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- [00:01]
A
We haven't tried to fix the speech problems or the action problems that have resulted from the bad social media models of the last generation, which I think is why people have this mania about misinformation, et cetera. We haven't tried to fix that stuff with a smarter content moderation policy or a bigger content moderation apparatus. We've tried to fix that at the business model level at the root. And I think that's why you see Substack as a different type of ecosystem.
- [00:27]
B
And now the good fight with Jascha Monk. A lot of things I've been doing for the last five years as an editor and increasingly also as a writer, wouldn't have been possible without a recent technological innovation, which is called Substack. It is on Substack that I started and hosted Persuasion when we founded the magazine in July 2020. And as you know, it is on Substack that this podcast is now hosted and that I share a lot of my writing with a really big audience that now is about 80,000 people. So I thought that after all of these years I should get one of the co founders of Substack onto the show to talk about how they conceived of the platform and grew it over the years, the way they are thinking about defending the principle of free speech and giving real liberty to creators on the platform to engage with the world on their own terms. What the risks might be of the basic dynamics of social media creeping into the world of Substack, of more grandstanding and mutual antagonism and perhaps even attempts at cancellation, and how the platform might evolve over the course of the next years. That guest, of course, is Hamish Mackenzie, one of the co founders of Substack and himself a former journalist and author. This conversation, I hope, is going to be interesting to anybody, including those of you who may not be that aware of Substack, who may not really understand the way in which it has transformed our public culture, will also be of particular interest to those of you who are quite familiar with Substack. And as part of the bonus content for this week, the one reserved to paying subscribers, we go into a lot of interesting detail about all of the tips and tricks, all of the do's and don'ts that Hamish has discovered over the course of the last years for Substack creators. So if you yourself are also sharing some of your content on Substack, and you want the best insider guide to how to build an even greater audience and perhaps be able to gain some financial revenue from it as well, please go to yashamonk.substack.com and become a paying subscriber to access that part of the conversation today. Hamish Mackenzie, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:10]
A
Thanks very much for having me.
- [03:12]
B
So I know you as the founder and the CEO of Substack. I've known you in that capacity for a while, but you're actually a journalist by training. How does a nice, honest journalist end up as a tech CEO?
- [03:25]
A
Well, let me offer a gentle correction. The CEO of Substack is actually Chris Best, who is my close colleague and co founder. We started the company, the two of us, in July 2017 and then very quickly added a third founder, Jiraj Sethi, who's the co founder, who's the. Sorry, the chief technology officer. My job has been coming at it from the journalist perspective, and that means working with writers, working with journalists, helping them succeed on the platform and also telling the story for the company. But how did I go from that world to this world? The problem was I met Chris.
- [04:00]
B
So you're blaming him for everything?
- [04:01]
A
I blame Chris for everything, including the brilliance of the system design of Substack and everything that's important about Substack. But I had been writing a book and working at a company called Kik while writing that book to pay the bills. And at Kik, Chris was one of the founders there as well. He was the chief technology officer and Jiraj was actually the top developer there. And I was doing some comms work for them and we became really good friends. And by the time I finished this book, which was about electric cars, is about how Tesla had started this electric car revolution. Chris had finished working at Kick and he got in my ear about this idea that was bugging him, which led to Substack.
- [04:45]
B
And what was the idea at the time? Right. I mean, one of the amazing things about successful startups is that they keep transforming. I mean, Substack is different today from when I first joined five years ago, but there's a kind of direction of travel. I think we have a sense, hopefully, of what it might look like in five years. We'll talk about that more, perhaps later in the conversation. But what was the initial pitch? What was the initial idea of what. What Substack was supposed to do and be?
- [05:07]
A
Well, it sprung out of Chris's idle time. He wanted to get back into writing and started writing this blog post where he was kind of decrying the state of the media because the incentives of social media were leading to all these bad behaviors, not only from people trying to win at the social media game. But from mainstream media institutions that had to follow the rules of social media just to be able to get the attention they needed to support their own businesses. And in this blog post, he outlined all the problems of that and then sent it to me for my feedback. Cause I was like a journalist guy, he knew. And my feedback to him was that all of these points he was making were really sharp. But people in the media knew that these were the problems. What they didn't know was what would be a productive solution to them, what could be something better. And so I suggested adding a couple of paragraphs to his blog posts, suggesting an alternative, a better way forward. And. And he didn't get around to finishing the blog post, but through conversation with me, but especially through his own thinking, got to this point where he decided, well, the problem, the fix needs to come from making the readers the subscribers, the customers, and not making the advertisers the customers, and to have direct payments from the subscribers to the writers and the creators so that they are incentivized to serve those people instead of playing like an algorithm game hoping to go viral in the social media context. And those are the basic conversations that led to the development of the sub stack model. I can go deeper on that if you want.
- [06:39]
B
So I'm sure that when you were first pitching this to investors and so on, you had a kind of one or two sentence pitch. What would the one or two sentence pitch of a time have been?
- [06:47]
A
Yeah, at the start we said, we make it simple to start a paid subscription publication. And that was confusing enough for some people. They wanted. They wondered if we meant like an academic journal or a magazine or something like that. And so we decided to simplify it and say we make it simple to start a paid newsletter. And a lot of the reaction was, no one's gonna pay for newsletters. Who's gonna do that? There's so much free content on the Internet and so much great free content. But we believed that people would pay for the writers in particular, who they really trusted or who they loved, and that they'd happily pay. They wouldn't just begrudgingly pay, they'd like to support and be part of their mission. And. And so that was the elevator pitch.
- [07:29]
B
So this is an interesting question, actually. I mean, what was the criticisms or the points of skepticism towards this idea and the business model you were presenting at the beginning that you think have just clearly been disproven? Presumably the idea that people just aren't willing to pay for accessing the content of their favorite creators is one of those that has just been disproven by the amount of people who now make for a living on Substack. We what are some of the difficulties that people pointed out early on that you think the platform is still struggling with, that it's just hard to get right? And that are going to remain a challenge in an ongoing way?
- [08:04]
A
I think we're making good progress against the things that we set out to do and that the only challenges, the types of challenges we face are can we build a network that has enough people in it that we can keep helping new voices grow and, and find fast enough success from subscriptions that they can go on and build their own empires? And we've actually achieved that. I think at a certain scale, like there's so much more room to go. But in those early days, the questions were like, who's gonna pay for paid newsletters and how many Ben Thompsons are there in the world? One of the early models for Substack was a guy named Ben Thompson running a publication called Stratecherie, which is a combination blog and email newsletter that he charged $100 a year for if you wanted to get everything he rates about business models of technology companies. And our thought was, well, currently there's not that many Ben Thompsons in the world. But with a model like this and with the demand from readers who are hungrier for a higher value content or media experience and want to be closer to those writers and creators who they most trust, we think that a whole lot of energy can be unlocked from the universe and that new types of publications will be created, new media businesses would be created, that and that the world maybe couldn't even imagine would exist. And so that is all proven true. I think the game we have to win now is keep building it to scale so that there's enough subscribers in the world waiting to be unlocked by new publishers.
- [09:37]
B
So I think one of the signs that this has clearly succeeded is that nowadays when famous fiction writers like Elif Shafak in the UK or Sherman Alexie in the United States look for an outlet where they can directly communicate with their readers, they come to Substack when very well established journalists, for one reason or another, want to leave legacy publications like Jennifer Rubin did recently in the Washington Post or Paul Krugman did at the New York Times, they naturally come and flock to Substack. I presume that at the beginning the problem was how do we. Or one of the big problems was how do we attract talented, serious writers with or without an established name to give this platform a try and to actually establish that that works. How did you go about doing that in the early days of a platform?
- [10:25]
A
Yeah, that's right. We had to get the. We had to have some examples of success to be able to point to and give people the confidence that this model might actually work for them. I'm sure you'll remember, Yasha, like in those early days, I was on the phone to you, I was on a zoom call with you, trying to convince you of this model and that you should give it a shot and it can work for you. But in those earliest days. Well, for a start, I convinced one person. It was Bill Bishop, who I knew from my days when I was a reporter living in Hong Kong. And he was always a go to source for China. And then I subscribed to his newsletter, which is called Cynicism. It covers roughly like US China relations
- [11:01]
B
spelled S I n O like China, not S I n y like cynicism.
- [11:07]
A
Yes, yes, some people say cynicism. And he was already primed to add a paid tier to his existing free newsletter. And I knew him, we had a good relationship. So it wasn't that much of a hard job to convince him to do it with us instead of trying to strap together the various tools that you'd had to piecemeal together in those days. And then once we had him launch and immediately be successful, we were able to say to other people, look, this model works for Bill Bishop. We think it could work for you too. And then other people who were in those early days were succeeding Daniel Lavery, who was one of the co founders of the Toast, which was like a culture website, totally different to Bill Bishop, who writes for a business audience. Daniel Lavery's audience is sort of mostly librarians who are paying 50 bucks a year out of their own pocket rather than putting it on a corporate expense account. And then Judd Leggum was early a journalist who runs a thing called Popular Information. He was previously the editor in chief of Think Progress, which was a center for American Progress's media arm. And we were able to take those early success examples and reach out to people who sort of fit a similar mold, who had kind of like bloggers, instincts to be honest, or podcasters, instincts who are self disciplined enough to be producing enough material. And then we also try to get press around those stories so that people would start paying attention to this as a new model. It's not just like a new social network where you can convince you to come over and you click a button and you get all these dopamine hits. It's a new model that we're trying to bring into the world and that requires quite a lot of education and a lot of people hand holding and a lot of convincing and a lot of conversion. So it was a lot of hand to hand combat in those early days. We still do this. We build personal trust relationships with the writers and creators of Substack, Even though it's like not something that any sales professional will tell you to do. It's not scalable, but it does build deep relationships. And then those people hopefully will go out and tell their peers about what a good experience Substack has been for them. And. And that helps build the entire ecosystem.
- [13:12]
B
And do you feel like there was an inflection point at which you could suddenly see that part of the operation jelling and coming together? I mean, for myself, when I was starting to think seriously about creating a magazine that advocates for philosophically liberal ideas and decided in the June of 2020 that that was the moment to do it, I had never heard of Substack and you know, I assumed that perhaps I would build a website to do this or perhaps I would go to one of the platforms that were better known at that time, like Patreon. And a friend of mine said, hey, these other friends of mine have just started this series of sort of linked newsletters on a place called Substack. And I think that's going to be a matter model for you. And I really had no idea what that was. And, you know, a couple of weeks later I had started Persuasion on Substack. And you know, a couple of weeks after that we had significant income from subscriptions generated on Substack to be able to build a stuff and start paying editors and contributors and so on to run this publication. But in my experience, it was sort of around the middle of 2020 that Substack went from being something that I'd never heard of to something that was an important part of my professional life. Was that a coincidence or was there something about that moment of you sort of breaking through into wider visibility?
- [14:34]
A
Yeah, there was a particular moment, 2020, we had been building momentum and sort of traveling through word of mouth and kind of underground networks like the sort of inside New York media, for example. A lot of people knew about Substack. And in certain corners of Silicon Valley, a lot of people knew about Substack, like newsletter nerds and original old school bloggers. But we were never very loud about marketing. We still don't have a marketing Division at Substack, we've relied heavily on those peer to peer recommendations and word of mouth. But in 2020, things did suddenly accelerate because the pandemic hit. And all of a sudden there was a need for intensified need for meaning and seeking out expert voices across a range of topics, but especially in public health and then politics. And then there were also people spending a lot more time on their phones looking for things to read at home. And the media went through an accelerated period of insecurity, even worse than it had been up until then. And that was happening economically, like people were losing jobs, newspapers were shutting down, news sites were shutting down, et cetera, or like at least cutting down their operations. But it also was happening culturally, where at the time there was a kind of a mania in the media industry where people who had views that didn't conform with their newsrooms were under a lot of pressure to leave or were getting pushed out by the bosses of those organizations.
- [16:14]
B
And additionally, just to add to that, I mean, you know, a lot of people who, you know, were columnists at some of the most famous newspapers then, some of whom are still columnists at those places today, who just were told very clearly that articles they wanted to write, they could not write and they could not publish. And I have many examples of people who've told me this in private, so I'm not going to cite them here. But the majority of listeners to this podcast would know, proposing articles that really would have been thought of as unexceptionable at any period and would be thought of as such today. People, many of whom are way to the left of me and have way more orthodox politics than I do, who had anything but could in any way be criticized by anybody on Twitter, stopped from publication seconds before, was meant to go online, and very unusual processes and so on. So I do think that that was a moment where there was hunger for that direct and unmediated access to the actual thoughts of writers. Because it was so palpable at that time in particular, that that had vanished from the traditional media.
- [17:19]
A
Exactly. It was a high pressure time in the culture and in that stretch, and this is around the time of the Harper's Letter as well, where there's a big. Let's call it an active debate online about it. But in that stretch of time, a bunch of high profile journalists decamped to substack around the time that persuasion was being established. Andrew Sullivan, Barry Weiss, Matt Iglesias and Glenn Greenwald, all in quite high profile circumstances, left their existing institutions. New York Times, Fox, New York magazine, the Intercept, and announced that they were setting up on Substack so they could have a direct relationship with the readers who cared about their work. And so that was a big moment for Substack that, like, put us onto the main stage, and then more people started hearing about it.
- [18:08]
B
You have an interesting political balance act to play here. Right. Because you are a supporter of a value that should be apolitical. That's a value that is inscribed in the Constitution of the United States. And that, I think, should be important to any journalist, no matter their political leaning, which is that of free speech. And Substack has, I think, been admirable in how robustly it has defended that through various attacks. But the value itself has, of course, in some ways become political. We're in a moment in which this may change over the course of the Trump administration, for all kinds of obvious reasons. But at least in the last years, it felt very much as though the left had given up on the value of free speech in important ways and prefer to talk about the danger of misinformation in ways that often advocated explicit or implicit censorship. And increasingly, it's been a bunch of heterodox liberals like myself, but also often conservatives and people even on the further right who wanted to claim the value of free speech for themselves. Now, what's interesting about Substack is that there are writers on the platform that really are from every political persuasion. And even among the more visible and famous ones, there are ones that are well to the right of me, but also ones that are well, well to the left of me. How do you manage to sustain both of those things? The clear commitment to free speech, even as that is becoming increasingly a politicized concept that, sadly to my great chagrin, is often seen as right coded and maintaining the status as a platform that's actually attractive to people across the political spectrum.
- [19:45]
A
Yeah. And there have been pressure campaigns to kick off certain writers or change our content moderation policies through the years, and it's always very difficult to go through that. It's a heightened emotional issue. But the way we look at it is that free speech and freedom of the press, which I think cannot be separated, are fundamental values for protecting great culture and protecting voices at the margin, giving power to the powerless against the powerful. And so that is a long term game. It's not something that can be won in any moment of a press release or in staring down a mob or collapsing to a mob. It's something that you have to keep showing up for over time. And that means taking some hits along the way. And so at a company level, it's enshrined in the company as one of the core values of the company. You have to be willing to stand up for free speech if you want to work here. And so that makes it a bit easier in those times of tumult that we're not feeling so much internal pressure as other companies have over the years.
- [20:48]
B
And this means, for example, concretely, that when you're interviewing people, jobs or for roles, you ask them explicitly about sort of a stance on free speech. And if a candidate who's otherwise great gives you a very equivocal answer, then you'll have second thoughts about hiring them. How do you make sure that you maintain that company culture?
- [21:05]
A
Yeah, it's very hard. And as a company gets bigger, you have to work really even harder to maintain that kind of standard. But we ask them directly in an interview process. Substack sometimes comes under criticism for its content moderation approach, which is hands off and is dedicated to upholding free speech. And in those times, and it happens in the media, like we've taken licks from the Atlantic and the New York Times and just about everyone else on the planet, you're gonna hear from your family and friends about these kinds of issues and they're gonna ask, what's this about? Like, why is Substack been bad? And how do you feel about representing, not only representing the company in those moments to your social circles, but standing up for these values too. And if they're uncomfortable with that, then we don't hold it against them. But we say that you're probably not going to be comfortable working at Substack. That helps give us a good steel rod when those moments get hot. Other than that, though, we're not a bunch of 20 year olds starting the company. I've never seen cultural change. I myself, I'm 43, and I remember the ACLU's position on free speech being extremely strong and uncompromising. And the ACLU being most people think of it as a very left wing or very liberal institution. I also have seen enough times like people on the right in the meantime claim free speech as a mantle, but really just using it as a political weapon in the moment to get things the way they want them. And so being a little bit having a founding team and a leadership team and people in the company who have seen a few things and are ready to stay calm under pressure is helpful. And then the way we talk about it, we outlined our principles on content moderation, when the moment wasn't hot, we said, here's our stance, here's why it is. And it's not because we don't want to have any responsibility for anything that goes on on the platform. There are content guidelines that do protect it at the extremes in line with the First Amendment. You can't be inciting to violence, you can't be doxxing or spamming or actually we added a little addendum which is you also can't do pornography on Substack. And technically that's not in line with the First Amendment, but it creates a different kind of culture for the platform if you do allow it. And you have to build a whole lot of things to cater for it, and we're not interested in that. But being able to lay out those principles in writing in a time of calm, so that we can keep pointing back to them for ourselves and for anyone who's challenging us on our positions has been a really useful thing.
- [23:48]
B
So walk us through what those principles are, and you don't have to answer that now, but I'll be interested to think through together to what extent they work, because Substack is a specific kind of forum, or to what extent those are the principles that Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and so on should also apply. So as you're saying, it's not everything goes. Obviously that's legal constraints. You're under legal obligation to make sure that people don't use the platform to distribute child pornography. To take the most obvious example, you're also taking some decisions like banning pornography more broadly. What's in and what's out. How did you decide to come up with those rules? And how do you undertake to apply them in such a way that people across the political spectrum feel that you're treating them fairly in the process?
- [24:37]
A
Well, we write down the content guidelines and then we write down our stance about content moderation. And then we showed people that we don't bend over time to the pressure mobs. And hopefully that sends a message to people that we are going to apply them fairly. You know, we took some heat last year because some journalists went and dug up a bunch of accounts that they said were far right extremist accounts and you should kick them off. And then she kicked all these other people off as well, just who they decided were bad people. And then pretty soon after that, Mehdi Hasan left MSNBC and joined Substack and said that hardcore free speech approach really appealed to him. Cause he knew that it meant pro Palestine voices wouldn't be kicked off the platform. So hopefully people see through our actions and see through our track record that these things are gonna be fairly applied. But I think the foundation of it, the thing that makes it different for substack versus the likes of TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X, is that our model, the thing that is at the core of the platform, the core of the ecosystem, creates different conditions that produce different types of results and different behaviors and different content rewards different behaviors and rewards, different content than those other machines reward on those other machines. You're rewarded for keeping people scrolling, keeping people maximally engaged in the feed, keeping people their emotions maximally peaked on Substack. You're rewarded for demonstrating that you're a trustworthy voice, that it's worth continuing to show up for. Even if you don't always agree with the writer, you've invited them into your inbox through a subscription, even if it's a free subscription, That's a big barrier to jump over and punish that writer by unsubscribing if they lose your trust. And even more extreme is you can pay with your money out of your pocket to say, I really trust you. And then the writer's responsibility is to keep living up to that standard and keep living up to that trust. And so when you change the business model that drives the whole platform, then you change the outcomes, you change the culture of the platform. So we haven't tried to fix the speech problems or the action problems that have resulted from the bad social media models of the last generation, which I think is why people have this mania about misinformation, et cetera. We haven't tried to fix that stuff with a smarter content moderation policy or a bigger content moderation apparatus. We've tried to fix that at the business model level at the root. And I think that's why you see Substack as a different type of ecosystem. It feels different, the quality is higher, the thinking is better, and the toxicity is lower.
- [27:28]
B
So let's distinguish between two different elements of Substack here. Right? And for those who are less familiar with the platform, who perhaps get hopefully my content and other content from it, but you don't have a full sense of exactly how the platform operates in the background. I would say there's at least two kind of elements to it, right? So one is it's an email delivery service. You can go to yashamuktatsupstack.com, which hopefully you've already done, and you're going to get one column from me. A week, podcast and so on and so forth. Right. And you can do that to 10 or 100 or 1000 substacks at this point. Now here, the problem of content moderation is, I think, inherently lower because you're only being served what you have explicitly opted into being served. Right. So a lot of the time the problem on Twitter and on other platforms is there's some algorithm in the background that's determining what I supposedly want to see. And suddenly it gives me a whole bunch of stuff that upsets me that I find to be super offensive and annoying. I'm sure there's all kinds of stuff that Substack sends out to people's inboxes every day that I would find to be infuriating. But I don't see those things. I see the things that I've decided to sign up to because the writers I admire, of whom there's many on Substack. And so I don't care about the rest. I don't see it. So that I think inherently reduces the demand for moderation and the kind of problems inherent in not having it.
- [28:51]
A
Right.
- [28:52]
B
There's a second part to the Substack experience that you've been trying to build up with good results, which is the Substack app, which entails a kind of social network where I am supposed I should do more often, sometimes to post every article I write and to engage with people back and forth and to chat with them and so on. And there I am impressed by the experience that I have on it so far as well, because I do find that it tends to be constructive. There's some robust debate, which is of course a good thing, but it doesn't tend to be toxic. It doesn't tend to devolve into a kind of name calling and moral grandstanding and so on that is so common in other forms of social media. But perhaps the level of that experience has a little bit degraded over time. And you could see how the bigger that gets, the more attractive it becomes for people to engage on that platform who are not core to the Substack universe. The more successful it is, the more it's just going to attract the 1% of people who love to argue about politics and have cruel personalities and seek out social media to do that in order to indulge their personalities. That's a lot of the problem of traditional social media platforms, that if you are very opinionated and a bit of an asshole, you have a reason to go to those things because it's a great way of opining and being an asshole to people. And so I'm not so concerned about the idea that the core email delivery mechanism is going to run into those problems. But I guess I do wonder whether you can sustain as friendly and constructive a culture on the more social media like element of your platform over time, especially as it continues to grow. So I'd love to hear how you're thinking about that.
- [30:30]
A
Yeah, I think it's a good concern to have. And we have it too. We don't want this thing to devolve into something that becomes unproductive or unfriendly or that turns people off rather than gets them more interested in engaging in good culture. And so I will also say that it's impossible to stamp out all the bad guys and impossible to stamp out bad speech. If you give someone a place to publish something anywhere on the Internet, you're gonna get some of it. We have a good challenge ahead of us in continuing to build the tools that give people more control over their own experience on these feeds. So at the moment, of course, you can do the blocking and the muting that you are accustomed to from other platforms. You can get these people out your replies, actually you can even delete replies to any posts you make in that substack feed, which is totally different from other social spaces. You get to set the terms for your own little space there, even on each post, even in each little note that you publish. And maybe it is true that we're only getting away with this so far because we're small relatively to the others, and that's as scale happens. We'll face more and more problems. I think there will be more problems. There will be more challenges. The platform and those decentralized moderation tools, those tools that are for you to moderate your own experience rather than for the managers to moderate your experience will have to improve. We'll have to keep getting better. And we've got grand plans for that. But I do think that the model makes a huge difference. It just gives you a massive leg up, a different type of starting point for the kind of culture that actually emerges. And I remember actually I said before, I'm 43, I've been around a little bit. I remember Twitter pre algorithmic feed ranking. I remember Instagram pre advertising. And those spaces were actually pretty good spaces. People really deeply loved Twitter in 2010, and there were many more people in Twitter in 2010 than there currently are in the, in the substack feed. Not that we're tiny, but we're like at the start of A big growth period for that product. And people did come to associate Twitter with being toxic or unruly or a place where a lot of harassment happened. Most of that happened beyond a scale where they already had hundreds of millions of users. And most of it happened after 2016, when it introduced algorithmically ranked feeds that were mostly serving advertising. The algorithm wasn't trying to maximize the number of paid subscriptions you would get, or the number of free subscriptions you would get, or the number of deeper, meaningful relationships you had with other people who cared about culture. That's what Substack's algorithm is trying to do. Those algorithms were trying to maximize your engagement and the time spent on their feed so that you would see more advertisements. And that's when I think, well, unfortunately, that's also the time when. Well, it depends on how you look at it. I don't wanna say unfortunately necessarily, but coincidentally, that's also the time when Donald Trump came onto the scene with a particular style of politics. It was also two years post Gamergate, which was 2014, and the culture became heightened and politics became heightened right around the same time as these massive changes to the ranking of the algorithmic feeds in these major social media platforms was being instituted. And I don't know if it's coincidence or not, but like, I think from that time on we've seen how there's been much more alarm about misinformation, much more alarm about polarization, much more alarm about authoritarianism from any part of the political spectrum.
- [34:30]
B
Elon Musk says the right thing when he promises that his goal at Twitter is to maximize unregretted user minutes. I think he has a phrase like that. I have to say, on the rare occasions when I venture to look at X on my phone, I can't say that the algorithm always delivers on that laudable ambition, in part because I'm often served up all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories and extreme statements that I don't think my browsing behavior has shown any indication I am particularly interested in spending time with. But to what extent do you think that that is a choice by the designers of the algorithm? And what you're alluding to, I think, is that if the primary source of income for your social media app is advertising, which is certainly true of Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, which mostly true for X, for they're trying to get a subscription model off the ground to compensate for that, to some extent, you're going to want to make people spend as much time as possible on the app. And apparently Being drawn in by controversy and big fights and so on is a good way of doing that. One of the things that struck me as having been true in the basic architecture of Twitter for a long time, not perhaps from the very beginning, but for a long time at this point, is that often what you would see is the Tweet that had 500 likes and 500 angry responses. Now, there are other social media platforms that might make different choices. Reddit, even Forward2, I believe, is mostly reliant on advertising income, tends to prioritize a decentralized structure where you join particular communities and they even have strong internal moderation. So it's not moderation at the level of Reddit, but it's at the level of am I an asshole? Or whatever the communities are. But B, within that, the response I'm going to see first is one that has the biggest delta between upwards and downwards. It's not the most controversial response that is displayed to me first. It's the one where 200 people said, yes, that's a helpful answer, and only two people said no. That answer really annoyed me. Now, I guess what you would argue is that on substack nodes, your goal is not to have people spend time in substack notes. Your goal is for people to discover a great essay, a great set of photographs, a great piece of content from one of your substack creators, and then hopefully choose to get that directly into the inbox more regularly and perhaps even choose to pay some money to that creator on a regular basis because you're getting a 10% cut of financial revenue from the subscriptions. So that's where your incentive lies. How much does that different incentives explain different architectural choices that will be sustainably leading to a different culture. And to the extent that it does, is that a choice that other platforms could make, or are they just in such a different business that there's nothing they can really learn from you in that respect?
- [37:33]
A
Yeah, well, I think we already see that on some level, on some scale, it does lead to a different culture. The culture of the substack ecosystem is palpably different to the culture of X or the culture of Instagram. How far that can play out, we're gonna find out. Like, we are very optimistic. But of course, one can't see the future and there will be things unforeseen that might always pop up. I think those other platforms are screwed. I think they can't. They are trapped by their business models. Unless they rip out advertising, they're gonna have to become more and more like TikTok, which is the master of this kind of game. And you see Facebook and Instagram trying to become. And X as well, trying to become more like TikTok, trying to become more visual, more like Dopamine Scrolls, more like less to do with trustworthy information and content and trying to help each other understand each other, and less to do with tight social relationships with people who you know and care about, and more to do with superficial engagement where it doesn't matter who the creator or the producer, the publisher is. And for as long as advertising is the model, they have to play the game in that way. They don't want you to leave their feeds. That's why it's hard for substack writers to get people over from X onto their substack accounts now, because X essentially suppresses the links. But it's not just for substack, it's for the New York Times. It's for any external links. And X has caught some shit for that, rightly so, because that's not a contribution to a better culture. But they're also just playing the game in exactly the same way that Instagram and Facebook have been playing it for years, because their business model demands that. So I think that those cultures are gonna keep coarsening and keep not serving the people who add value to those platforms, the writers and the creators and the people who care about what those writers and creators have to say for as long as they're playing the advertising game. But it does create space for Substack and other networks who see what substack see to emerge. And it won't only be substack.
- [39:51]
B
Here's something that I've been generally curious about asking you, which is that substack has just transformed American, particularly at the elite level, particularly among intellectuals and writers and so on of a particular sort. But it is just striking to me both that Substack now has the most prominent collection of writers of any form in the United States. I mean, if you compare sort of the people who regularly publish on substack, they are bigger names and better known and arguably have greater reach than the collection of people at the New York Times, or the collection of people at the Washington Post, or the collection of people at NPR or the collection of people just about anywhere else. And it's really striking. And it's completely transformed my own media consumption. I mean, I still go for the most part to traditional newspapers and outlets on an overview of the things that happened yesterday or certain kinds of breaking news. But, you know, the voices I most enjoy reading and thinking with and reflecting with, are on Substack, and it's given me myself a great liberty. One of the things I really love about Substack, and I've said this on the podcast before once or twice, is that when I write on Substack, for the most part, the article I feel most proud of does the best in terms of how many people read it, in terms of how many new readers I get who subscribe to the substack, and so on. The articles where I get a little bit tempted to opine on yesterday's stupid controversy tend to do less well. And that's the inverse of what my experience of traditional media has been, where if I write the article saying why the thing that some politician said yesterday is stupid and outrageous, I can do that in my sleep in half an hour and it's going to get a ton of readers. If I write the article where I'm actually trying to share some deeper insight into the world that I've been thinking about mulling over for a long time, it might well fall through the cracks. That's all long wind up. Not just to praise you a little bit, Hamish, and what you guys are up to at substance, because I am trying to be grateful, but I'm struck by the fact that it hasn't happened in other countries that I know well. So in Britain there's a good number of writers on substack and there's an obvious bleed over within the Anglo sphere, but I think it's happened much less in the United Kingdom than it has in the United States. Once I go across to places like Germany, France and Italy, it is basically non existent. I mean, really plugged in. French journalists, German journalists who have a good understanding of the world and who are innovators within their own ecosystem may not know what substack is. Why is that? Is there something about those countries that is less inviting to the same transformation in the public sphere? Is there structural conditions like their traditional media just doing a better job at retaining their readers and at allowing multiple voices and earning that loyalty so that people aren't sort of looking and casting around for new actions? Or is it that you guys have simply haven't yet made a big conscious push to expand into those territories and it really doesn't happen organically. It takes sort of a deliberate strategy and you've decided that the time to make that push hasn't come yet?
- [43:03]
A
Yeah, well, you might be surprised by the level of penetration there actually is in the United Kingdom. That's our second largest market and there are a host of really great writers, from new voices to really high profile people who are succeeding on substack and having a great time.
- [43:20]
B
And I don't want to underestimate that. But actually if you happen to have the number at the top of your head, my guess would be that even relative to GDP size, which obviously is much higher in the United States than the United Kingdom, your revenue in the UK would be less than that. Right. That it's not just prorated what the US is, but let's say about half of that. I may be wrong about that. I'm completely spitballing, but yeah, I don't know.
- [43:44]
A
Yeah, yeah. I don't have the number off the top of my head to challenge or prove that one way or the other. It is a really big market for us. We do have people on the ground in the UK and we're taking it seriously and continuing to grow it. But it is definitely true that the US is disproportionately the majority of the substack user base and it is true that we are relatively under penetrated in the European, other European countries. There's a nice little pocket in New Zealand because I go back to New Zealand every so often and convince some of my friends to get aboard. There's some in Australia, Canada's doing pretty well. But it is true that the US is leading and the US is overrepresented in the mix of the substack ecosystem. I think the US does kind of lead on cultural things generally like pop music, the NBA, cinema, all these kinds of things. I think the US often is first and others wait and follow. There are probably some cultural reasons as well. There might be. There's more of an entrepreneurial culture and more of a risk taking culture in the U.S. i think that might help writers and other public thinkers make this kind of leap and feel like they're kind of part of a vanguard where others like in New Zealand, this is true. New Zealand is just culturally more conservative when it comes to that kind of risk. And so they might be slower to move and then practically speaking, yeah, we're a small team. We're like about 100 people in the company as a whole and we don't yet have enough depth and resources to really go do a major go to market push. In Germany, we'd love to do more in Germany, Italy, there's a couple of great writers. There's one really huge writer in Germany, a media personality who's doing. Sorry. In Italy, who's doing really well. But we haven't exploited those opportunities yet when there's more work to be done.
- [45:37]
B
So that's interesting. I mean, just to help my thinking about how these kind of processes work. So you do think that this deliberate push is necessary or at least really, really helpful. So if you were going to go and decide, all right, we're well on track in the United States now. We want to expand more into those underserved markets. What do you think are the steps you would need to take in a place like Germany or perhaps like Italy to grow there?
- [46:01]
A
Yeah, I think we need sort of partnerships people and marketing people. We think of partnerships as partnerships with the writers and the publishers, not with other companies who do bundle deals or anything like that. And we need marketing or communications, just telling people that Substack exists, that this is a model that could work for them and that others are really succeeding with it, and your life is gonna be better once you start using it in most of those places. We haven't had a chance to really get in there and do that to the extent we've done it in the United States. And I think that is critical for starting the ball rolling. Otherwise, people in Germany who are familiar with substack, many of them are probably familiar with it because of you and not because someone in substack has gone and told the story there.
- [46:45]
B
And by the way, I do now have a German substack and a French substack, and this interview is gonna be translated into German and French. So hopefully this interview will help people to get on board, because I'm trying to grow my German French substack. I have a big audience at this point in English, but the lack of network effect is one of the things I'm struggling with in German and in French.
- [47:01]
A
Yeah. Well, thank you for making your contribution to our internationalization plan. But yeah, all I was going to say was that being active and present in the market is key to actually generating the heat and the action in the market. And we have ambitions to do that at a greater depth. And we are just getting started in the countries that are not the United States at the moment. It's a focus thing for us.
- [47:23]
B
Us. Let's talk a little bit about sort of more broadly how you're thinking about developing Substack further. There's, I think, opportunities, speaking from the point of view of a writer, as even more people are likely to take to a model, even more writers are likely to join it. I do think that the new Substack app has made it easier to discover other good voices And I certainly can feel that for our own content. And there's an uptick in the number of people who come to it through the substack ecosystem. There's obviously also a risk that the space may get saturated, which is to say that when there's very few newsletters, and most people didn't subscribe to many newsletters, the ability to get into their inbox was an incredible privilege that traditional publications didn't have. I mean, they woke up in the morning and they had a stupid email from the bank and they had an annoying seven emails from the job, and here was a fresh, interesting, interesting piece of content that they could read and so they would click on it. Right now they might be subscribed. If some of the kinds of people who are most loyal readers to 5 or 10 or 20 substacks, and so you're suddenly competing with five or six other articles that came in at the same time. And you know, my open rates are pretty good. Hopefully they're still pretty likely to read me. But if in a couple of years even more interesting writers are on substack and Suddenly they're getting 20 emails from substack every morning, you know, at some point there's just going to be diminishing returns in terms of that kind of reach. So that's one kind of way in which further expansion may be a risk. And the other, of course, is the financial model where it's been amazing to see how many people are willing to pay for quality content. And I'm very grateful to them because they allow me to do my writing on substack and asset persuasion to pay our editors and do our work and create this amazing ecosystem. But of course, people have financial constraints and if they have free subscriptions on substack, that's one thing, and if they have 10, that's another. And if you ask them to take out 20, I mean, that really is starting to be unrealistic other than for people who are very fortunate in their financial situation. So how are you thinking about those risks of saturation?
- [49:35]
A
Cool. I've got two answers for each of those. And one answer is cultural and one is economic. On the cultural side, for the first problem you described of now, these writers on substack have to compete with all these other writers for attention. The cultural thing is that competition puts upward pressure on quality, which is good for the consumer who wants to be getting better stuff to help them think and help them use their attention wisely and for just generally up leveling the production of culture in the world. I think, I think social media doesn't really do that. Social media, the dominant cultural machine at the moment, because all you are optimizing for on social media is a moment of virality. That's the ultimate reward in social media. So that kind of upward pressure on quality, I think is a good thing for the consumer, even if it makes life harder for the publisher. But the second thing is the economic thing is there are quite a lot of people in the world and the numbers that publisher needs to hit to be financially successful with the substack model are not jaw dropping. So people are used to writing for traditional media, are accustomed to thinking that if their piece isn't read by hundreds of thousands of people, then really it hasn't succeeded or it's not going to be financially successful. They are not going to be financial successful. On substack, if you can get 1,000 people to commit to a one year subscription, which is not easy, that's hard work. But if 1,000 people are willing to pay you 50 bucks a year in most places in the world, that's enough to live on. It's not in New York or San Francisco, but in many other places it is. And if you can get 2,000, you're fine. If you get 10,000, you're wealthy. And those kinds of numbers are, while difficult and not a walk in the park, are very, actually very attainable for the people who have got the talent and the quality and the consistency and the ability to do this kind of work and are so different to the numbers you need to be hitting on the likes of YouTube or even the New York Times to be able to make something financially viable. So I actually think those are two, I think one, it's not that acute a problem for the writers and two, it's a great problem for the consumers. Cause they get higher quality stuff. On the oversaturation from the reader point of view, you know, there are so many things to subscribe to, I can't afford to get them all. I can't, you know, I'm gonna be like bankrupting myself if I pay to subscribe to all the things I like. Again, cultural and economic angles. The cultural angle is, that's good, I think because we have probably as a society, as an economy, been undervaluing culture. We haven't been paying enough for the production of this important stuff that shapes how we think and shapes who we are in the world, shapes how we work together. That is a really valuable thing that the Internet and sort of media generally has conditioned us to believe. Is worth pennies and not dollars. So that's a nice problem to start to try to correct in some way on the other side, I'm one of these guys. I've got a ton of subscriptions. I'm like, whoa, this hurts to, like, fork out another 50 bucks of this. I'd like to just pay a large sum to have a smorgasbord of my favorite writers and publishers, producers. And so I think in the future. We're in an unbundling moment now. Substack represents an unbundling of media and media businesses. But I think there can be. There are bundling opportunities in the future that will make sense for both the publishers and the consumers. And there's like, well established math for, like, ways that you could do this where everyone wins. We're a ways off walking down that path, but we're certainly thinking about it and we're open to it. And I think there's a way to do it where you don't erode the agency that the subscriber has in choosing who to support and the sense of ownership that the publisher has and knowing who their subscribers are and being able to export them anytime they want.
- [54:03]
B
And just because bundling may not immediately be intuitive about what exactly that would entail, I imagine that what you're raising as a potential future possibility is a model where you take out a monthly subscription to Substack at whatever price point that may be, and that gives you access to either all or some selection of. Of content within that universe.
- [54:27]
A
Yeah, like maybe you pay 100 bucks a year. Sorry, 100 bucks a month or something like that. And that gets you a certain number of tickets that you spend on particular publishers, but that you still. Rather than Substack being fully a mediator that decides who you're going to see and when, you still have that sense of ownership and that sense of agency. I think that balance is really important to strike. But some model like that I can imagine working, and we've talked about that.
- [54:51]
B
And would particular creators then have an ability to opt in and out of that, or would that just come with the use of a Substack platform as a creator?
- [55:00]
A
There's so much yet to be determined. We haven't started work on anything like this. But I can imagine, I think in general, preserving the publisher's agency is really important. And so if someone didn't want to participate in a program like that, I can imagine we'd create a way for them to be able to optimize.
- [55:17]
B
Because, of course, from the perspective of the creators that both is an opportunity because it might mean that people who otherwise one wouldn't have any income from effectively end up paying whatever it is that the creator would get per ticket that has been redeemed to view an article of theirs or a video of theirs. And of course, it could lead to more discovery, to more people saying, hey, this is actually a publication I want to subscribe to. On the other hand, of course the risk is that you end up with something like what musical artists complain about in Spotify, that even if you have a lot of views, a lot of plays, that translates into very little money at the end.
- [55:52]
A
Yeah, 100%. I think it's a very delicate balance to strike. It's something that we're not gonna like, plow forward to headfirst. In an unthinking way, one of the true and great and forever promises of Substack is as a publisher, you have ownership and you have control over your own destiny. And so that is something we will never erode because it's a fundamental piece of the platform.
- [56:16]
B
What are other things that you're focusing on at the moment in the development of Substack? How do you think the Substack ecosystem, Substack experience will look differently in three or five years if your plan succeed, than it does today?
- [56:30]
A
That five year time horizon is such a complicated thing because no one's quite sure yet how the AI revolution is going to change the landscape for online content, online relationships, how these things are, how your experiences are curated and delivered. So I don't know exactly what it will look like, but the foundation will always remain intact. As a publisher, you own your relationship with your audience. You will primarily make money from direct subscriptions, and you own all your content. You can export that anytime you want. And as the consumer, you'll be able to choose which writers and publishers you want to support and opt into and out of the experiences you want. The social network aspects of Substack will continue to grow and get thicker and more valuable as a machine that drives subscriptions and the format type people continue to have a more expansive understanding of what Substack is. I think at the first era of Substack, people sort of thought of it as a platform for newsletters that were mostly text based. But increasingly Substack is known as a place where podcasts are hosted and where video shows are created. Substack Live is actually pretty new, but going very well. It's where you can just go through your app and do a live, public, facetime kind of thing where you can be in conversation with someone else and then you can publish that as clips or you can publish it as a podcast episode on your substack. And we have, I think we're gonna see a lot more shows leveraging Substack Live. For example, Tim Acosta recently left CNN and now hosts a daily live show on Substack through the Substack app. I think you're gonna see that that get a lot more professional, a lot more sophisticated and a lot more prevalent. And then we have a feature called Chat, which is a bit of a sleeper feature at the moment, but it's kind of like a WhatsApp group you can host with all your subscribers where people can be in communion with each other and it's not just the writer talking to the subscribers, but the subscribers talking to each other as well. And you can make those just for paid subscribers, just for free subscribers, whatever you want to do. I think that live and Chat, these forms of like real life human interaction where, you know, there's a human on the other end and you know, even if it's a writer you love, you can be sure that you're just not getting a piece of like AI produced content. It's that the humanity, that soul connection is actually really important. I think those things will grow to so let's say like let's call them live community features. Those things will grow in importance in Substack over time.
- [59:21]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, Hamish and I geek out a little bit about all of the do's and don'ts, all of the tips and tricks for how to build an audience on Substack and how to stop monetizing your content if you're interested in doing that as well. This is not a guide to famous people who have a pre existing audience and decide to leave some legacy publication to go to Substack. It's a guide for anybody who might be interested in sharing their thoughts, their creativity with the world and building up an audience on the platform. If you would like access to that part of the conversation, as well as ad free access to all of my weekly episodes and my frequent bonus episodes and all of my writing on Substack and help support all of the ecosystem we've been talking about for the last hour, please go to yashamunk.substack.com yashamunk.substack dot com and become a paying subscriber. Thank you so much for listening to the good fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it. Share it on Facebook, Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [60:56]
A
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces. It.