thousand journalists to have a good living. They want 50 million users that use it constantly. They want to insertify it into something like a stream based TikTok, Twitter, Instagram style distraction machine because those companies have huge valuations and that's where they might push it. So what is our final answer here? I think I'm going to pull all these threads together. We have a chance at actually having the Internet, the same Internet that was destroying collective truth and reality and sort of serious journalism. Give us an alternative that's not that bad. We did all the numbers we see that's possible. But if we hitch our wagon to this one company substack, I worry about it. What we need is something like I mentioned WordPress, that's an open source project. We need like an open source equivalence ways that you can have email newsletters that can be easily discovered, subscribed to and take payments that is not tied to like a company that wants a huge valuation. You can do this all from scratch. Jesse and I, we do this from scratch. Our newsletter. We, you know, we, we, we pay for a hoster. We do everything on our own. But it's expensive and complicated. You know, we have someone that it's like half of their job just to wrangle our newsletter software. And we don't do paid subscriptions. But if we did, that would be a whole other level of like complexity to try to do that on our own. It cost a lot of money. I mean, I don't know how much we, it costs Newsletters cost money. Like Substack's eating a lot of money to host it. I don't know exactly what ours is, but it's at least a thousand dollars a month plus just to host and send emails to like that many people.
