Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Substack's Founders on the Future of the Media" with Hamish McKenzie & Chris Best

Transcript

"Substack's Founders on the Future of the Media" with Hamish McKenzie & Chris Best · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Good day, humans. Welcome to The Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas. Here's Dangerous idea
• 0:07
  for you. As the legacy media struggles to maintain trust, maintain market share as more and
• 0:16
  more young people get their news from scrolling, I was going to say mindlessly, but that
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  sounds a bit pejorative, doesn't it? Scrolling actively and delightedly and delightfully
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  through the labyrinth of their social media feeds. We are kind of doomed to a fate in
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  which everybody will inhabit their own social media news bubble tailored for them by algorithms
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  designed entirely to keep us all, quote unquote, engaged to keep us clicking, to keep us scrolling,
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  to keep us watching, to keep us liking, to keep us commenting, things that either pander
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  to what we already believe or demonize what we don't already believe. That is the sort
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  of dystopian possible fate of our information ecosystem in the absence of gatekeepers like
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  big public broadcasters that everybody tunes into at the same time every evening to find
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  out what's going on in the world from an old straight white male talking at them.
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  Substack is trying to do something different and today's episode is an interview with the
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  two co-founders of Substack, Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie. I've just come off the
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  back as I'm sure you are no doubt aware having been bludgeoned over the head with it for
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  the past few weeks. A world tour. Substacks first ever, Substack live around the world podcast
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  marathon. Lots of great content. So if you've been asleep at the wheel then go back over
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  the past a dozen odd episodes and almost every single one I think is worth listening
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  to. This one in particular, what is the future of the media? Is there an alternative to either
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  social media algorithms on the one hand or a stuffy old legacy media on the other? The
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  reason I'm speaking to the founders of Substack at this juncture is because just as I was
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  about to embark on the Substack live around the world podcast marathon, did I mention
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  it? Have I mentioned it? I just did that. Have I? Did I mention it? Anyway, come over.
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  They went through around a funding and their latest funding round puts the valuation of
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  Substack at over a billion dollars over a thousand million United States earth dollars,
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  which puts the company in the realm of being what's called a unicorn Silicon Valley unicorn
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  a big behemoth something really serious, which came out of the brains of these non American
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  lads as they were trying to figure out a sort of a subscription model originally for newsletters
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  and now for everything that any creator wants to create for their subscribers. We have a chat
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  about the the conflict between free speech and hate speech, whether anything should be limited
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  on platforms like Substack, what their vision of the future of the platform is the decline
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  of legacy media, the role of video online and in our information consumption, the challenges
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  of living in a social media world. I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one, the only
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  Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie of Substack. I think it's a bazillion dollars in funding. Did
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  you with a valuation of a quadrillion trillion? No, I think it's one point one, Brazilian, etc.
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  One Brazilian dollar, one Brazilian dollar, which is actually not very much money, apparently,
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  given the Brazilian economy these days and they're here to tell us about the future of Substack,
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  what this whole platform is where they see it going from here and why Nazis are great. So now
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  that we've established that, I'm interested in what it's like to be a tech Titan, which I think
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  I can call you guys now. If you if I look at your to-do list, if you have such a thing or your
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  assistance assistance assistance to do list, then what is like I think we can probably guess like
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  what the top things are. What's like in the number three to number five range on,
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  let's start with you, Hamish, on your to-do list? Me, no, I was looking at Chris as the tech Titan,
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  on the earlier right theory, selling to a tech company. Number three might be the for me,
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  personally, might be maximizing or fully taking advantage of the opportunity for a video and
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  Substack and helping people who prefer to express themselves over video really have the power
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  of a studio in their pocket. There's so much work to be done there, it's so exciting and to
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  marry that with the direct subscription model just presents so many amazing possibilities to me.
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  So there's number three, possibly three or four to me. Okay, I would have put that at number one,
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  but Chris, what's your number three or four? You might have put it at number one. I'm trying
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  to forget about about two through N. I mean, there's a saying in Silicon Valley where it's like
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  the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing and I'm trying to and I think with this,
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  you know, you raise money, you've got all of these resources, you've got all of these exciting
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  opportunities. There's so many like people in your inbox with ideas and I think that the most
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  important thing that we can do now that I can do now is kind of like keep focused on what actually
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  matters and that's making a great product that actually delivers the value that people want.
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  And for us, this phase of sub-stack, the great product, like the thing that's making it great,
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  part of it is like the actual software we build, but a big part of it is the network and the value
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  and the fact that other people are here and you kind of have this like increasing critical
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  massive things. So I'm actually making a deliberate effort to kind of like narrow my priority list
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  and forget about whatever number five would be if I was keeping track of it.
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  And are those two goals making the great product and making the community and the network work
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  always aligned? I think for our the thing that we're making, they're actually inseparable,
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  right? The core of what sub-stack is is not, you know, a really good newsletter tool or a really
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  good live video suite. Those things are are very important means to an end. But the core of sub-stack
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  is this business model that supports independence, the fact that you can actually, you know, own your
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  own your personal media empire and have this direct connection with your audience, but then plugging
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  that in to an internet scale network that actually helps you grow and win. And if we like making that
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  thing is what makes the product good. It's what makes it good for audiences because they can show up
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  and the most interesting things in the world are here and it makes it good for you because it being
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  on sub-stack, then you can grow. You can you can reach an audience, you can find, you know, make money
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  doing the work you really believe in. And when Hamish talks about the importance of video,
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  is that do you concur with that or is that slightly odds with the original vision of having a
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  useless out platform? Can you, can you start trying to create a rift between
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  by the end of this interview, the two of you, you're just going to leave your room and you
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  get this. We're going to watch a mod wrestling match this intro. I knew this week. How's the
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  going? I think video is is very much on, on course, right? Like the, the core of sub-stack is not
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  any one medium or any one technology. The core is about the social contract and about the
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  economic engine that supports the good things. And so we've always taken this stance of like,
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  we want to give you sort of maximum creative leverage. If you're a writer, you should be able to
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  come and type into this box. And if the things you type are great, you should be able to get
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  rich and famous and you shouldn't have to worry about anything else. That's hard enough. It's
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  hard to make something great. And the things working on a video now are kind of like the equivalent
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  of that. You should be able to show up and make and like, you know, have the most interesting
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  conversation in the world. And if you can have the most interesting conversation, which by the way,
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  is fucking hard to do, you should like, as you know. Thanks for the flattery, but yes.
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  But like, and then we want to make this, this, this, this set of tools that just like, as if by magic,
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  takes that thing and like does everything else that you need to like have your own personal
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  media empire. So it's very much in line to me. And Hamish, when you hear Chris say that if you're
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  a writer, you should be able to just come in right in a box and it should make, it should be
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  able to make you successful. If the analog to think of, thinking about the video analog of that,
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  there's been a up until now a, I would say a bias within sub stack, not in, I'm not saying that
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  in a pejorative way, but a preference inside a sub stack to be a low fire place to do business
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  on video to basically make it rough and ready and quick. And you can pick up your phone and you
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  can stream and it's live and engaged and integrated and horizontal and all of those like nice
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  networky things. Now there's a pressure from certain creators myself included to facilitate a
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  greater polish, a greater level of professionalism and to actually sort of step up and be an alternative
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  to television and to big YouTube shows. How do you think about the clash between sort of spontaneity
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  and low fire versus polish and high fire? I think they can live together. I've always been a
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  high low kind of guy like you can go high and enjoy the high brow stuff and then go low brown,
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  like that's really fun too. So I think that there is a true quality to the unvarnished direct
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  conversation which you can sort of casually drop into or casually create. And social media has
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  kind of enabled that and it's resulting in new types of media products and new types of media
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  businesses being built. And I think it's actually shaping culture and shaping our politics to a
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  larger degree as well. But there is definitely a place for the more intentionally crafted
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  higher production value, deeper dive type of video as well. And to a large extent,
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  there might be on Netflix or YouTube at the moment. But they're married to a particular type of
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  model which is that you either pay your attention to YouTube and it decides what to put in front of
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  you or you pay your money to Netflix and then decides who wins and who gets all the money.
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  But there's definitely a big opening for a direct subscription relationship model where I pay
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  Josh because I want to I pay him directly because I want to be in a relationship with him
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  a professional. You want to be a relationship with Josh? No, nothing about my swinging,
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  nothing about my polyamory. I'm making some assumptions. You're
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  me. I only want the media swinging part of this release. Right. Okay. Okay. But you know, I could
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  I want to be able to go direct to the sources that I most trust and be able to support them not
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  only with my attention viewing their work, but with my money so that I can help them succeed and
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  help have more of an agentic role in shaping the culture. Hamish, when you think about high five
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  versus low five and Chris, I like your thoughts on this as well. One thing that bothers me a little bit
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  when I think about how to produce this show is to people engage with it differently if it's
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  polished. Like is the experience, in other words, that Netflix phenomenon, is it not just that there's
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  a financial difference between the business model of Netflix and the business model of a
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  sub stack creator, but that there's actually like let me give you an example because my background
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  was in radio. I would go on huge radio shows as a guest when I was like a presenter on Huffpost
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  Lives in New York that claimed to have a hundred million viewers listeners rather. I'd go on the
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  today show and banter with like Kathie Lee and Hoda for eight minutes and they claimed to have
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  50 million viewers or something. And I would get one or two text messages from some old person
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  who was a friend of my mother who saw it. I would go on a podcast that had a really loyal listener
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  base. Yeah. And they're big podcasts. They're still 10 million people or 5 million people.
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  And my podcast was shoot to the number one spot on the Apple podcast rankings for the next 72
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  hours because of the engagement with which people consume podcasts versus just having the today show
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  on in the background. And it's part of the concern. If there is a concern at sub stack about
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  facilitating television on the sub stack that you corrode the intimacy.
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  I don't think there's a concern but I think there is increasingly like a time and place for the
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  polished stuff. And that in general people have learned to I think this is a like I'm just sort of
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  like rambling about personally how the culture is changing and Chris will have a much more
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  intelligent and concise way to say something that reveals deeper truths. But I think that
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  when someone sees something that is a polished piece of media these days,
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  they're almost less inclined to trust it because it's a relic of a previous era where there was
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  a much more centralized control and top down gate cats media where you got your official opinions
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  from official voices from people wearing official suits behind official desks with official
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  backdrops and perfect productions and everything segmented into two minute blocks.
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  And the internet broke that model and now every perspective gets to have a voice and have a chance
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  of being heard. And once people have been exposed to something like a three hour conversation between
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  a podcaster and a guest where you get to break it out of the sound bite framework, then you start
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  to want more of that and trust more of that and start to feel like the other thing is a little
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  bit alien and more of a broadcast when you've been talked to rather than with you've been told
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  something rather than invite it into sharing something. And so I think that's actually a really good
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  quality of social media that's like introduced a new way of talking to each other in large groups
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  and it's going to be really hard to I don't think we're going back to the old way,
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  which is not to say that there's never a time or place for the high production value,
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  high quality like intentionally designed a conversation or media product.
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  But it's occupying a different place in the culture than it once did. It's no longer the
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  default dominant thing. Yeah, Chris, what sense do you make of the vibe difference?
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  I think that's true. And I think the podcast and the show, like the podcast as a format
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  is I think it's has been so successful in part because it gets it some it forces people to have
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  more authentic conversations in some way. Like when you sit down and you're talking for an hour
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  or something, there's just a degree to which it becomes much harder to sort of fake or bullshit
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  through. You know, if you've ever done media training of like how to go on TV, the training is like,
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  all right, everything is a 30-second sound, but don't answer the fucking question. You just,
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  you know, whatever they say, you say one of these three things that you came to say. Say a
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  conversation. Just say that's an excellent question, Josh, which gives you a little bit of time
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  to think about what you're going to say. That's an excellent question, Josh. So on to why
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  the sub-stacks synergies are such excellent for growth. And that's kind of, and that's just like how
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  that, how the structure of that type of media and the incentives that it creates pull the participants
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  to behave. And if you sit down and try and do like an hour-long podcast interview or a live
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  and you come at it with that kind of attitude, you're going to look like a moron. It's just
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  the possible, I think, to have the same degree of light. In fact, we have look like morons in the
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  past. Yeah, listen, I'm going to look a moron. I'm going to look like the moron that I actually am,
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  not the moron that the PR team thinks I should be. That's a very good point, though. That's actually
• 15:49
  a good point to look like the moron that you are instead of the moron that I'm saying. I'm
• 15:53
  serious. I'm probably saying for the crimes we actually committed if we must. Yes, absolutely.
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  Exactly. And I think this was part of, you know, not to get all political, but you know,
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  when they talk about the podcast election in the in the last election between Trump and Kamala
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  Harris, I do think that there's an expectation amongst Democratic party machine people that you
• 16:10
  can avoid looking like an idiot altogether. And you can, but then you lose the election. You're
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  going to have to lose, you know, pick your, pick your idiot. Either you're going to look like an idiot
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  that you are by doing podcasts and engaging and seeing an authentic, which is what Trump does.
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  It's not that he doesn't look like an idiot, but he definitely looks like his own kind of
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  Sui generous idiot. Well, he followed, he followed Newsom's latest turn.
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  No, what's going on? What's going on? Oh, man, he's, he's tweeting in Trump's house style.
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  He's making like parody Trump tweets and doing all these, he's like, oh, he's gone. He's, I think
• 16:43
  he's taken that you can't beat him, join him strategy. Right. He's interesting. He's a matter of
• 16:48
  easier criticism. Is he actually being satirical or he's doing this inadvertently?
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  No, he's like, it's literally, it's like, you know, thank you for your attention to this matter,
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  like all caps, like he's doing, it's, it's, he's going through the bit. It's quite interesting.
• 17:03
  Wow, that's interesting. And he's been, and he's been doing the podcast bro thing.
• 17:06
  Yes, yeah, you're talking to Steve Bannon on a podcast and all of it. And next step,
• 17:11
  you're sending out tweets like the president. I mean, that's interesting. That's, it's funny that
• 17:16
  the thing, the sort of beach that I've been, that, that, that man Andrew Sullivan and Barry,
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  why some people like that have been banging on about for about eight or 10 years is finally,
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  like, there's a whole bunch of Johnny come lately. So now jumping on the bandwagon,
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  including the governor of California, who's like, oh, should we be talking to people outside
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  our echo chamber, should we? I can do that as well. Watch me do podcast thing with other
• 17:38
  individual who disagrees with me, not doing it in an incredibly effective way, I don't think.
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  One of the, one of the viewers scooters asked a question saying, what was the thing in the
• 17:48
  pitch that helps secure $100 million? It's, well, the main, I'm going to say the mean, yeah.
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  No, I at one point, I was trying to just, because the, the, the, the craft of making a pitch
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  is about taking the big idea that you have and just compressing it like a diamond down into
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  the simplest, possible expression of itself, that's like the least distorted. And I ended up
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  making a meme that was one of the slides in the pitch that I just felt like even in my own mind,
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  totally clarifying for like what sub stack is. And you know the handshake meme where it's like
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  two hand, like two guys shaking hands. And it was basically like, muscular arms.
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  Muscular arms. One muscular arm is, look, it's the business model that supports independence.
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  And the other muscular arm is an internet scale network. And you put those two things together,
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  that's sub stack. And I think that is probably like the key insight that we ourselves have come
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  to over the years, which is like, you know, we think this model is really important. We think
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  the fact that you own your stuff and can have editorial freedom and can make money doing the
• 19:03
  work you believe in. That stuff really matters. And the model has, and the model and the tools
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  have to support that. But none of that actually matters if it's kind of like you're off on your
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  own little island and you're totally dependent on all of the other networks that are just driving
• 19:19
  the world crazy. And if you can't grow. And so the thing that sub stack can bring to the thing
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  that can give the Josh's apps of the world sort of like a fighting chance to win back the culture
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  and make a real difference is by taking the like the promise of the sub stack model and pairing it
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  with a proper place on the internet that matters to the culture and helps you grow.
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  And when you say an internet scale network, what does that mean?
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  Pretty simply to me, it's like, look, you know, the main device you use, most people use every day
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  is their phone. And on your phone, you have like, there's probably like three or four little
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  rectangles you go to. And yeah, or you know, whatever those are for you, everybody might have
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  different ones. But there's like, you know, there's probably like, you know, whatever two to seven,
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  maybe at the outside. And I think if you're an independent creator, you have to be in those
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  rectangles or you're just not in the conversation. And most of those rectangles are things that are
• 20:31
  like TikTok or YouTube or Grindr or whatever are these networks that are governed by these incentive
• 20:38
  systems like that have there's a certain way to win. And the way to win is determined by how that
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  platform makes money and what their strategy is. And we think that to fulfill the best version of
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  what sub stack can be, like we have to like provide one of those rectangles. And we have to
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  provide the one that says, we're going to connect you to the things you actually value. And if you
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  want to do that, it has to be like, it has to be a internet scale plates with everything, right?
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  You can't even order to make that thing. You have to, you start to realize that you're going to
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  make something that like, it has a feed, it has a way to like, it has all of the things that kind of
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  go into making one of those things great. Hey, miss, do you worry that it's getting too complicated?
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  There are lots of pieces and pieces that you're putting into this basket, which is going to
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  become the everything app, right? You've got a, you know, social network in the form of notes,
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  you've got, you've got video, you've got the posts, you've got, it chats, you've got like comments.
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  There's, there's some point at which the experience becomes more, there are more opportunities
• 21:38
  to do things, but that also makes it more unwieldy. So how do you balance the, how do you balance
• 21:43
  sleepiness? Luckily, I don't have to design the, you don't have to do any of that. So yeah, but
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  you're, your brain is like, new link on this. I love the idea that you just go home at night
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  and you feed your cats and then you go to bed and you meditate and you have a nice bath and you
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  don't think about any of these things, but I know you're well enough to know that you do occasionally,
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  you do occasionally contemplate this stuff. So actually, there's like, to, to build on that,
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  that integrates the best of social media with the best of traditional media, like the values and
• 22:08
  the practices of each. It is a good design challenge and I think, and I'm really glad that I get
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  to work with amazing people who think about those problems and clear ways and come up something
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  that works. But what I actually think is that is a movement for simplification because the more
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  complicated thing is that these little parts of our media lives are dispersed across the internet
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  where I like, I might go to browse for good things to be engaged with or for new voices to
• 22:37
  fall in love with. Like previously, I might have gone to Twitter or Instagram and those systems,
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  they're interested in not aligned with those voices that I want to support or that I really value.
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  And, or I'm, you know, to read a long thing before sub-stack, maybe, well, like a really
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  meaty piece, I might have gone to the New Yorker or the New York Times or the Atlantic or whatever
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  are some other place who have gone to, like, watch a long movie somewhere, a documentary. And
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  my attention would be, like, distributed across these places that each have a, like, a different
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  model, none of which are necessarily aligned with delivering value to the people who make the good
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  stuff. And with sub-stack, it gives you a place to have it all, like, have your relationship with
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  the smartest voices and the best culture in one place where the browsing can happen in a way
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  that is not turning everything into a doom scroll and that delivers more power to the people who
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  actually make the culture. And so I, you know, even though it's complicated for us to nail the
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  design challenge, I think it's as an overall force, more simple and more powerful.
• 23:47
  Yeah. And obviously lacks all of the downsides of living in an algorithmically, in an algorithm
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  where they can't go time. Well, there's, there's challenges to overcome. But yeah, like,
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  there are algorithms in sub-stack, but they do a different jobs in the algorithms of the other
• 24:01
  places. What's their job? And now I hand it over to Chris. Yeah. This is a big piece of our philosophy,
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  right? It's like, what do we think about powerful technology? You think about algorithms, you think
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  about long form and short form video, you think about feeds, you think about, you know, all of these
• 24:24
  things. If there are, you know, if we think that there are the major networks on the internet are
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  kind of driving us crazy, does that mean we should retreat from those technologies? Should we be like
• 24:34
  the awmess and say we will, I will swear off algorithms. I will not, I will only wear natural
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  fibers. I will, you know, go back and live in the land and read newspapers on print. I think there
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  will be people who do that and I wish them well, but I don't think that that's the way forward.
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  To me, the answer is like we have to marshal the power of these amazing technologies in favor of
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  the people who actually make and can, and like, support the culture. And so there is an algorithm
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  on sub-stack, but where the algorithm on, let's say X is designed to like extract as much time
• 25:07
  from you as possible so that it can sell it to advertisers, the algorithm on sub-stack is designed
• 25:12
  to help you find things that you value and fall in love with to the point where you might decide to
• 25:17
  pay for them. And by the way, once you decide to pay for them, we want to help you continue to
• 25:22
  like keep up with the content you aspire to keep up with because then you're going to retain.
• 25:27
  And so the objective, we call it the objective function is like the nerd speak. It's like what is
• 25:30
  the algorithm trying to do, right? And you can feel sometimes on these other platforms. It's like,
• 25:37
  it's trying to like find the thing that pushes your buttons and drives you crazy and gets you hooked.
• 25:42
  And on sub-stack, at least the aspiration, and I think really the reality, if you use it,
• 25:47
  is it's trying to find you things that are transcendent that you like, that you value.
• 25:50
  But how do you measure that without falling into similar traps? Like the proxy that other social
• 25:56
  media platforms will use is something like the time you spend on the site, which by definition
• 26:02
  is, you know, a good thing because obviously you're having fun if you're spending a lot of time on
• 26:05
  the site. You'd be leaving it if you weren't, is the logic of the, you know, of the Zuckerberg
• 26:10
  and the Musks, right? Like, and obviously that then gets perverted into ridiculous addictive
• 26:16
  clickbait, similarly engagement and connection. You know Zuckerberg talks about how,
• 26:21
  connection is always a good thing, unless you're connecting an old lady in Missouri with a Russian
• 26:28
  hacker who's spreading disinformation about elections or something. But like that can't factor
• 26:32
  in because the metric isn't nuanced enough to catch that. How do you avoid falling into the
• 26:38
  trap of going, well, look, we're connecting people with lots of different great things on sub-stack.
• 26:42
  You know, they're spending more time on the on the site. Obviously investors are now going to be
• 26:45
  happy about that. But at the cost of people's, you know, intellectual derangement.
• 26:52
  Yeah, I think that's actually, that's one of the most interesting technical problems that we get
• 26:57
  to solve. And like eventually, there's sort of like a, there's an eventual answer. To me,
• 27:01
  the eventual answer is the thing you pay with, the thing you pay with on other platforms is your
• 27:05
  time and the thing you pay with on sub-stack is your money. And when you sit back on a Sunday and
• 27:10
  you think is your best self, like, what do I want to invest my time in? What do I want to invest my
• 27:16
  money in? What's worth, you know, five or 10 bucks a month to like be something that I really
• 27:20
  want to support? You're going to make that decision. I think as like a, as a slightly better version
• 27:25
  of yourself, right? It's a little bit different than the like, what's going to get me to do one more
• 27:29
  scroll before I fall asleep or like, should I scroll through this feed of things that are sort of
• 27:33
  pure into whatever? And it's not perfect, right? At some point that it isn't a way to give people
• 27:39
  agency. It's a way for people to express what they actually value. And some people are going to
• 27:44
  choose to spend money on things that are not what I would have chosen or that I don't think are
• 27:49
  good. And ultimately, I by like, I still think that's a good thing to do. Basically, if I'm helping
• 27:55
  you make the decision by your own lights of what, considering everything you have to consider,
• 28:01
  what do you want to invest your money in? And I'm helping you make that decision well. I think we've
• 28:05
  done a good thing. Even if people are going to, you know, people are going to make radically
• 28:09
  different choices about what they spend that money on. So there's that sort of like the deep answer.
• 28:13
  And that the key is that that thing has to tie to the business model of the company, right? If we
• 28:18
  say, hey, we've got this, you know, we've got this aspiration to be really noble and to help the
• 28:22
  people who are actually using the thing get what they want. But then our business model is well
• 28:27
  actually we make money in this different way that is that is against what you want. You know,
• 28:32
  either you're going to run into a situation where you're, you know, undercutting that principle
• 28:37
  or where your business is not successful. And like actually neither of those are going to come.
• 28:42
  So we have to design the whole business model of the company around the idea that look we are
• 28:48
  only going to make money when we're helping people discover things that they deeply value.
• 28:52
  So there's that's like the philosophical side. Then there's the technical side which gets really
• 28:56
  interesting because payment is a really sparse signal, right? So like you're going to pay for,
• 29:01
  if we're doing great, you're going to pay for like a handful of substats over time. And so you do
• 29:06
  have to like be able to work back. And you know, this is one of the things that we're working really
• 29:10
  hard on right now are like, what are the early signals? Like what are the things that actually
• 29:14
  show that you're getting deep value out of something? Because we run tests, right? Like we run tests
• 29:19
  on the substack algorithm. And sometimes we'll have an effect where it's like time spent went up
• 29:24
  and number of scrolls went up, but reading long form content went down and watching long form
• 29:30
  things went down and paid subscriptions went down. And that's a really clear one because it's like,
• 29:35
  well, if you're Twitter, you say yes, because you're going to make more money. If you're substack,
• 29:39
  you say no, because that's actually going to make less money and it's against the thing. But the
• 29:44
  key is like finding the things where, you know, where they're actually those those early signals.
• 29:48
  Like what are the signs that you're finding something that you actually value and care about? And
• 29:52
  you know, engaging with deeply with long form stuff. Again, that's something we're like on
• 29:57
  substack. That's really good. If we're like, hey, we found you a long form thing to watch. We're
• 30:02
  like, great. That's helping. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have thoughts about that, Hamish?
• 30:07
  Of course. So I've got so many thoughts.
• 30:13
  Like I get it like my really basic thought though is,
• 30:18
  I'm really psyched as a writer as a person who's formerly an independent writer to have
• 30:25
  people like Chris and the people who I work with at substack turning their attention to building
• 30:31
  magical technology machines that give more power to writers and creators. And I don't think any
• 30:40
  other company has had that as their guiding philosophy really. And it's not like written into
• 30:46
  the code of their business model. And so I am a little like habitual have been unfortunately and
• 30:54
  habitual user of social media apps over the years and been stuck in all the feeds. And I'm much
• 31:00
  happier using a feed that has been designed to distribute power away from the platform and
• 31:08
  to the actual people who create the stuff of value on it. And so when I hear of when I get turned
• 31:15
  off, honestly, by words like objective function, I don't think normal people talk like that. But
• 31:20
  I'm glad that the nerds are thinking of how to push
• 31:29
  algorithms and the people's favor rather than just in service of maximizing the extraction of
• 31:36
  attention. So it can be turned into advertising dollars. Yeah. Chris, the obvious follow up to your,
• 31:42
  you know, what you were just articulating in terms of the priorities of how substack thinks about
• 31:46
  success being sort of embedded in the very fabric of what it's trying to do is paid subscriptions
• 31:55
  and attention in a way that is more fulfilling than their doom scrolling of other social media
• 32:00
  sites is the question of advertising and some of the concerns around the $100 million funding
• 32:05
  raise, which you guys have just acquired, was does that mean there's going to be more pressure
• 32:10
  on faster profitability for the company? And could that see the introduction of ads, which
• 32:16
  contaminates the ideal that you were just articulating? I think if anything, you know, the fun
• 32:23
  raise, what it does, it gives us the space to kind of like plan long term and think, what is the
• 32:28
  biggest invest version of this thing that we can build? And what is the future that we can pull
• 32:34
  towards and kind of like invest, invest sort of ambitiously against that? The way that I think
• 32:40
  about the ads thing is I do think there's a there like with any technology and like with any
• 32:47
  business solution, there's kind of like there's good and bad ways to do it.
• 32:52
  And I think that the the thing that we've seen in like the massive internet scale,
• 32:59
  like the Facebook's, the Twitter's, the YouTube's, all of these places is you kind of get this like
• 33:04
  you know ad exchange where you say like we're going to turn people, we're going to have we're
• 33:09
  going to warehouse people's attention. We're going to completely separate that from the content
• 33:14
  that they're watching in the context of what they're doing. We're going to treat them as this
• 33:18
  like commodity, we're going to collect this attention commodity and then we're going to go and sell
• 33:23
  it to the higher bit, highest bidder and the more that we can collect, you know, the better that
• 33:29
  business model is like tremendously powerful, tremendously effective, those companies make a ton
• 33:34
  of money for themselves. But it is kind of like the thing that at its core is creating in our mind
• 33:41
  like the broken incentive structure that Substack exists to create an alternative to.
• 33:47
  Now does that mean that every type of advertising or sponsorship that ever happens is exactly
• 33:52
  the same as that thing? Like I would say no. And so if you look at either question of like,
• 33:57
  you know, for example, will there ever be sponsorships on Substack?
• 34:01
  The answer is, of course, they're already are, right? There are tons of independent writers,
• 34:07
  creators, podcasters, you know, new media companies that are flourishing on this ecosystem.
• 34:13
  And some of them are showing the way for themselves, you know, without our help and without our
• 34:18
  involvement. But because you can put whatever you want in your Substack, there are people who are
• 34:22
  doing like really smart, I think, high-end sponsorship stuff. And I find that model very interesting,
• 34:29
  because in some ways it's kind of like the, it's sort of like the, it's the thing that switches the
• 34:36
  power, right? It switches the power to, I'm somebody that has this like, you know, this high profile
• 34:42
  thing. I'm somebody, you know, you have this direct relationship with the creator. I think there's
• 34:46
  a, basically I think there are things that we can explore that are already happening where the creators
• 34:51
  are showing the way that are not only like, don't fight against the quality, but actually reinforce
• 34:59
  the incentive for quality. What would be an example of a good way of doing it? What would be an
• 35:03
  example of a bad way of doing sponsorships and ads? I mean, one thing, one thing that I saw happen
• 35:08
  that I thought was really interesting was, do you ever follow Lenny Richitti? No. He's a brilliant
• 35:17
  guy from the tech world. He was a product manager at Airbnb and he started a Substack
• 35:24
  and a new, and a YouTube and has become this very successful sort of like, he runs his interviews,
• 35:31
  he talks about the discipline of product management, kind of like all of the smart product people
• 35:35
  follow him. And from very early on, you know, he has a YouTube channel that he has like sponsorships
• 35:40
  on and it's like the high-end software people are like buying things, but he added a thing to his
• 35:45
  Substack subscription that said, you know, if you're a paid subscriber, you're also going to get
• 35:51
  like a year of these really good AI tools that cost a lot of money. And the sponsor is going to
• 35:57
  pay him for that, but also he was a paying subscriber. I'm going to get this like deeply valuable
• 36:02
  thing. And I found that very interesting. I was kind of like, this is an interesting world where,
• 36:08
  you know, as a subscriber, it's not like I'm paying and I'm getting like a bunch of ad reads to me.
• 36:14
  I'm paying and I'm also getting some like really valuable, like really valuable extra thing with
• 36:19
  my subscription. I find stuff like that very interesting. Yeah, I mean, as you say, many of us already
• 36:25
  sort of doing versions of that in the sense that if people subscribe to uncomfortable conversations,
• 36:29
  then they can get like a seven day free trial to Andrew Sullivan and Barry Weiss or something like
• 36:34
  that and vice versa. And, you know, so people are comping each other various things and incentivizing
• 36:39
  each other. But I do think there's a difference between an individual creator going out to the market,
• 36:44
  finding a sponsor who is consistent with their particular brand and the interests of their
• 36:48
  particular audience and then making that arrangement and that is a kind of ad hoc thing versus
• 36:54
  presumably the way that it would have to be systematized in a place like sub stack where,
• 36:58
  for example, a creator could opt into a sponsorship package whereby all of a sudden my posts would
• 37:04
  have an ad for a semolina brand of breakfast cereal in in the post. I guess to me, that's the
• 37:12
  interesting question, right? It's like, is there a way like could we build something that has the
• 37:18
  good properties of that former thing, but that makes it easier and makes people make more money?
• 37:23
  And I think I don't know, to be honest, I don't know exactly what that is. Maybe there are like
• 37:30
  topic categories or something like that where you opt into ads from particular segments of the
• 37:34
  market or something like that. But what are the North stars? The North stars are, look,
• 37:39
  you should be in control. This is your space, your audience, your business, you know,
• 37:44
  you're putting your name on the line. You should be the one that's in control.
• 37:47
  Easy as that. The other one is like, you should make as much money as possible,
• 37:54
  like as, and be able to focus all of your energy on the stuff, on the editorial, on the things
• 38:00
  that you care about and believe in, right? Every hour that you spend on the phone selling advertisement,
• 38:06
  selling sponsorships to somebody is an hour that you could have invested in having an interesting
• 38:11
  conversation. Okay, to Chris and Hayne. Ah, he and to Chris and Hayne, we're talking to somebody
• 38:15
  interesting, you know, whatever, whatever the schedule calls for. And so I don't like, you know,
• 38:20
  I don't have a clear, you know, we're in the very early stages like our approach right now is we're
• 38:24
  actually learning from our customers. We're talking to people what they're doing today and learning
• 38:29
  like what's great and what, especially what like really works with their business and what they
• 38:35
  care about. So we don't know what the answers to all these things are, but this is just like how we
• 38:39
  would approach this. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned those two imperatives being that I should own it
• 38:46
  and also I shouldn't have to go around hustling and wasting my time from being the creator who I
• 38:52
  want to be, but there is another imperative, which is that I and fellow creators want to be part of
• 38:56
  the community and the network that is building a way of having conversations that is not contaminated,
• 39:02
  either by, you know, massive corporate money and biases in the legacy media, nor by the
• 39:09
  deranging effects of algorithms, the way that they express themselves in new social media. So
• 39:14
  there's that third thing where you have to ensure that whatever capacity you hand people like me,
• 39:19
  it's not such a, it's not such a floodgate of sexy ad revenue that I end up suckling on a
• 39:26
  teat that, that contaminates the whole space and makes the whole space feel clickbaity. 100%
• 39:32
  Yeah, I like the fact that Hamish is, Hamish, you are basically a proxy for the viewer at this point
• 39:41
  where I can tell by looking at your face whether or not the conversation is interesting or not.
• 39:46
  So I think so far, I think so far Chris has done a bang up job because you look really good.
• 39:52
  You're going to be a thank you. I'm glad to know that I look very interested. It's obviously a good
• 39:56
  front company now. Yeah, you're actually playing Avatar. We just sent a prompt. Look really
• 40:02
  interesting. I've been out of the race. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are cat videos playing
• 40:08
  inside your head, which you find very interesting at the moment. What would Hamish, is there something
• 40:13
  that you that like people and investors and other kind of Silicon Valley types have thrown around
• 40:19
  about the possible future evolution of sub-stack that you just find yourself being resistant
• 40:24
  and allergic to? Is there a way of monetizing it that you're like, if that ever happened, I would
• 40:29
  not be a happy chap. Yeah, we've had conversations with investors who have decided not to work with,
• 40:35
  who do not really see what sub-stack is really about or what's special about it,
• 40:42
  who would be inclined to just load it up with programmatic ads, that kind of thing,
• 40:46
  which would destroy what sits at the root of sub-stack, which is this foundation built on direct
• 40:53
  relationships on creators having ownership and control of their own destiny. With the platform,
• 41:01
  only succeeding when the creators succeed. It's pretty easy to spot when you encounter it,
• 41:08
  and those conversations never go very far. We're very intentional and careful about the
• 41:14
  investors that we do work with, and we're never going to work with the ones that don't fully
• 41:23
  demonstrate that they truly understand what's special about sub-stack.
• 41:27
  Wasn't one of those potential investors Elon Musk, do he try to buy you at some point?
• 41:33
  Elon Musk did try to buy us, and if one thing I do anyway, yeah, that's true. That's true. I won't say,
• 41:41
  he made an offer in conversation, but without specifics. On the face of it is a tempting idea
• 41:50
  to fuse the distribution power of Twitter with the creator power of sub-stack. That is,
• 42:00
  an example of something we decided not to pursue, because it ran the huge risk of breaking what's
• 42:10
  special about sub-stack, breaking the fundamental sub-stack model, because Twitter is still
• 42:16
  barely now, but still in ads. It's still an ads-based business. There are a lot of ways that
• 42:22
  sentence could have ended, hey, Mitch. Twitter is now a dot, dot, dot. Fill in the blank. That's
• 42:27
  like a party game. Yeah. That is true. That is true. To Twitter is many things to many people,
• 42:34
  and we all love it, but our point of life is coming soon for sub-stack. That's not true.
• 42:41
  The basic point is that it's a fundamentally different system with different goals to sub-stack,
• 42:46
  and we were not willing to strap sub-stack to that and compromise the foundational
• 42:51
  vision of sub-stack, which is about giving power to creators and to consumers who can then
• 42:57
  vote with their money to shape the state, the culture that they want to thrive.
• 43:02
  So we're committed to continuing to build sub-stack according to their original vision,
• 43:08
  something they want to compromise to. Yeah. I mean, you've changed so many people's lives like
• 43:13
  mine. I was talking to, I think it was Sam Harris about the fact that this, yes, there are huge
• 43:20
  new blockbuster publications on places like sub-stack, and that's what everyone focuses on when they
• 43:26
  talk about the decline of the legacy media, but what gets less attention is this new middle class
• 43:32
  of creators, of whom I count myself one. I'm not a global name. I'm not a, but I make more money
• 43:39
  from sub-stack than I did when I had a daily talk-back radio show in the legacy media,
• 43:44
  and that was within two months of being canceled from my own show. The ability of people to tell
• 43:51
  legacy media outlets of good creators to tell legacy media outlets to fuck off has basically,
• 43:58
  I think it has ramifications even inside the legacy media because now editors and managers are
• 44:02
  aware that they don't have a whole, a chokehold on you. And so everybody has a little bit of a big
• 44:07
  swinging dick if they have a bit of a platform and a bit of an audience and they're producing
• 44:10
  something that people like. So thank you on my behalf and from everybody. I'm not sure if you're
• 44:15
  aware of like how much of a life-changing thing it's really been to bring into existence. This thing
• 44:20
  that everyone sort of knew was possible but hadn't quite done. Thank you. It's the greatest
• 44:28
  thrill we get is seeing the people who come on sub-stack and build new things and succeed
• 44:32
  doing it. And it is easy to get distracted from that core truth when there's so much other
• 44:40
  chatter around. So it's always really gratifying to hear someone come out and say it directly to
• 44:44
  our faces. It's great. It's like, you know, no, no worries. I mean my kids have a more relaxed and
• 44:48
  less stressed-out father as a result. It's amazing. His platform exists.
• 44:54
  How do we see the... So we've talked about the... Chris, when you were originally kind of coming up
• 44:58
  with sub-stack as like a newsletter thing, did you take some coaxing or cajoling to think about
• 45:03
  audio and video? I'm just interested in the trajectory of the conceit. No, it's very funny. We
• 45:11
  actually started the sub... We started the company with... I would say the most grandiose version
• 45:17
  of the idea. Like the origin of the company was, you know, I was trying my own hand at writing
• 45:23
  because I've always been an avid reader. I've always been an avid media consumer. I think that
• 45:27
  the things we read and watch and listen to shape us. It's not just a way you spend your life. It
• 45:32
  changes who you are. And so, you know, conversations, ideas, they're valuable. And I had the good like
• 45:37
  programmers Hebris, where I was like, I could write. I know how to type. I know how to have ideas.
• 45:42
  How hard could this be? And so I started writing... I started writing what I thought was going to be
• 45:46
  like an essay or a blog post or something like outlining my frustrations with the media economy
• 45:51
  on the internet. Basically going, wah wah wah. The internet came along and smashed a lot of the
• 45:56
  existing business models for media. And the things that have replaced it, these networks, they're
• 46:03
  working great from their perspective, but they're driving us fucking nuts. Wah wah wah. I'm like
• 46:08
  complaining in this thing. And I sent it to Hamish because he's my friend who's actually a writer
• 46:12
  and knows about this stuff. And he let me down very gently. He's like, dude, it's 2017. And you're
• 46:18
  great insight in this blog post you're writing is like, oh, newspapers are in trouble and like
• 46:24
  legacy media businesses are in trouble. And, you know, maybe Facebook is not an unalloyed good.
• 46:29
  You know, I hate to break it to you, but like everybody knows this and like this is not news
• 46:33
  to those of us in the industry. But the more interesting question, if you want to make this essay
• 46:37
  not boring, here's what you have to do, you have to say what you should do about it. Like how could
• 46:42
  this be different? Let's assume that all of these things you're whining about are real problems.
• 46:47
  What could you do? And that started... We started arguing about that. And we came up with even back then,
• 46:53
  even before we... It was a company, what I would say is kind of like the big vision for sub-stack,
• 46:59
  which is, look, we're making this new economic engine for culture. And, you know, if the world needs
• 47:05
  a renaissance, which I think it does, the people who are going to create that are not technologists,
• 47:11
  like me, it's going to be people like you that are making the culture that are, you know,
• 47:18
  have independent voices who are having thoughts, having ideas, having conversations, you know,
• 47:22
  writing, podcasting, making videos, making new kinds of media that maybe we haven't even explored
• 47:29
  yet. And the people who are like investing their time and energy and money to support those
• 47:33
  things who are living in the culture, like that's where the magic is going to come from.
• 47:37
  And to the extent that we have something to contribute, the thing that we can contribute is like
• 47:41
  this, you know, we can be sort of like the arms dealer for these people in some ways, right? We can
• 47:46
  give you like the technology and the tools and the network that gives like you the fighting chance
• 47:54
  to sort of like win and make this thing. And so this was always like from the very beginning,
• 47:59
  we were thinking like this is going to be multimedia, it's going to be a network, it's going to be like
• 48:03
  YouTube, it's going to be like something like this that has all these properties.
• 48:06
  And then the the reason that we started, you know, with the the smallest possible instantiation
• 48:12
  is because when you're making something really big and ambitious, you can't boil the ocean,
• 48:17
  you kind of have to like in nerds, we call it like the MVP, the minimum viral product, you have to
• 48:21
  find like the smallest version of the thing that could possibly work. And it's better to be
• 48:27
  something that's like, you know, really, really, really good and valuable for like a very small
• 48:32
  number of people and then gradually expand the number of people it's great for. Because if you
• 48:37
  start with something that's kind of like just okay for millions of people, nobody cares. But if you
• 48:43
  make something that's like the greatest thing in the world for a small handful of people, that gives
• 48:47
  you like a place to start. And the idea of sub stack as like a, you know, paid email newsletter
• 48:53
  platform is just the smallest possible instantiation, the kernel of this much larger idea. And so we
• 49:00
  sort of self consciously like started here and worked over a period of years to grow this bigger thing.
• 49:06
  That's interesting. Scoot just made a just commented something that was exactly what I was thinking,
• 49:11
  which is that newsletters are to the internet, what books are to Amazon. In a sense that what you
• 49:15
  were just saying is not dissimilar to Jeff Bezos is originally original conceit, which was just
• 49:20
  ship things that are very, very easy to ship. Like start with the minimum viable product actually
• 49:25
  actually like a book is easy to store. Yeah. You know, it doesn't go off. There's a lot of
• 49:31
  anyway, you're not buying this. I think there's some truth about it. And then you can end up
• 49:37
  shipping tomatoes at the end of the day. But like don't start with tomatoes. Start with
• 49:41
  that's that's true. And the only difference I would I would quibble is to say, well, the the
• 49:45
  thing that Amazon ended up being is this like this everything store, right? And the fact that books
• 49:50
  are a form of media was almost like incidental to that. It was literally it's like, yeah, this keeps
• 49:55
  better than tomatoes. Whereas, you know, we're trying to make this new economic engine for culture.
• 50:00
  Our focus has always been media and culture. And so that like like writing is a core piece of that.
• 50:06
  It's not incidentally, we did writing, but we're going to turn into like a tomato store, right?
• 50:12
  Writing is sort of and it's like ideas and media are the core of it. So it's it's maybe less
• 50:19
  10 years. Now you're you're just you're just tempting me to start a sub stack about tomatoes
• 50:24
  exclusively about the delivery of tomatoes, the different kinds of tomatoes. This on one thing
• 50:29
  that I'm conflicted about all the time guys is the question about free speech online. I think about
• 50:35
  it with Twitter. I think about it with riots in the UK. I'm frequently asked in Australia to
• 50:41
  sort of present the pro free speech kind of American version of thinking because in an Australian
• 50:47
  context, I'm regarded as a wild free speech absolutist, even though I'm regarded in the United
• 50:52
  States as being an anti free speech nincompook for thinking that first amendment like attitudes
• 50:59
  towards speech should not extend to every single place in the universe that sometimes you just want
• 51:04
  a nice cozy living room. You don't necessarily want a town square where everybody is shrieking
• 51:09
  crazy ideas at the top of their lungs. How are you wrestling with that?
• 51:16
  I think it's a really interesting topic. You know, I think one of that dynamic that you just
• 51:22
  outlined, right? Where there's like in some you could you could argue in some sense that there's like
• 51:28
  there's a tension there between what I would think of it as like freedom and civilization,
• 51:34
  right? Where it's like, hey, if we're going to if we're going to have this idea of free speech and
• 51:40
  a free free press that many people believe that I certainly believe is crucial to a free society
• 51:48
  that if you're going to have that thing that means as a consequence that you must go on Twitter
• 51:55
  and get yelled at by insane people that curse at you and you know, you just have like you have to
• 52:01
  live your life in this way where you're like having these horrible experiences. And I think many people
• 52:07
  like conflate those things on both sides, right? On both sides you get people that say that those
• 52:11
  things are sort of inextricably lengths. And one of the things that I think we are doing and can do
• 52:18
  with substack, I hope we can do a substack is show that you actually can have both those things at
• 52:23
  the same time. You can have a robust defense of freedom of the press. You can have the idea that
• 52:30
  you can host a substack and talk about a very wide range of things, including things that people
• 52:34
  find deeply objectionable or offensive or wrong. And yet you don't have to descend into kind of like
• 52:43
  a horrible hellscape experience for everybody. And in fact, you can have like a like a liberal
• 52:48
  society where people can discuss every idea. And you can actually have a discourse environment
• 52:55
  that gets like stronger and better because of that. I do think that that's something that we can
• 53:00
  help build. I think that we have been working on that. It's we've made real progress. I'd
• 53:06
  say it's not perfect. But that's kind of where we're coming from on these issues.
• 53:10
  I do suspect there's a different intuition about this inside the United States versus in
• 53:15
  other angle of phone countries. And I noticed that none of us is American, who's your Canadian,
• 53:21
  I'm Australian. Hey, Michiel from who knows this tiny country off the coast of Australia? Is that
• 53:26
  Don't worry about it. Yes. Doesn't even appear in this somewhere in the South Pacific.
• 53:31
  Everybody we meet thinks he's Australian and I get to see him die a little bit inside when that
• 53:35
  happens. I know. I know. I'm sorry about that. It's New Zealanders are better. I'm actually going
• 53:40
  there in a couple of weeks because I don't know if you know, but my I might have mentioned in the
• 53:44
  past, my mum's a Kiwi. So my daughter has all of her cousins over there. So we're going horse riding
• 53:50
  on Murawai beach with the cousins. Beautiful. Black sand beach. Anyway, three people watching
• 53:56
  have heard of Murawai beach. Everybody else has no idea what we're talking about. But I do wonder
• 54:01
  whether or not you bring to the conversation about what sort of speech should be allowed a different
• 54:06
  attitude than the move fast and break through things. American superhero kind of like just say
• 54:13
  whatever you want to all the time and then crazy losers snowflakes can go fuck themselves. Like
• 54:21
  is sub-stack different or is it we are just going to tolerate all kinds of ideas
• 54:28
  and never put our thumb on the scale even if they're really beyond the pale.
• 54:35
  I think the magic here is you can have a platform that does have a really robust commitment to
• 54:42
  freedom of the press and decentralized is the how the moderation works into like you mentioned
• 54:50
  your living room, right? I should be able to have a cozy living room. And you can you can
• 54:56
  that is how it should work, right? You should be able to have, you know, a be in a country where you
• 55:02
  don't aren't threatened with arrest for espousing bad political views or you know that are protected,
• 55:10
  you know, you have civil liberties to say the things you want to say. But that doesn't mean that like,
• 55:14
  you know, you have to invite everybody into your living room to
• 55:18
  right, I see. To lecture you. And then the question is just like, well, you know,
• 55:22
  whose living room is it and how does the living room work online?
• 55:26
  And I think you don't think that there's a role for the government in, you know,
• 55:30
  some countries will say in Germany you can't have an anti-Semitic living room, you know,
• 55:34
  you're like, even in the privacy, well, actually, I'm not sure that's true.
• 55:37
  Can you hang a squat sticker in the privacy around home in Germany? I don't know. You can't put
• 55:41
  a squat sticker in your window, right? So that passes by and see it. And you can't say like,
• 55:47
  come in here to discuss, you know, Nazi stuff and have people just coming up and knocking on your door.
• 55:52
  So because the government has said that's not the kind of society that we want, even inside the
• 55:56
  privacy of your own living room, you're not allowed to be promoting that stuff. That's so that's
• 56:00
  where the rubber meets the road on a platform like substack. Like, do you want it to be a terrain
• 56:04
  of total intellectual freedom? Or do you want to get into the business of saying these ideas
• 56:12
  are so far beyond the pile that we're not going to tolerate them on our side?
• 56:16
  I think, you know, we take a stance that's pretty strongly in favor of freedom of the press,
• 56:22
  right? We want to have a very broad remit. We do have rules at the very extremes,
• 56:27
  but they're deliberately designed in a way that's sort of like allows for a very, very broad
• 56:33
  range of stuff, including stuff that people find deeply offensive. You know, we do follow local
• 56:37
  laws. That's a thing we have to do. But our view on this is, in general, I'm not going to,
• 56:42
  I'm not going to wait until like what should countries do because that's a, you know,
• 56:46
  that's the thing I'm not, I'm not an expert on. I think, but like, maybe another way to look at
• 56:51
  this is like, what should platforms do? And I would say that in the, you know, the 2010s, we had
• 56:56
  this great experiment where we said, okay, there are bad things in the world. There's bad ideas in
• 57:01
  the world. There are nasty things that happen. And the right way to solve this problem is we will
• 57:07
  take these massive global scale networks run by technologists like me. And we'll say, okay, it's
• 57:14
  your job to make sure that people don't say bad things on here. And if there's bad speech that's
• 57:20
  happening, if there's bad ideas that are happening, if there's bad politics that it's happening,
• 57:24
  the right answer is we're going to give a ton of power to Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk,
• 57:30
  or whoever's running, Chris Best, whoever's running this platform. And you should be like the
• 57:36
  government of Germany or whatever and say, you know, you should wait in and only allow things that
• 57:41
  are good or right or ban the things that are bad. And I think there's, you could have a deep
• 57:46
  philosophical discussion about like, is that right? Is that wrong? Is that a good way to do it?
• 57:51
  One thing that I think I would argue is quite clear is if you have the question of like,
• 57:55
  did it work? Did that actually help? Did that stop the spread of those ideas? Did that lead to a
• 58:01
  higher trust, higher information density society? My view is it did not work. And it was in fact
• 58:09
  counterproductive. And the theory of the case that says the best way to combat bad ideas and bad
• 58:16
  politics is to like exert a heavy hand of censorship at the platform level. I just don't think that
• 58:23
  that idea has a track record of success. Hannah, where do you see the sort of future of the legacy
• 58:30
  media? I sometimes wrestle with this myself. Like, do I want, like, what is the value in a,
• 58:35
  let's say, sub stack achieves all of the things that you want it to. And in 15 or 20 years,
• 58:40
  we're living in an almost unrecognizable media ecosystem. Is there a place for legacy media and
• 58:47
  public media for you? For the ones who can adapt and survive, there surely will be, but
• 58:53
  New York Times is not going to go away. You could say the New York Times is legacy media pretty
• 58:57
  confidently. But I don't think we should operate from the assumption that the institutions that were
• 59:05
  built a hundred years ago in the context of a hundred years ago with business models that made
• 59:11
  sense for that time, automatically just going to continue and thrive in a new context. A hundred
• 59:18
  years later, after the internet has arrived. So I think there is what I actually am very confident
• 59:27
  of is that there is a bright future for journalism. Let's call it that. And that's there will be new
• 59:34
  institutions that arise to support and uphold quality journalism. That is built on the same
• 59:40
  standards and ethics of the previous generation of institutions that supported journalism.
• 59:45
  In the same way that as the railroads were being supplanted or supplased by roading networks,
• 59:53
  transport didn't go away. In fact, it became more diverse and more interesting,
• 59:59
  could reach more places and became more valuable as an entire network. And so I feel really
• 1:00:05
  more entertaining if you factor in TikTok videos of people getting attacked on Delta flights and
• 1:00:10
  getting it to the gate. Road trips are so much more interesting and accessible than they were in
• 1:00:17
  the pre-automobile. So I feel like I would love for legacy media institutions to be able to adapt
• 1:00:29
  to the new world and look at Substag, for example, as a place to build on new land where new media
• 1:00:34
  products can be built. But the thing I really, like the thing I really care about is in this
• 1:00:40
  transitional state, does journalism get protected and upheld and can that be supported in a way
• 1:00:46
  where it can really thrive? And I absolutely think it can. Even if Substag is the only thing that
• 1:00:52
  is left standing at the end of all this. But I don't think Substag is going to be the only thing
• 1:00:56
  left standing. There will be other models to support good journalism as well. One of the things
• 1:01:01
  I worry about at the same time as being a beneficiary of this evolution in the media is, well,
• 1:01:08
  the two main things would be investigative journalism. So the kind of journalism that is not
• 1:01:13
  commentary on things, but is the actual uncovering of corruption in city hall in a medium-sized
• 1:01:20
  city in the Midwest or something like that, let alone foreign euros. And editors, having worked
• 1:01:28
  in a newsroom and having worked at the public broadcaster in Australia and sort of having been
• 1:01:32
  trained in the conventional way of doing things, there's an enormous utility to having editors to
• 1:01:38
  hack apart your copy and tighten it. And I wonder whether or not you've ever thought about like,
• 1:01:44
  I mean, this is actually just occurring to me now, but a lot of the writing on Substag is
• 1:01:48
  understandably a little bit long-winded and sloppy occasionally because of the lack of editors.
• 1:01:53
  I can imagine who are you talking about?
• 1:01:57
  Me? What is this? It's a 67th minute of this conversation.
• 1:02:02
  You're lucky you guys are getting away with less than three hours, I'm telling you.
• 1:02:06
  No, but I mean like there's a, I can imagine having an option where you have like community
• 1:02:13
  editors who are paid positions that is an opt-in for creators, where you could pay a monthly fee,
• 1:02:20
  and you could have like advice and editing and even just someone to bounce around ideas with
• 1:02:25
  who is someone who's been pilfered from the New York Times or the Washington Post or something
• 1:02:29
  like that, who is an in-house Substag editor who can assist people with tightening their writing,
• 1:02:34
  checking their sources, you know, and that could be an opt-in to facilitate real journalism
• 1:02:39
  versus common-treating. Well, it doesn't necessarily, that's an interesting model, it doesn't necessarily
• 1:02:43
  have to be in-house to Substag. Like there's a new ecosystem emerging here basically that can support
• 1:02:49
  journalism, that can support media, entertainment, whatever the thing being created and shared as,
• 1:02:54
  and we're in the early innings of it. So there are institutions already being built on
• 1:03:00
  Substag today that have editors and all this kind of legal and structural support that you'd
• 1:03:05
  otherwise get from a newspaper back in the day or a TV station back in the day. Like Zateo,
• 1:03:10
  like Dropsite News, like the Free Press, like the Bullwalk, and these like Substag is kind of
• 1:03:17
  eight years old. It really started to get on people's radar, I think, around in the pandemic,
• 1:03:23
  and so this is new still, and new institutions take time to build, and a new ecosystem takes time
• 1:03:30
  to develop. But I can absolutely, there already are editors who work, who offer their services to
• 1:03:36
  writers on Substag, at particular charge-out rates that they determine, and the writers choose
• 1:03:40
  whether or not to work with them, how much to work with them. There are already like artists who
• 1:03:44
  will do illustrations and photography for these plate places as well, and I know of efforts underway
• 1:03:51
  to create a more like support structure, the sort of soft infrastructure that good media institutions
• 1:03:58
  and media practitioners need to do better than the minimum. And I think we're going to see all
• 1:04:04
  sorts of expressions of that in the future that could, and like the model is total, the platform,
• 1:04:10
  Substag is a platform, it's totally accommodating of those new models, and I'm excited to see that
• 1:04:16
  emerge a bit. And I think the thing that we're mostly waiting for on that front are the entrepreneurs,
• 1:04:22
  like the people who are going to come and build these new things, whether they're making the media
• 1:04:27
  themselves, or they're building the support structure to support these emerging businesses.
• 1:04:33
  And we have kickstarted some of that, like we have subsidized, provided subsidized
• 1:04:41
  editors to people in the past, subsidized health care to people in different stages,
• 1:04:45
  but I think ultimately people should not really look to the platform to provide that kind of
• 1:04:50
  stuff they should look to an ecosystem of services and a rich kind of emerging economy to find
• 1:04:56
  new ways for it. Right, but you can choose to make the platform as proactive or non-proactive
• 1:05:01
  in that space as you want to. If you want to foster that sense of community and journalistic
• 1:05:05
  mission. Yeah, and we do, like we bring people together in events, we host happy hours, we do a
• 1:05:11
  lot of educational stuff, we work with certain creators one-on-one to help them figure out what
• 1:05:17
  a smart launch strategy would be or what's the best way to think about what's paid and what's not
• 1:05:22
  paid, all that kind of stuff, but you don't want to overstep the line, I think. You don't want to
• 1:05:28
  start assuming the role effectively as publisher, where you start to have responsibility for our
• 1:05:34
  ownership or benefit from the content itself. It's important to preserve the ownership of the
• 1:05:39
  creators and the publishers themselves, where we can be a facilitator rather than like an overlord.
• 1:05:45
  Yeah, it's also probably important in terms of honoring the free speech principles that Chris
• 1:05:50
  was talking to earlier, that if you want to be able to, if you want to have some distance between
• 1:05:54
  you and the creators, then you have to have that distance. Can I say one thing about the investigative
• 1:05:58
  journalism point you raised? Yeah. I think it's a really interesting one because this is a meme I
• 1:06:02
  hear a lot. It's like, oh, you can't do real journalism on subset. You can't break real stories,
• 1:06:07
  you can't do investigative stuff. I think there is an element of truth to that. And the element of
• 1:06:11
  truth that there is is sometimes doing that kind of work takes a lot of resources, takes a lot of
• 1:06:18
  time, or it takes money, and it can be a real digging in and doing a really great job,
• 1:06:24
  breaking some powerful story is something that takes investment. And if you're an independent
• 1:06:31
  media organization of any kind, like building up to the point where you have the resources to
• 1:06:35
  invest in that is a real task. So I think that piece of it is true. The other piece, though, is,
• 1:06:41
  you know, does that stuff work on sub-stack? And the answer to that is like unequivocally, yes.
• 1:06:47
  One of the things that is what some of the biggest subscription drivers and things that drive
• 1:06:51
  people to like growth and success is if you're breaking an important story, if you're, you know,
• 1:06:57
  telling something that's important, like the result of doing important investigative journalism,
• 1:07:03
  that stuff really does work on the platform. That's true, but I wouldn't allow.
• 1:07:08
  Yeah, I mean, I can say at that point, but I also wouldn't allow yourself to get to
• 1:07:13
  starry-eyed about that because, although the sexy, big blockbuster stories will do well on the
• 1:07:19
  platform, there is a category of loss-leading investigative journalism that was, that you sort of
• 1:07:25
  needed newsrooms and trainee journalists and interns to learn how to do, which involved
• 1:07:32
  sitting in a bar for a very long time and chatting up, you know, making conversation with the
• 1:07:38
  undersecretary of agriculture, who, you know, pops in there and, you know, end up having an affair
• 1:07:44
  with one of the, you know, so and so's. And then you just end up with a roller dex of a lot of
• 1:07:48
  people and all of newspapers were able to subsidize that. It doesn't mean that... But Josh, there's
• 1:07:53
  nothing. I completely understand and believe in all those values as well and have a traditional
• 1:07:57
  media background and a big believer in investigative journalism. No, there doesn't really like
• 1:08:01
  bring in the cash all the time, but cost a lot of money to produce and it's really important to
• 1:08:06
  functioning society. But I actually don't think that there's anything different about the
• 1:08:12
  self-stacked platform compared to other platforms people would have built the old institutions that
• 1:08:18
  supported investigative journalism from the past were. In fact, I think there are big advantages,
• 1:08:23
  like it's much easier to start an operation on self-stacked that is mostly about journalism and
• 1:08:30
  less about the the back room office, the administration, the sales team, that sort of stuff.
• 1:08:35
  There's a business model that works and supports it. Like the subscription model does scale. Like
• 1:08:40
  someone in the individual living off subscriptions might hit a ceiling, you sort of like in the low
• 1:08:46
  millions or something like that. But new institutions can be built that do generate a ton of revenue
• 1:08:52
  from subscriptions so that they can actually find that type of work they choose to and they want
• 1:08:56
  to make that central to the brand of what they're building or central to the like the mission of
• 1:09:01
  what they're trying to build. And you know, if other business models and other lines for making
• 1:09:07
  money come on online on self-stack or even if they choose to do it off self-stack, the the platform
• 1:09:14
  itself is at least as flexible as the old platform which used to be like get delivery trucks and
• 1:09:19
  a printing press. Like they figured out how to support investigative journalism in that model
• 1:09:27
  100 years ago, although the disadvantages of that time, I think people are going to be
• 1:09:30
  up to figure out with this model and this platform too. Chris, the last piece of the puzzle for me
• 1:09:35
  in terms of journalism and creating a flourishing civilization where we have a whole bunch of
• 1:09:40
  different ideas is avoiding echo chambers and avoiding this sort of, you know, foggy curation
• 1:09:48
  that we can blunder into without quite knowing it, which doesn't expose us to a bunch of different
• 1:09:53
  ideas. And I was on a panel television show in Australia recently called Q&A with Australia's
• 1:09:59
  e-safety commissioner, a person who Elon Musk calls Australia's censorship czar or commissar or
• 1:10:05
  something, you know, because he's so nuanced about stuff like this. And I got into an argument with
• 1:10:10
  her in which we, you know, I was basically saying that the problem is the coming back to this
• 1:10:15
  conversation about algorithms, the way that social media companies are measuring their own success,
• 1:10:20
  and you're not going to overcome that with by government fear, so you're going to overcome that
• 1:10:24
  probably by collaborating with social media companies about how they define success. And one
• 1:10:29
  really interesting solution that a social media reform advocate was talking about, it was
• 1:10:34
  true as a Facebook whistleblower, was saying we should be looking, for example, at the number of
• 1:10:40
  people who are following people who are not followed by other people who they follow.
• 1:10:47
  In other words, the number of brand new links, instead of looking, instead of measuring the
• 1:10:52
  success of a network as being just, you know, this person connects to this person, are we actually
• 1:10:59
  fostering an expansive worldview by privileging new parts of the network that, you know,
• 1:11:09
  aren't an obvious A, B, C, D, E, but are going from A to E. Now, I don't know how you would do that,
• 1:11:15
  or, but is this part of the conversation at Substack about, yeah, it's great that I can curate
• 1:11:21
  my own universe and that I'm not being deranged by other rhythms. But there is still the temptation
• 1:11:26
  for me to only follow people who agree with me, and it's just easier instinctively for me not to
• 1:11:33
  constantly be challenged. How do we create a system that encourages and incentivizes us to think
• 1:11:39
  broadly? One thing that gives me a lot of courage on this front is I do think, you know, when you
• 1:11:47
  look at what people will choose to subscribe to and pay for, you can look through kind of like the
• 1:11:52
  notes that people send when they pay for a Substack, a very common sentiment is, you know,
• 1:11:58
  hey, I don't always agree with what you say, or even I disagree with a lot of what you say,
• 1:12:03
  but I find you really interesting and valuable. And that is a sentiment that people have,
• 1:12:09
  right? I think when people think not just like, what am I going to click on or scroll through,
• 1:12:13
  but they think, you know, when I make a conscious decision of how I want to build my media environment,
• 1:12:18
  you know, am I going to choose to subscribe to some things that challenge me or that get me a
• 1:12:23
  different perspective? I think the empirical results we see is that people, you know, do choose
• 1:12:28
  that with some frequency. At the end of the day, like, we can't force you to, I'm not going to be
• 1:12:33
  like, ah, you have to subscribe to this thing that you hate. But I think when given the choice
• 1:12:39
  in a good way, a lot of people do want to expand the range of voices that they're hearing from,
• 1:12:45
  they want to get perspectives that they value that they think are, you know, authentic and interesting
• 1:12:50
  and good faith, but are not necessarily just like coming from the exact place they're coming from.
• 1:12:55
  And I would say that to me, the biggest problem with the, the sort of the algorithm bubble thing,
• 1:13:00
  the social media and center structure is not even just the echo chamber, but it's like the,
• 1:13:05
  the polarizing effects. Because what the algorithm finds you on X is not only a bubble of people
• 1:13:12
  that exactly agree with you, it's a bubble of people that are in one tribe, your tribe,
• 1:13:18
  and then it finds the things that are maximally outraging and maximally angering and
• 1:13:24
  maximally othering to the people outside of that. That's actually how you foster engagement.
• 1:13:30
  If you're, if you're just going for engagement, if you just had a bubble, if you just had a bubble
• 1:13:34
  of everybody agreeing, you would actually get bored of that very quickly, right? That's, that's true.
• 1:13:39
  That's true. I take a point, but when it comes to time to make decisions about how algorithms,
• 1:13:45
  for example, are going to suggest something to me on the basis of the other things that I
• 1:13:49
  subscribe to, it would be super cool. And maybe we'll get to a point at which maybe AI can already
• 1:13:54
  do this. And it's just a matter of deploying it for this. It would be super cool if the suggestions
• 1:14:00
  that a platform like Substack made, factored in a question of whether or not the thing that it's
• 1:14:06
  suggesting is unusual or innovative or an outlier in some way. Like rather than being, well,
• 1:14:13
  I follow Sam Harris and Barry Wise. Therefore, I'm also going to like Andrew Sullivan.
• 1:14:18
  There might be a way for an AI to look at the kind of stuff that some of the people who follow those
• 1:14:23
  people are most excited about through their browsing patterns or spending more time exploring or
• 1:14:31
  you know, so that there's a bias put towards discovery rather than the reinforcing of the most
• 1:14:38
  obvious patterns. I don't know what that looks like, but I'm just putting that out there as someone
• 1:14:42
  to consider. I think that's something you can do that a bit with the technology, but I think
• 1:14:46
  another piece of that is like just the human element. Like that's a really good place for
• 1:14:50
  curation for, you know, I say, hey, you should check this thing out. You get that like humans putting
• 1:14:55
  people on the things that's a good way to do kind of like that creative. It's when you want to take
• 1:14:58
  a leap, right? If you, there's something that's like, hey, this is not the kind of thing that's
• 1:15:02
  normally up your alley, but like it's worth you checking out. It's actually better to hear that from
• 1:15:06
  a person than an algorithm all the time. Ideally, yes, yes, absolutely. I'm going to let you guys go
• 1:15:11
  and enjoy the beautiful San Francisco summer evening. Does something happen in San Francisco when
• 1:15:17
  you make a billion dollars? Like when you become a billion dollar company, does Gavin Newsom come
• 1:15:21
  over and give you a blow job? Do you get a key to the city? What happens?
• 1:15:25
  I assume the politicians just hate you more.
• 1:15:31
  Does your life change? Nothing, nothing's happened. We had a nice little happy offer and
• 1:15:36
  I'm thinking, oh yeah, we did it.
• 1:15:40
  Yeah, San Francisco, that's a Tuesday, unfortunately.
• 1:15:42
  Yeah, that's right. Chris, hey, Vish, thank you so much.
• 1:15:46
  We both have some text, by the way, subscribe to us too and subscribe to us.
• 1:15:49
  Oh, yes, it's right.
• 1:15:52
  Always one for applied, subscribe to Uncomfortable Conversations, subscribe to Chris and
• 1:15:56
  subscribe to our channel. I tell other people to do it so I do it too.