#1097 Hamish McKenzie On How This Tech Startup Is Disrupting Mainstream Media

Hamish McKenzie is the Co-Founder Of Substack. In this conversation, we discuss the downfall of legacy media, the rise of independent media, where money is being made in this new industry, supporting free speech, the creator "middle class", and the Substack subscription model. ======================= Arculus is the next generation crypto & NFT cold storage wallet that combines one of the world’s strongest security protocols with the easiest to use form factor and app. Arculus requires 3-Factor Authentication to ensure only you have access to your digital assets – something you know – a PIN, something you have – the Arculus Key Card, and biometrics. Learn more and buy it now on getarculus.com. Use promo code POMP to save 15%. Remember, with Arculus, it’s your keys, your crypto. ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. Alto CryptoIRA lets you invest in more than 200 different coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA. They make it easy to fund your Alternative IRA or CryptoIRA via your 401(k) or IRA rollover or by contributing directly from your bank account. So, ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp ======================= Amberdata provides the critical data infrastructure enabling financial institutions to participate in the digital asset class. We deliver comprehensive data and insights into blockchain networks, crypto markets, and decentralized finance. Download our Digital Asset Data Guide at https://www.amberdata.io/pomp ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet. Interactive charts let you view an asset’s price history and your portfolio’s performance over time. And maybe the best part, Exodus is integrated with the Trezor hardware wallet - making advanced security easy for everyone. Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. ======================= The number one name in NFT domains and the world’s most powerful wallet are teaming up to bring something new to the crypto and Web3 world: That’s right, Unstoppable Domains and Blockchain.com partnered to create NFT domain names ending in . Blockchain. It’s the perfect ending to show that you’re a believer in a decentralized future. Either sign up for a free blockchain.wallet or visit Unstoppabledomains.com to buy your domain today. =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off.

• 0:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Hamish McKenzie is a co-founder of Substack. In this conversation, we talk about the pros and cons of the old media world, how the entire new media world is likely to play out, where money is being made and lost in the media landscape, and how we should think about a broken ad model, subscriptions, the Substack product, book publishing, and much, much more. I really enjoyed this conversation with Hamish, and I hope that you guys enjoy it as well. As you listen to this episode, keep in mind what you like and what you don't like, and then get on Twitter and let us know where we did well and where we could have improved the conversation. Hope you guys enjoy this episode. Let's get into it.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:15Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Hamish here with me. I'm super excited to do this. I thought a great place to start would be on the current state of the legacy media. Substack's always in the news. You guys are taking over the world. You're a right-wing apologist, all kinds of different critiques, but I think that you all have a better understanding of the nuances, the pros and cons of the legacy world than most people realize. So like, how do you break down the older-school media outlets and platforms? What are the pros and cons of those platforms today?

• 1:47Speaker 03

  Well, it's a huge question. There's lots of pros. It's good to have people dedicated to the pursuit of fact-finding and fact-telling and storytelling around narratives that help us build better societies. And for the most part, that's what everyone in these mainstream journalistic institutions are trying to do, whether they're successful or not, whether they have the right approach or not. They're trying to do that.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  You know, the New York Times does a lot of reporting and lots of local newspapers around the country do a lot of reporting in unglamorous places and about unglamorous issues. That wouldn't otherwise be done. It's really vital to the functioning of society. But some of the cons, well, the business model is totally broken. The economics of the whole industry is totally broken. It used to be the case that you could go into journalism and have a hope of having a good, stable career. Now those hopes are really diminishing. And so increasingly, the people who work in journalism tend to be from a

• 2:53Speaker 03

  certain group in society where they can afford to live on low incomes or like do long internships for free. A lot of newspapers failing, magazines are shutting down, freelance budgets are being squeezed, social media is changing the way people think and how they interact with the news. And I would say that sort of mainstream media is in a bit of a spiral. There are some large global institutions like the New York Times and Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal who are just going to do fine. They'll probably continue to grow, but there's a huge hollowing out of the middle class and it has consequences.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  It has massive impacts on how we all talk to each other and think together and try to solve some of the big problems, on the stories that get told, on the stories that get highlighted, on stories that get swept under the rug. And I think we see the results of it in the low levels of trust that the public have in mainstream media at the moment. I think it's, the recent surveys have shown that public trust of media in the United States at least is close to an all time low. It's very low. It's like around 30% of people trust mainstream media.

• 4:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So when we think of these articles that are getting written or the topics that are being selected, how much of the quality in journalism is determined just by the topic alone? So when we see, I don't know, Caloris Award in Afghanistan surrounded by the Taliban, war, national defense, insurgency, like these topics are very serious, they're very heavy. If you were going to go and tell them from the ground, it obviously involves danger. And I think many people, as you pointed out, would say like, oh, that's journalism. Whether, you know, whatever that means today, that's what they would say. And then we see other beats or topics that people may write about and folks are like, that's like the most unserious thing ever. Like, I can't believe that X outlet is writing about, you know, Y topic.

• 4:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that fair to say, just like, sometimes the topic that's being covered is different in terms of the importance that like the audience places on it? And therefore that changes the way people view, like, is it journalism or is it, you know, something else?

• 5:09Speaker 03

  It all gets wrapped up together, right? Whether it's reporting on the new Harry Styles movie of the Libya Wild and the big dramas around that, or about like the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan, it kind of gets called journalism, it kind of gets called the mainstream media, it kind of gets wrapped up with this certain emotion that people feel about the media. And I think probably in the most part, what gets paid attention to is the stuff that sells, you know, the salacious stuff, the gossipy stuff, the easy to understand stuff, the stuff that you can consume in a tweet or in a YouTube video that you don't have to have any deep context on, that you don't have to be paying attention to currents of history for.

• 5:50Speaker 03

  So what I think might be relevant in what, in the question you're asking is, people have a reaction to journalism these days, or the state of the mainstream media, and they're probably just reacting to a certain slice of it. And it might be the slice that they just consume most commonly, or they see most commonly appearing in their Twitter feed, and it's a filter. It's not the whole media, it's not the whole story.

• 6:20Anthony Pompliano?

  What about the business model? You mentioned that the business model is broken. What does that mean?

• 6:28Speaker 03

  For 200 years, advertising has been the backbone for funding journalism. And for 200 years, the newspapers and magazines had a pretty good monopoly on it. Because they were serving local markets, because they owned a distribution. And they appealed to a broad enough audience that they would get the major supermarkets and businesses in their local regions to buy massive ads. They would have the classifieds, that would account for a lot of revenue as well. And people were sort of obliged to advertise for like selling their car or finding the babysitter or advertising the death of a loved one in the local newspaper. The internet has changed that completely.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  The internet is obviously the best place to go if you want to do effective advertising. If you want to know who's seeing your ads, if you want to know if you're getting value for money with your ads, if you want to have good targeted advertising. So Craigslist took away classifieds from newspapers, that was one death blow. Then Facebook and Google came along and did targeted advertising better than newspapers or radio or TV could ever hope to. And so the, the, the big support structure that had helped fund journalism for 200 years has just been completely removed. And newspapers and magazines and the main organs of mainstream media have been struggling trying to find out what comes next. Like, how do we survive in this new world where the internet is so much better at doing

• 7:56Speaker 03

  the thing that we tried to sell for so long?

• 7:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So when I look at many of the mainstream outlets, it appears that they are expanding in a couple of different avenues or on a couple of different planes. The first is, it used to be mostly all written content, delivered via newspaper. They've now pushed into digital. But then also they're pushing into video, they're pushing into audio. Like, you see the type of content and the place in which it resides is evolving. And some of them have shut down the old type of content or place it resided. But for the most part, it's just been added. They just keep adding more and more and kind of becoming this bigger and bloated thing. The same thing is true of the monetization methods. So there's still tons and tons of advertising. Now they're trying to add subscription or they're trying to add physical products that

• 8:44Anthony Pompliano?

  they're selling and e-commerce and things like that. Is that something that is just a natural evolution of every business is like you kind of dominate or use a wedge to get into a market and then over time you just add on more and more and so this land and expand strategy is something that is a natural function of markets, markets, economics and capitalism? Or are they doing that because their previous approach is like on a lifeline? Like they're literally dying as a business and so if they don't do this, then they will basically fail and go out of business and it's more out of necessity than it is just like capitalism?

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Well, the ones who are failing to do that or don't have the opportunity to do that are dying. The ones that we see doing that and the ones who are doing it effectively are growing and it's like the New York Times and I guess the Washington Post has actually gone through harder times since Trump is out of office because there's less interest in their content now. But with Jeff Bezos funding them, they've had a big injection of energy into expanding their storytelling platform, so more digital, more video, more community type stuff, more audio. I think it's a natural, like they're playing to the landscape of the internet and with the internet, there's no bounds, there's not like, you're not bound by the margins of a printed piece of paper.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  So you can do video, you can do audio, you can go global instantly, you can be on social media telling your stories there. They kind of have to do that. The subscriptions is a, the pivot to subscriptions is a must, like the advertising is going away. The New York Times does have advertising as part of its business, but it's a shrinking part of its business now and subscriptions is a growing part of its business. So that's a definite business imperative and economic imperative. And it will change the way that these news outlets tell their stories and gather their audience because the subscriptions business is different to the advertising business.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  The subscriptions business is more about delivering over the long term of a relationship where the relationship's quite deep. And the New York Times, they're much, I'd say they're, since pivoting to subscriptions, have become quite a lot more, um, obviously ideological. And so they tell stories that resonate with their readers and that readers want to hear. They still do hard reporting and tell stories that not everyone wants to hear. But a lot of the stuff that brings these people is opinion or features where there's a strong point of view put forward. So I think all these things are basically changing because of the internet. Um, and the ones that were seen changing are the, the giant success stories that aren't going to die tomorrow

• 11:27Speaker 03

  because everyone else is dead or dying.

• 11:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm. And as we see the content changing, I saw a study, uh, a while back, I guess, three or four years ago, where they went and they looked at the New York Times at the use of certain words. And it had pretty much been flat and all of a sudden it exploded upwards. And the argument in the study, whether, uh, you agree with it or not, was, hey, when they went behind a paywall or started to use subscription, it changes the type of content that they write about because that audience wants to hear something. And if you tell them things they don't want to hear, they may unsubscribe. And so naturally you just kind of cater to them. And it starts to build an echo chamber to some degree. Is that a worry or a threat today to kind of these journalism, uh, organizations? Or is that something that, you know, it's easy to call out, it's easy to point at some of these data

• 12:13Anthony Pompliano?

  points, but we haven't even gotten close to reaching, uh, a saturation point where, uh, it's something that like could corrupt, uh, you know, all of the mainstream media or like, how do you think about, uh, the importance of that?

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Well, it's gonna be, we're, it's gonna be interesting, right? I don't know what the ultimate judgment's gonna be on whether it's good or bad. But it's definitely a trend where people, uh, where institutions and outlets are starting to play more to their audiences and having distinct ideological positions and the audiences, um, go to them because in part their positions are reinforced. It's not actually that new, but like before the advent of the penny paper and advertising, uh, funded, uh, newspapers that were quite generalist, there used to be a lot more like, a, a, a more parochial press where factions were, um, catered to, you know, back in the days of Benjamin Franklin, there were, sometimes

• 13:07Speaker 03

  one writer would assume multiple political positions or, and, or that creates, one, one person like Benjamin Franklin would create multiple, uh, publications catering to different political groups or different political interests. In the UK, there's much more of a tabloid and a broadsheet culture where the newspapers are oriented around ideologies or political positions.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  But also, social media is doing this on a massive scale. As much as we might think of the likes of Twitter or Facebook as public squares, they also sort us into our ideological camps, where we have the people around our team and the people who are on the other team, and then the subgroups within each team, so that we get really sorted into our own particular filter bubbles. It's a definite challenge for us to overcome, I think, as a society, and I don't know what the ultimate result is going to be. But I hope that with things like Substack and more niches being covered more deeply, that there are going to be rewards for people who exhibit integrity and who exhibit the ability to cross party lines and say things that their readers don't necessarily want

• 14:18Speaker 03

  to hear, and that there will be people willing to pay because of that integrity. Social media doesn't really allow for that kind of model. The New York Times does a little bit, but they've become quite strongly ideological. But yeah, there's a lot yet to be seen.

• 14:34Anthony Pompliano?

  How do the people change? So when it's freemium or it is free with ads, we know the people who worked at those organizations. When they move behind paywalls, or they try to push out into video or audio and kind of expand their empires, do the type of people who work at these organizations change? Or is really the change in personnel happening because of ideological kind of either differences or a feeling of, hey, this isn't a place that I want to work?

• 15:02Speaker 03

  I'm not sure. Well, hopefully with subscriptions and with models that are actually working in the modern day, these outlets can do better, and the Substacks and small niche publications and other platforms can do better and can make good money to support the journalism they're doing and to keep hiring people who can come and work for them. And so overall, over time, maybe this leads to a healthier ecosystem. But I think the greater problem is not so much based on...

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Like a particular business model. But in the last couple of decades, probably three decades, maybe more, there's been this trend away from journalism as being something that's sort of open to the working class and there were like ink stained wretches going after tough stories and sort of priding themselves of being dissenters and speaking truth to power to a different kind of class where journalism has become like one of these knowledge economy jobs where it's, you know, it's celebrated in Hollywood and it's a little bit glamorous and you get to have an interesting lifestyle, interesting life, spend time with interesting people.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  And increasingly, it's become a sort of profession that is closed off to anyone to anyone but those who have like elite educations or know the right people or like hang out in the right circles or have enough money, like I said before, to be able to do a free internship at the New York Times or Vogue or have enough money to be able to, you know, have enough family money or background money to be able to like to take a really crappy salary at BuzzFeed and still live in Brooklyn. And I think that cultural effect is really large and maybe underappreciated. And it's been a decades long trend.

• 16:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I always immediately jumped to this idea of, is it intentional? Or is it just a byproduct of these trends, right? So for example, if you take a bunch of people who played college sports or who were in the military or who all went to the same high school or college and you put them in a room, what do they talk about? They talk about the things they know and they all have the same experience. And if you all have the same experience, then naturally there's not a lot of diversity in kind of the things you're interested to talk about for the most part. And what I think you're highlighting is like, well, if you then put all of those people into an organization that is supposed to be writing about covering and discussing opinions and kind of the thoughts and ideas and critiques of certain ideas.

• 17:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, then we shouldn't be surprised that you end up getting a lot of the same talking points over and over and over again. And so in some way, by driving out people who were different or came from different backgrounds or whatever, it really homogenized the content. And when that occurred, there's an entire group of readers and then obviously of the population that say, hey, like, you guys are crazy, crazy just being like, you don't understand me, you don't understand my life, you don't understand what's going on here. And that feels like that part of this has gotten lost in the conversation and doesn't really get covered nearly as much as maybe it should.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I'll criticize myself because that's a nicer way to do it. But I'm from, I have an elite education, you're right. Like, I have a, I didn't went to, I didn't go to big name schools, but I have an advanced degree. You know, I, I think about intellectual things, I go to places with people who are like me. And I worked in the media.

• 18:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Cancelled. You're cancelled.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  And all the, like, all the people who I worked with were quite a lot like me. And, you know, I'm a foreigner as well, like, living in the States. And we would write about our interests, we'd write about what we'd know, what we knew. And we had certain prejudices and we weren't aware that, of, of many of those prejudices. But you think about a country like America, like, I, I look back and when I was a journalist, thinking like, how naive I was about what I didn't know. And America is such an incredibly diverse country. And yet, the mainstream media institutions, the main organs we have for communicating

• 19:13Speaker 03

  journalism across the country are all based in these sort of enclaves in New York and San Francisco, Los Angeles, maybe Chicago, these very, like, wealthy places with people and with the storytellers are people from elite backgrounds, usually pretty comfortably middle class and above. And They haven't spent much time like in the foothills of Appalachia or in Alabama or Arkansas and then some of those small struggling places that get overlooked and they have, not through bad intent, but they have certain interests and causes that are

• 19:55Speaker 03

  not necessarily at all aligned or relevant to like a huge number of people in this country who also have to like, we also have to get along with and understand and try to solve problems for. And so, yeah, the gap between the haves and the have-nots, the have-nots in the States seems to be growing and the people who work in the media are definitely on the side of the haves, which creates problems when it comes time to like trying to empathize with and understand the have-nots and trying to bring these groups together.

• 20:27Anthony Pompliano?

  When you all started Substack, was it, let's go save journalism? Was it, hey, this is a way for writers to make more money? Was it, we want to read different things? Like, what was the impetus for saying, let's go do this? Because I think people forget, entrepreneurs are making the biggest bet. They're spending their time, their reputation. Years of their life are probably being removed by the day, given the stress and all of that. And so like, what convinced you, okay, let's do this?

• 20:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I actually resisted it because of those things. I was a reporter, I was a writer and I just finished writing a book and I set myself up for a career as a writer, which is difficult in different ways, but I wasn't about to go and become a startup founder because that's a tough job. It's, you can't ever really switch off. It's under immense stress. I'd been a reporter at Pando Daily a while back, which was covering startup ecosystems. And we were telling stories about these founders who were so deeply depressed, they were committing suicide. I knew that it was like a difficult journey. I wasn't that eager to jump into that and make it my life. But it was my wife who convinced me that this problem is so important and it's, I'm particularly interested in it

• 21:42Speaker 03

  and well cut out to try and tackle it because of my background in journalism and then in tech and being an independent writer and sort of writing about media business models and media technology startups that had not quite got there in the past. That eventually I came around and thought, okay, I've got to give it a shot because Substack could work. And then what we were trying to do was to provide an alternative to the dominant media ecosystem, the dominant media economy, which we'd come to believe is broken fundamentally. And it started when Chris wrote this blog post. He'd been one of the founders and the chief technology officer of Kek, which is a huge messaging app with hundreds of millions

• 22:25Speaker 03

  of users in its heyday. But he had finished working there and he wanted to write some more stuff. And he wrote this blog post and he sent it to me for my feedback before he published it. And in the blog post, he was kind of decrying all that was wrong with the media ecosystem, which was that because online advertising was at the center of it, social media giants had risen up and created these new powerful information systems that had us all kind of addicted. But the types of content and behavior that those social media networks were rewarding was stuff that's like divisive and pits us against each other and polarizes. And it's sort of based on cheap outrage and clickbait. Those are the

• 23:09Speaker 03

  things that succeed in those systems. And it's not much to do with like quality and truth telling. And as a byproduct, it also meant that the business models that supported good journalism were being eroded and writers were having a difficult time finding ways to get paid. And so who's left to do this important work? And Chris sent me this essay and I said, yeah, all these things are true, but people in the media know these things are true. What no one knows is what's something productive? What's something, what's a better way forward? What's something we can do about it? And that led to the discussions between us. He never published that post, but it led to discussions that became Substack with the sort of core insight that rather than monetizing viral content, it would be better

• 23:54Speaker 03

  to monetize a relationship, a direct relationship between a reader and a writer, where the reader pays the writer they trust. And therefore, the reader becomes not the product as they are in social media, but the customer. And then the writer can have a clear path to sustainability by rewarding the trust and attention of their readers.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  And it's basically turned into Substack.

• 24:16Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think of that, I think now you can point to and say that thesis was correct. People will argue how big it can be, what the unit economics are, how you attract writers, all the frank bullshit, right? Just throw that out of the door. The core thesis is correct in that people are willing to pay for content from people that they trust. And that trust can be derived because this person's saying everything I want them to say and makes me feel good. It could be because this person has unique insights into a topic that I want to learn more about and everything in between, right? It feels like there's quite a bit of different topics, different types of writing, all that stuff that's on there.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 24:56Anthony Pompliano?

  When you look at the things you got wrong, were there any parts of the original thesis that you're like, ah, we thought X would happen and we've been surprised that it didn't manifest itself? Or maybe we thought A and it ended up being some variation of it, but we got the initial part wrong?

• 25:15Speaker 03

  One of the gratifying things is that we actually started the company by publishing an essay outlining what we care about and why, what we're trying to solve and what we're going to build. And then we followed up by building the product and launching the first few writers and they succeeded and we went off to the races.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  We've got like, we make mistakes all the time. The sort of micro mistakes along the way of just trying to run a business and trying to run it in public really, because Substack's a very public platform. But the core things that we set out to do and the promises we made early on have remained true throughout Substack's history and we're five years on from starting the company now. And I think it's been, we've been able to like stick to those principles because they're pretty simple. It's like you can start a paid newsletter or a paid publication and someone can come and read it. And if they like it enough, they'll put their name on the mailing list. And if they like it very much, they will pay some money to help you keep doing this work and to keep going.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  We haven't, you know, we, we've resisted going into advertising. We've resisted building like addictive news feeds where the content is sorted by like engagements. We're just stuck to the simple principles of give writers ownership, let them have total control and let readers have agency by deciding who they want to invite into their brain and who not to. And because of the simplicity of that, we haven't had too many major missteps.

• 26:49Anthony Pompliano?

  When you all started, I don't know, maybe I was one of the first 100, 250, 500, whatever writers on the platform.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you might've been the first 20 for sure.

• 26:59Anthony Pompliano?

  First 20, whatever it was, early. And I remember talking to you all and first of all, you know that you're early when the founder messages you and is like, hey. I'm like, okay, all right, got it. We're not at a WordPress scale yet. But, but what I think resonated with me so much was there was a ton of stuff that you could have done. I remember some of our early conversations around like, what about this? What about this? What about this? And you all were always consummate professionals. You would say like, good idea, maybe later. It was never no, right? But, but it was very obvious that like, we have to get this first iteration correct. How much of that was driven? I know Bill Bishop was one of the very first, very large success stories on the platform.

• 27:43Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of that was Bill or others saying like, this is what I need to be successful versus you being able to say like, if we create a great writing experience and then have the payment technology, like, Bill, just write. Don't worry about anything else. Don't worry about the product. Like we, it works and then the audience will come and we'll kind of go from there.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's definitely a balance because we're opinionated about some things. We're opinionated about subscriptions being the thing to focus on and that the writer shouldn't have to do any of the sort of difficult, complicated marketing or back, back office admin type stuff. They should just type into a box, click publish and then money will magically appear in their bank account. And so we're trying to build a system that puts people on the rails to do that so that they do the right things by default without having to be publishing experts. But also, we've built very consciously around writers and through

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Understanding deeply what they want. And it started with Bill Bishop, who was the first publisher on Substack. He writes a newsletter called Cynicism. It's about China. He'd been doing it for five years for free, never seriously made money from it, turned on paid subscriptions with Substack in October 2017, and immediately got to six figures of revenue on his first day. And with Bill, we're like sitting with him in Starbucks, sort of trying to figure out how to take group subscriptions for him through this prototypical version of Substack that Chris, the CEO of Substack, Chris Best, was basically building himself. And we took Bill and we built the first versions of Substack completely around him. And there'll be some negotiations on things that he wanted and things that we wanted, until we got to a point where we felt, okay, so some of this can be

• 29:20Speaker 03

  generalized now, and we'll open the funnel a little bit, bring in a few more writers. And we kept on doing that. And oftentimes, we'd find a writer who wanted to be the kind of pioneer for a particular product or feature, and you are one of them, Pom. You are the prototype for, you provided the prototype for the podcasting on Substack. You wanted an audio feature to be able to do podcasts behind a paywall, or audio, like readouts of your letters. And so we built the first version of that for you, knowing that we wanted to do it at some stage, but not knowing when we wanted to do that. And so now you can host a podcast on Substack completely free. It's actually the easiest way to start a podcast that makes any money is to do it on Substack, and you get all these other benefits with it as well. But it was like the podcasting features

• 30:05Speaker 03

  are so great on Substack, because we first built it to serve this one customer, and then took it from there.

• 30:11Anthony Pompliano?

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• 30:46Anthony Pompliano?

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• 31:30Anthony Pompliano?

  That's A L T O I R A dot com slash pomp. Start investing today. This episode is brought to you by FTX US. They're the safe, regulated way to buy and sell Bitcoin and other digital assets. Trade crypto with up to 85% lower fees than the top competitors. There are no fixed minimums, no ACH transaction fees and no withdrawal fees. Download the FTX app today and use referral code POMP to earn free crypto on every trade over $10. The more you trade, the more you earn. Go download the FTX app today and use referral code POMP. What's fascinating about this is, uh, so what, uh, what we're talking about here is, um, we, I remember like it was yesterday, we had a meeting. It was in New York City and, uh, we were talking about a whole bunch of things. You guys were explaining the business and kind of where you thought the product was going to go and all this stuff.

• 32:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think I had, uh, a couple of asks, but the two that I remember, uh, vividly was, uh, I said, hey, guys, uh, it's obvious that I'm one of the early writers. Uh, it looks like it's growing. The 10% fee, I'm going to need less. I want to need you guys to bring that down. And it wasn't even a conversation. You're like, no, like, like we are going to take the 10%. And some people would have read that as, oh, who do these guys think they are that they're going to just, you know, be able to charge this? Like what is, was deemed at the time as to be a high fee, but I took it as like, no, they know that this is going to be super valuable. And what they're going to continue to put behind that fee is going to only grow over time. And so they're essentially not negotiating.

• 32:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Against themselves. And it was, it was, I think when I, that was the moment when I was like, oh shit, this is going to be big. Like, like they have a very specific view of the world and they're going to go implement that view. And then the second thing was the audio feature. And you guys were like, okay, we're not going to change the fee, but like the audio thing, that's interesting. Like tell us more. And then you went and you built it. And so it's fascinating, I think, for a lot of entrepreneurs to kind of hear in the same meeting, you're able to have a very specific view and be very steadfast on things that you were not willing to compromise on. But at the same time, almost have like a blank canvas and say like, hey, but these other things, we have complete, you know, feedback and conversation with our users. And then we want to go and build this. How do you decide what goes in either bucket? Right. Because I think that now that the, the user base is getting larger and larger,

• 33:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm sure you guys are getting emails every day from writers, podcasters, video, you know, name your kind of content type that are saying, I want X. How do you sift through it all?

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, people tell us we're stupid all the time or like charging too much or that not building this feature or not doing ads or not doing this thing, not doing that thing. There's a ton of opinions, but we've got these principles that we're steadfast on. And one of them's, well, one, an interesting example is that we don't let a writer charge anything less than $5 per month. You can actually work around it if you use a special discount that you kind of make permanent. But the reason we do that is because writers undersell themselves. They, they typically don't think they're worth anything more than $2 a month or $3 a month. And we're like, no, people are going to pay you $5 a month. You should ask for $5 a month. It's a huge difference to you. It's not that much difference to them. And we're making that our minimum.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  The same on the 10%, like we know that that 10% is more than pace for itself. It used to be just because we do your customer support for you because the simplicity of the product saves you a ton of time. Because Substack, you had some basic network, network effects, like if someone's credit card was in the system, you're only one click away from being able to subscribe, they're only one click away from being able to pay you. And now we actually have some pretty major network effects coming online through recommendations and leaderboards and, and user profiles. So that now we drive more than, more, I'll say more than a third is very conservative. More than a third of all subscriptions from Substack on Substack come from the Substack network directly and more than 10% of the paid subscriptions. So that network is actually

• 35:16Speaker 03

  driving real dollars that you wouldn't have otherwise got if you're publishing on some other platform. But we just know, we just know that we've got some principles that we're not going to compromise on. And everything, everything else is sort of product development and we're listening to people, we listen to what writers want. We're not trying to build, we're not trying to be a white label agency trying to just respond to every users, every need and therefore ending up with some sort of Frankenstein product that's kind of good for lots of people but not great for anyone. We're here to build a great product and a great company and that means saying no to lots of things.

• 35:51Anthony Pompliano?

  So you all, I think, probably get credited with really drawing the line in the sand. There is the mainstream media and then there is the independent media or the independent creator or the solo creator, whatever terminology you want to use. It was a trend. People were starting to talk about this. There was, you know, the Mr. Beast of the world and things like that, but no one had really, I think, one, built a product to facilitate this in a unique way. And also, two, it feels like you guys went from like, hey, somebody kind of lightly dragged their finger in the sand to like, you got a shovel and you really made sure people knew where that line was. How do you view the new world? Where are we going? This like independent media, individual creators world, where is it headed? What is the

• 36:36Anthony Pompliano?

  North Star? What is the finish line on that kind of journey, which seems to be pulling away from in a different direction than maybe the mainstream media is?

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Well, there are some behemoths of the mainstream media that will remain pretty recognizable. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, their businesses are fine. They're not going to go away anytime soon.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  I think there's the the attention economy media players like TikTok and Instagram and Twitter and the likes, where they'll be like all the way down one end of the sort of quality spectrum, not to say it's all going to be bad quality, but of a quality, where it's going to be like, here's where I go to waste my time. This stuff is mostly junk food. I know I'm not like nourishing my brain, but I love it. I'm having fun with it. And then there's going to be a new media media universe, where Substack is hopefully going to be a big part of it, where new types of businesses will be made and new types of outlets and publications will be created. They weren't previously possible with the old model, because

• 37:43Speaker 03

  now there's zero gatekeepers. You can start a media business on Substack at breakfast and be making money from it at lunchtime.

• 37:50Anthony Pompliano?

  People think that, by the way, people think that's hyperbole. That's you're dead serious, and I've seen it work. Explain like the effectiveness of a product that you can go click a couple of buttons, turn around and ask people to pay you, and you're literally collecting revenue within hours.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's well, it's part of that same philosophy. Like, we want people to be able to show up, type into a box, click publish, and then money magically appears in your bank account. It takes about five minutes if you want to set it up because you've got to connect a Stripe account. And you've got to tell the world about it. But yes, you can publish a post within minutes and then money will appear in your bank account. And it's really a special model because the you're not you're not dependent on like an overlord to be deciding on how you get paid and when you get paid. And with Substack, the money comes in on a rolling basis. You don't even have to wait until the end of the month. And

• 38:47Speaker 03

  so when you get a story that breaks out, when you do some good work that gets a good audience or gets talked about a lot, you actually get a pay rise because you get a flood of new subscribers coming into your system and people, some portion of them are going to become your paying subscribers. And so you get rewarded for doing good work and get rewarded for doing good stories, which is a feeling that's totally different from working in a newspaper or a magazine or any, you know, a news site where you have to wait for the bosses to decide whether or not they're going to give you a pay rise, and they're not going to give you a pay rise because their business is dying. Yeah, and so we're trying to remove all the friction from the product to make that process as slick as possible, as easy as possible. And that creates a whole new dynamic in terms of who's allowed into the media ecosystem.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Like, what stories do get told? What communities do get served? How deeply do those communities get served? And that's a pretty exciting world, and I think we're gonna see Substack and players like Substack have an impact on the media economy that's kind of like the impact of Uber and Lyft on the ride-sharing economy. Like, taxis existed before. Taxis were a big business. But they're nothing like the entirety of, like, the ride-sharing market with Uber and Lyft in there. And I think that Substack can catalyze a similar effect, a similar enlarging of their media ecosystem. New things are possible. It's gonna be way more valuable than what we've lived with the last couple hundred years.

• 40:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What percentage of people on Substack, it's their full-time job versus, hey, I write this once a week, I have another job, but, you know, I do this because it's a passion project?

• 40:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, there's tens of thousands of publishers on Substack, probably hundreds of thousands by this point, and most of them are sort of blogging, you know, writing for free and they're not intending to go paid, or maybe going paid is a one-day distant dream. And then there's a smaller class, I actually don't know the percentages of it, but there's a smaller class who make some pocket money. They can go out for a restaurant meal each month that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to do. And then there's some who are making full-time livings, and, you know, good enough incomes that they don't have to take any other job. And then there's some who are, like, fabulously wealthy. And I don't have percentages off the top of my head. It's not that different from other media platforms where there is a power law, the

• 41:05Speaker 03

  big players at the top bring in the lion's share of the revenue across the platform, but there's an emerging middle class, and there are things that we're doing to help accelerate the growth of that middle class. And I think there are gonna be services that appear in the future to serve this kind of ecosystem that will also help that middle class.

• 41:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Do we know if anyone's ever, well, you know, but has anyone cracked $10 million a year yet?

• 41:30Speaker 03

  I probably, I can't say that.

• 41:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, that must mean someone's close.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  It might be revealing too much, but there's certainly like people making very healthy in the millions of dollars a year on Substack.

• 41:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So that was gonna be my question is about how many people do you think on Substack are making over a million dollars? Is it like five or six or is it like 50 people?

• 41:52Speaker 03

  It's more than five or six. I won't give the exact number again. This is kind of something we want to keep under a hat at the moment, but it's a nascent platform. This number has grown fast and is looking pretty good. And what's really interesting to me is that some of these people, it's not a mystery. You can go and see who the top earning Substack writer is. It's on the leaderboards on substack.com. It's Heather Cox Richardson. Heather Cox Richardson. She was, she was previously writing the same post that she does on Substack on Facebook for an audience there that just showed up every day and like some trolls would leave comments, like giving this stuff away for free. She's still doing it for free on Substack, but she gives people the ability to pay if they want. And one of the privileges they get if they are paid subscribers, they can leave a comment.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  So she was make, there's like lots and lots of value created out of nothing where she wasn't making any money. She's making tons of money now. There are other journalists with, there are journalists who have left really respectable, big paying jobs at major mainstream publications who have left and quintupled their income on Substack. And in one case, I won't name names, but increased their income by a factor of 10. So 10-tupled their income. And for me, that's extremely exciting because it's unlocking all this energy in the universe.

• 43:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, one of the things that I literally was just talking to somebody in the mainstream media, she's a reporter. We were talking about something else. I've realized, hey, may not be so happy where she is. And I just said, you know, Completely off the record, explain a little bit more. And where the conversation went was like, these mainstream media companies, they're brokers. That's all they're doing. They're brokering the attention from the audience with the work from the journalist and the value that is captured there, usually through advertising, but more and more through subscription or other means. They keep the lion's share. They keep like 95, 98%, sometimes 99%.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  They own everything. They own that person. They own the reporter's stories and IP. A reporter does a great story that breaks out and changes the world in some way. They can't, they don't get anything if that story gets turned into a movie, for example, other than like a name in the credit line.

• 44:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Wait, is that real?

• 44:08Speaker 03

  Well, in some cases, they might be cutting a little bit, but yeah, like if you work for New York Times and someone takes your story and turns it into a blockbuster sensation in Hollywood, you're not getting much money from that at all. New York Times is going to get a lot of money there.

• 44:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I mean, that is a whole other story and quite crazy. But, but I do think what you end up doing, which we see across the world, is you're taking out the middleman. You're taking out the rent seeker. Now, it's unfair to say that it's just a, you know, hand in the cookie jar type middleman because they're providing services, whether it is the brand, the subscribers, the marketing, the operations, editors, like all these different things that obviously make it possible. But it does feel like a lot of folks believe that the economic value being captured may not be sufficient for the services that are being provided. Now, the reason why I say it in that way, there's a lot of writers who don't want to be entrepreneurs. They actually don't want to run a business. They don't want to do

• 45:05Anthony Pompliano?

  some of this stuff. And so you all have experimented with a ton of different things, which seem to be the things that everyone believes are controversial, from putting essentially down payments, I guess, or whatever you want to call.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, like financing deals for writers to get started. Yeah.

• 45:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Advance or whatever. So it's like, hey, look, quit your job, come here, we'll basically provide some safety net for a certain number of months. You have to write X number of times, whatever the agreement is, and go. And let's see how big it can get. There's been things that you've tried around healthcare and all these, you know, other services. Where have you all landed out? Like, how do you get people to do this who may not want to be an entrepreneur, but can't just only write? They have to do something else.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Substack model is not for everyone, right? And for some people, the newsroom model is the right way to go. Like, if they, they, they need the comfort and security of a newsroom, there's no judgment about that. For those who can succeed with the Substack model, and it's not just existing journalists, you know, millions of people around the world who could do this.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  If they've got that, oh, I've got to pay rent and I've, they got that hunger to do it, then their chances of succeeding are greater than if they've just got a comfortable salary to rely on. So with the thing that you refer to, as we call them Substack Pro Deals, it's kind of, it's financing upfront to help them to take away the risk of leaving their job or saying no to some other opportunities so they can dedicate themselves full time to the enterprise of building their own media business on Substack. So we're kind of doing for writers what a VC might do for a startup entrepreneur. Instead, we're demanding less and we're staying like totally hands off. We have no editorial influence on those people or anything.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  We did find some, some, when you do that, some people do show up for a paycheck and they're like reading it the wrong way because it's hard to get money to get like any, to do anything in media. And some people show up for a paycheck.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  But some people take that money and they're grateful to have it because that lets them get started on building their, their dream publication, doing the sorts of writing that they've always wanted to do. And so you have to be quite careful with the, with the balance of it. It's not just going to be, you can't just like spray and pray. And of course, some of the deals don't work out and some, some work out famously. It's a little bit like funding a movie or funding a book or funding a startup in that way.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  But often what we've found is some of the best earners, many of the best earners. Definitely, most of the best earners on Substack never had one of those deals. They're just like backing themselves, taking the 90% from the start. Because if you take a deal like that on the financing package from Substack, you only keep 15% for the first year and then you revert to the standard 90-10 model that Substack has. And those people who are really backing themselves, they can succeed. It seems that they have a very, like a greater likelihood of success overall. And especially of like out earning sort of whatever their modest goals might have been. And to make a ton of money on Substack through subscriptions.

• 48:18Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about the independent individuals versus the people who are building actual publications? I think some of the folks who have done very well on Substack now have four, five, six people. And, you know, I joke that like they're reinventing the newsroom, but not like in a negative way. Like they just realize, hey, that works for them versus maybe Bill Bishop. I think he does it by himself and has no, no kind of team or anything like that. Like, how do you balance that? And is either one what you're trying to do? Or is it actually part of the beauty of Substack is you could do either depending on what works for you?

• 48:50Speaker 03

  What especially works well on Substack is if you're a solo artist or a small band, but not necessarily like the super band or the super group with many instruments in it. We do have some group publications that are doing really well. It just gets more complicated and we think you'd be better off to have individual Substack than you then network together in their own way. But it is really gratifying to see some writers be on Substack and become so successful that they start to hire people. So Casey Newton has done this with Platformer. He's just hired a fellow reporter to work with him on reporting and on the business. And Judd Leggins hired a couple of people to help him on his own publication, Popular Information. We start to see that happening more and more.

• 49:34Speaker 03

  And I love seeing that because it's the writers who are in charge. It's the writers who then become owners and they're paying it forward. They're bringing other people along for the ride. But an individual Substack, while it can expand to have many contributors, and there are several that are doing really well on Substack, it's probably better to have it focused. And then the way I would like to see it play out is that people build networks. So you might have the pump letter, and then you might have another friend who's doing something on Ethereum, and another friend who's doing something on like DeFi, and you decide to like band together in a way, kind of like a multi-channel network on YouTube, and help lift each other up, and maybe share some of the expenses of editing or marketing, that kind of way.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  And I think entirely new types of businesses can be built that way. And we're just seeing the beginnings of that on Substack now.

• 50:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm laughing. You mean like if you had the pump letter, huddle up, and the profile, and then you had this great feature from Substack where you could recommend each other?

• 50:33Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. Yeah, I imagine you're right on top of that. Like, what if you wanted to share an editor? What if you wanted to share a lawyer? What if you wanted to share an art department? What if someone came in and invested in your little conglomerate there to help you like go on and expand?

• 50:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  And start covering wine in Italy and all these other subjects. To me, that's a pretty borderless way of expanding. Rather than, I'm starting a newspaper, I'm gonna have these verticals, I'm gonna have a ton of reporters, and a ton of editors, and a sales team, blah, blah, blah. It's a much leaner operation, and it's full of much more potential.

• 51:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. I want to ask you the hard questions. So let's just jump right to the hardest one. What will you take down? Is there anything that someone could write that you guys would take down?

• 51:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, one of the things, and to caveat this, one of the critiques from the mainstream media, who the second they see that we publish this, they're gonna run, and they're like, oh, let's listen to what they're saying. Hey, guys, is that...

• 51:32Anthony Pompliano?

  You all take a stand that it is free speech. For better or worse, there's this element of like, hey, people should be able to write what they want. And I think generally have a negative view towards censorship and stuff like that. With that said, as with most of the platforms who do this, there's things like illegal content. There's things that may just like from a society standpoint, 99.9% of people reject as an idea or a sympathy towards some sort of ideology or whatever. Where do you guys kind of draw the line? Or like, what is the framework to evaluate content that gets into a gray area? Or maybe something that other people get upset about?

• 52:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have content guidelines that are where the terms are pretty narrowly defined. So you can't publish anything on Substack that incites violence. You can't publish porn, you can't do spamming, you can't do doxing, that kind of thing. And that's where the lines are for us. And it's, if anything falls into a gray area, then Trust and Safety Team and the founders discuss and decide, like, can it stay or can it not stay? But the problems surrounding those questions, I think, are a lot less acute for Substack, which is kind of this system where readers have control.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  They can actively opt into the publications they want to follow and opt out of the publications they don't want to follow. And they don't have anything forced against their will down their throat. The problems for us are a lot less acute, I think, than in the social media giants, where there's these massive amplification machines that are kind of incentivizing provocative content and controversial content and rewarding those types of behaviors. And so those problems there are like... It's a different set of problems. They might as well be different media. They are totally different media ecosystems. They may as well be in different universes.

• 53:35Anthony Pompliano?

  So doxing is like a really interesting one because we've seen the mainstream media over and over and over again. I'm going to say both sides of the ideological aisle dox people who run pseudonymous accounts, who have some sort of brand and then they end up saying, hey, here's the person who's running it or whatever. And if you strip away all the political nonsense and the divisiveness and all of that, it's on one side, people are like, hey, that was a doxing of an individual. On the other side is the argument of like, this ends up being of public interest for ABC reason. So it's weird, right? And I don't think that we can point to and be like, this is the one rule that is always going to be

• 54:17Anthony Pompliano?

  applicable because there's so much nuance in every single case. But how do you all think about that type of stuff? Where it's like the mainstream media's, maybe not response, but like their defense of something like this would be like, oh, it's of public interest. And like, actually, it's not doxing in a negative sense. It's like journalism. How do you think through that?

• 54:38Speaker 03

  Well, the journalist in me thinks that certain stories do rise to a level of public interest, that it's clearly defensible, that it's worth exposing information or shining a light on particular information that might not otherwise have been easily attainable.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  And yeah, there's no blanket rule, but I think it's incumbent upon the news organization in that case to make a strong defense and let the public decide.

• 55:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I also want to call out that I'm asking you as one individual, and I understand there's a whole team of people who look at this. So I know that you don't have the exact answers. But I do think these are the questions, right? People are like, okay, cool. If we're going to take the media, whatever that ends up actually being, and we are going to strip it out of the hands of these organizations, and we're going to give it to a technology company, like, how do you do that? Right? How does it actually operate?

• 55:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, for us, there is like, there is a legal definition of doxing, and it's something along the lines of, you know, sharing.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  Phone numbers and I think private addresses. And if it's just a general member of the public, then you should be very, you should have, you should be careful about that. But I do think it's, it's not impossible for even an individual Substacker to make a case that this is in the public interest, in the interest, and you have to take it on a case by case basis.

• 56:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk to me about audio and video. What, what are you guys thinking there outside of just writing? Everyone knows you for the text based, kind of email newsletter with paid subscription, but you're pushing into these other areas. What, what are you thinking on audio and video?

• 56:17Speaker 03

  Um, I don't think there's much difference between audio, video and text in terms of what's the value to an audience. Like the, the person, you know, I've said this to you before, Pomp, like people are kind of subscribing to you, they're not just subscribing to the thing you write. And so they'll be just as happy to get it, or maybe a different group of people would be happier to get it. If it's an audio or it's on video, or if it's just you in a discussion, a live chat, that kind of thing. And I think that the business model there is, certainly can accommodate the variety of those relationships, no matter what the content is, or no matter what the format is. So Substack is like, we've got first class podcasting features on the platform, it's

• 57:00Speaker 03

  free to host and distribute a podcast on Substack, you can have paid episodes or unpaid episodes, you can have comments attached to it that go out with a post where you can include other video and all that sort of stuff. We will do exactly the same for video, we have a beta product for video at the moment, you can have subscriber only video, it lives in your Substack, it's in the Substack app. You can have a discussion thread if you just want to like have a conversation with your subscribers. And yeah, I don't think the, the actual content type is the, the thing that makes it work, it's the voice behind it, it's the distinctive worldview that's behind it, it's the quality of thought that's behind it. And so we'll keep expanding the platform to accommodate all those things.

• 57:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So you hit on this a little bit earlier, but one of the parts that you all seem to be pushing into that I find the most fascinating, this is me speaking as a consumer of content. This is me speaking as a Substack user. And it's also me speaking from like an investor entrepreneur, just like watching the product evolve. And I think that you guys are playing a little bit of chess here, is that all the features in the beginning were one to many communication. It was very much, I write an email, I send it to an entire list. Yes, there are comment sections or whatever, but for the most part, it was one to many. Podcast, same thing, I record, I send it out. Video would obviously continue that trend. You're now pushing into more of like the threads type content, chat, things where it may not be as much

• 58:27Anthony Pompliano?

  one to many, it could be more one to one. Or maybe it's the creator of the publication is just one of many people discussing a topic, an idea or whatever. And so it moves from that one to many to more of like this like community aspect. Is that something that you think you guys will continue to double and triple down on? Is this just a test? Like, how do you think about one to many versus like community type stuff?

• 58:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I think it's kind of, there's a formality spectrum, that's right. So you can be in your most formal mode broadcasting, you could be publishing a post or publishing a podcast episode or publishing a video. And this is like the thing that you've put a lot of thought and time behind and you're willing to defend it and argue it in public. And you click publish and there's a moment and it's like, all right, now this is being broadcast to my world. And then there's the other end of the spectrum, which is something we've been trained on for decades now with social media, which is sometimes you don't want to have the like the high bar of formality to meet. Sometimes you just want to have a chat. Sometimes you just want to have a discussion. Sometimes you just want to hang out with people who are interested in the same things you like. And so we are starting to do more work that enables that kind of conversation.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  And so we have discussion threads which already exist in Substack instead of creating a post. You can just start a thread, it's kind of like a Facebook group post, for example. And in the Substack app, we're piloting a feature that allows you to have an even sort of more informal chat with your subscribers. And maybe one day that might be a subset of your subscribers. Or maybe one day you just want to, like you as a subscriber, just wants to chat to one other subscriber from the same publication universe.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  Again, I see the model being really interesting for that use case like who's doing paid chat discourse, I guess, in a way. Not, yeah, like, I, I, I think there's like the idea of having a close, high signal community that's tied to the publication, but is not all of the publication is just really interesting. And I don't know like what is ultimately going to look at, what is ultimately going to look like, but it's going to be a really fun area to explore.

• 1:00:40Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:01:25Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:02:38Anthony Pompliano?

  This is fascinating because I tweeted it recently and everyone was all upset because they didn't get the invite to the groups, which was not my fault. But I said, "Look, I've actually found private group chats to be way more valuable to my learning information consumption over the last couple of months than social media." And some of it is just like high trust versus low trust environment. If you put something on Twitter and you've got a big audience, like the trolls are faster with their fingers than, you know, the supporters and also more relentless. But at the same time, it's a different medium. It allows for much more follow-up and nuanced discussion and kind of all these different things.

• 1:03:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it feels like if I was to come out and be like, "Oh, let's start a paid chatroom." People would be like, "All right, dude, like, you know, sounds like a scam, sounds like a paid trading signals," or, you know, like whatever the joke on the internet is. But when you actually start with the community of like-minded individuals around certain types of content, whether it is the written form, audio, or video, the chat now is a supplementation and allows those people just to have kind of more real-time feedback and communication. And if you could in some way replicate these very small private group chat value in the larger audience, like, damn, would that be powerful, right?

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's like, it's very interesting as an idea, at least. I'm excited for what we're doing here. But I do think of it as like, now everyone can have their own social network. What becomes possible when that's the case, even if it's just a small social network, even if the only people in your social network are your family. And we acquired a company called Cocoon that was actually building these sort of small community social networks as well. And they are helping us, that team is helping us build this next generation of discussions and threads on Substack. And social media is completely different. Like, social media, like, it's fun to chat in that real-time kind of way and have back-and-forth,

• 1:04:45Speaker 03

  and you can find your communities on social media. But it's all a big performance, and the trolls are only a click-away, or a quote we retweet, dunk-away. And people get points in that game for being mean to each other, or for, like, taking someone down in a spectacular fashion in front of all their friends, so that all their friends can laugh at you as well. Whereas in the community, the more, the closer tighter-knit community, like you see on Substack, people are there for similar reasons. Like, "I like this guy's voice, too. I'm deeply nerdy about this particular topic, too." And if I'm paying to be there, that's an even stronger signal. Like, "I care about this as much as you care about this. I care about this so much that I'm willing to part with money to be here."

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  And that can create a whole lot of great conversation, much more productive conversation, much more good-faith discussion. And I think that kind of thing, in the long run, can have a big impact on the quality of discourse in society.

• 1:05:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It is, um, if it is possible to get there with a community, and you're able to navigate the spectrum of what you call "broadcast all the way to chat", damn, is that powerful? And then also, in some way, it's fascinating, because by building the infrastructure, it almost seems like you all are sitting there saying, "How do we take this group, which the initial thesis was like, they want to have a more intimate relationship, by removing the middleman with the creator of that content? How do we just pull them closer and closer and closer and closer together, so that they feel like they're getting more value, they're willing to part with that money, but the money is not necessarily going to a media organization? It's going directly in the pockets of the person creating the content,

• 1:06:24Anthony Pompliano?

  which obviously changes the incentives of the content that's created."

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  That's kind of, that's kind of the magic of the internet. Like, the internet kind of started off this way, like, in blogging days, and in Friendster days, and, you know, Facebook pre-advertising, Twitter pre-advertising. They were much more, much more, um... Authentic relationships and direct relationships and people weren't trying to game it in a particular way. There weren't these engagement based algorithms sorting us into giant tribes and pitting us against each other. But the internet like and so with like the last decade of the internet has been such a rough ride that we've all got these sort of scars and bruises and reflective like hesitancies.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  But the internet can be amazing. It can connect people globally instantly around particular topics, some of which are like deeply nerdy and hard to find friends and otherwise are hard to find fellow travelers and otherwise. And so it'd be interesting. Well, I'm very interested and hopeful about what this looks like when the monetization structure for this is not advertising, but is direct payments. So that really you are the, you know, as the reader, you are the customer. You're not the product. You're not being game for some other purpose and that the writer gets rewarded based on how well they respect your attention or the the manager of that community gets well, uh, gets rewarded for how well they manage that community and the interests of that community rather than the interests of the advertiser.

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  Um, I think it can go to some like fascinating places and I don't think we've really seen the potential of the internet yet because it's been short circuited by this other model that has sent us on a, a 20 year detour.

• 1:08:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you at liberty to say what the craziest idea you guys have thought of is?

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  Oh God, we've thought of some crazy ideas.

• 1:08:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe one that you thought of, but you guys aren't going to do as of right now.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  I really want to get into book publishing. I really want, um, I really want you to be able to click a button and have a book in the same way that you can click a button and you've got a media company or you've got a, um, you know, you, you publish it. You've got your post for the day. You, you've already written it. That's the heart that done. Then you click a button and then everything, the post goes out into the world and money comes to you and subscribers come to you. I'd like to have the same effect with books. So you're a writer, you've written a book. Um, you upload it essentially, you click publish, it comes out perfectly designed. Uh, it's got a price that you've selected. Anyone can come to your Substack and buy it. It gets distributed and marketed to your mailing

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  list. It gets put in all the stores everywhere and you get the lion's share, the lion's share of the sales revenue. I think there's great potential for that model. It's a little bit

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  beyond where we can go just right now, but I do hope to get there.

• 1:09:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that would be absolutely fascinating. And, you know, we've seen a bunch of people take their blog posts, their emails, whatever, and turn them into books, right? So if you're the place where that stuff lives, it seems like it'd be pretty easy for you to be able to just scrape and say, hey, here's the 10 most popular ones. They're this length, put it into a book and do a little bit of light editing and off you go.

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  Don't you know someone who's turned part of the ethos behind their Substack into a book recently?

• 1:09:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I do. Paulina, I'll tell you, actually, I don't even know I'm telling you on this here, but one of the pieces of that process that was fascinating to me is Paulina was talking to a lot of other authors and a piece of feedback that she got from people who had published with some of the independent publishers, with some of like the big houses and then some people had self-published, was how little the most professional of the organizations did when it came to distribution, marketing and like the actual selling of the book. So much of their process is focused on like the creation of the book. And then they're like, okay, we move on to like the next customer essentially. And I think that that was surprising

• 1:10:26Anthony Pompliano?

  to me. Like I would have thought most of the value of what they were providing to people was like, we'll help you sell the book, we'll promote it, we'll do all this. But it seems to be the opposite, which is weird.

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

  It used to be a lot more like that. And they're not actually acting in the writers' interest most of the time. They're sort of acting in the company's interest. And that's expressed by them deciding to really put all their marketing resources behind the books that are already showing signs of being the winners. And so if you don't sell a ton of copies in your first week, then all the marketing support will get pulled from your book and put onto the book that is actually starting to move some copies. And so the winners get really big and the ones that don't have fast starts don't get that much support, by which point Like you probably would, you know, you'd be better off just going your own route and self-publishing.

• 1:11:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it is, um, it, it, it is, uh, uh, very interesting to see. I, I recently posted a video, and it was a, a desk with a bunch of stuff all over it and a computer. And then over thirty seconds, it basically took all the things on the computer or on the desk and put into the computer. So it took the calendar off the wall and it was an app on the computer. It took the globe and then it was Google Maps and like, and it basically erased everything off of that desk from thirty years ago. And it was essentially visualizing software eating the world.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:40Anthony Pompliano?

  What you're talking about is almost, uh, automation. But how much, like, how do you automate the book publishing process? Well, the first principles component is like, well, where do you get the content to start? And so there's not that many companies, Substack being one of them, but there's not that many others that could say like, well, we are where some of the content lives that people actually write their books off of, or they, they kind of create these collections. And so you have to be a very unique company to be able to get to the automation of a book because you have to start with the, uh, kind of source material.

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the, I do think it's kind of similar to the, um, software in the world metaphor that you're using is that like, a lot of publishers somehow, book publishing somehow hasn't caught up. And maybe it's because people look at the book publishing market and see that it's so, so much in trouble that it's not that interesting to them. And like, why are they going to try and make books publishing as efficient as possible? Amazon's done it with Kindle program. They has its own, in the Kindle publishing direct program. It has its own particular, uh, particularities and it's its own kind of closed ecosystem. Um, but to me, it, it just, it seems so easy. You wouldn't want to take the humans out of it completely, especially you want a good human editor and a good human designer, or probably a good human designer, maybe generative AI can do something for you. Um.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  But then the marketing and the distribution of the book and the getting it into people's hands and the price setting, I don't know why you need a massive publishing house to do all of that anymore. And I'm waiting for some platform to unlock the energy there and just make it super simple for a writer to publish. They don't have to know anything about design. They don't have to know anything about marketing. They don't have to know anything about distribution. I hope Substack can be that company, but it seems totally overdue for me.

• 1:13:29Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned generative art. You did not say generative newsletters or generative words. Have you seen anyone do it yet? And do you think-

• 1:13:39Speaker 03

  Narrative, narrative science has been doing that for a while. It's like probably one of the easier things to do, right? Like come up with a piece of writing that a computer can write based on the data points. And I think, I think we are starting to see like generative art versions of that with fiction and stuff. And I think there will be like, if you're, if you're following real estate markets or you're following sports, I think a lot of the great stuff to read in the future will be written by AI. But I don't think that's gonna obliterate the need for human voices. In fact, maybe it even leads to more demand for human voices.

• 1:14:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I am. There was a company in North Carolina a couple of years ago, I'm gonna forget the name of it, which I apologize to those guys, but it's guy Robbie and Joe.

• 1:14:27Speaker 03

  It's probably narrative science. Those guys are in-

• 1:14:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Are they? Maybe they changed their name. It was like automated something or whatever.

• 1:14:35Speaker 03

  Oh, maybe Automated Insights, maybe?

• 1:14:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Automated Insights, yes. That, that was the name of the company. And when my mind was like, oh shit, this is a thing, is they had done a deal with Yahoo for Yahoo Fantasy Football.

• 1:14:48Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And every single game that was played, like if you and I were in the same league and we had a fantasy football matchup on Monday, we were on Tuesday, I guess, we would get a report that was an article written about how our matchup went. And it was all auto-generated. And I was like, oh my God, they're creating like millions and millions and millions of articles every single weekend.

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't care how much money you have, you could not recreate that with humans.

• 1:15:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think that this was pretty basic technology by today's standards as well. You can imagine the color and flair that a like a really smart AI might bring to that. It's gonna be an interesting world.

• 1:15:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, what about taking like the written content on Substack and auto generating audio or video or trying to do some of that stuff? Have you all explored that? Looked at you're laughing, so I'm assuming that there's some good story here.

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  Like Chris just sent a text message about this the other day, saw something online and said like, what about this is prompt so many ideas? And so, yeah, it's very much at the like text message or Slack message level of ideation, but super interesting, isn't it? Like, can you take a podcast episode and with one click market it on social media through like the right mix of audios and visuals, audio and visuals and maybe text? Or can you do the inverse? Can you take a piece of text and turn it into like a piece of audio that you can then use to market the publication or the story or even tell the story? In fact, on Substack already and you can click the little headphones icon on any post

• 1:16:26Speaker 03

  and it will, a robot will read it out to you, a convincing robot with a nice voice will read it out to you. Or you can choose to overwrite it with your own voice and your own narration, which is even like a higher quality, a higher value item. So, yeah, I think that sort of stuff will definitely, that's coming. Quite excited about that.

• 1:16:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Kit, can I give a product feedback live now?

• 1:16:46Speaker 03

  You can, you can. I'll tell it to the boss.

• 1:16:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it'd be pretty simple. I mean, you have to build the tech to do it, but if people basically said, hey, I want the ability to turn the text into audio with my voice, you probably could come up with like a script and it's like, hey, sit down for 25 minutes, 30 minutes, read these words into a microphone, Substack's able to then take it, build out, okay, here's like the voice model and then you just like drag and highlight the part that you want it to read, right? So like when I send the email, I don't want it to read the whole thing. I just wanted to read like the opinion piece and then you just click a button. All of a sudden it makes the audio and you're good to go. Now for me.

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I love it.

• 1:17:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Save me seven to 10 minutes a day, right? Like not, not the end of the world, but at the same time, it's like those little things that get you closer and closer to content creation that is high quality, but saves time and increases money for the users.

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  I love it. I'm not enough of a genius to know how much like modeling you'd need before you can get the

• 1:17:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Take Chris like a like one night.

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  Those other guys will figure that out. But it's kind of like FaceTime, you know, I don't know, what is it Face ID on your phone like make sure you like show you the phone, your face from all the angles. We'll just get all your, we'll get your voice from all the angles until we with mastered palm. And then actually, like, what do we need you for? We just get an AI to write your articles based on the the words you use all the time. And then AI to read out your thing. And then you can just go and sit on the beach.

• 1:18:12Anthony Pompliano?

  We're joking, but I do think this is going to be sequential, right? Like now it's okay, humans do everything. We see what the generative art like, okay, shit, this is cool. This is powerful. Like how people will use it is still up for for decision, but like, it's cool.

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:18:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Taking content that you just created and then automating it into other mediums seems to be like kind of a no brainer, right? And you see this with people like taking audio, turning it into transcript and vice versa, whatever. But the next leap, which you're talking about of like, okay, type in one sentence and then it writes the entire article for you. I think the technology is probably there where it can create something that like generally talks about it. But part of the value of an individual's sub stack at the moment is that it's their unique thoughts, right? Kind of your point about like they're subscribing to X person. And how do you

• 1:19:09Anthony Pompliano?

  recreate that? It's to some degree like the creativity or the original thought is the hardest thing for the computer to do. I say that and then somebody will build a model and it'll like be smarter than all of us.

• 1:19:19Speaker 03

  It'll convince us that it's creative and original. Yeah.

• 1:19:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So like it does feel like, okay, we went through kind of, I don't know, step one. Step two now, it's like very obvious to see in the next year or two, maybe three years. You'll be able to kind of click buttons and automate into other mediums. But the from scratch generation seems a little bit further off. And and there's like weird ramifications, like there's positives and negatives to that world that I don't think we quite understand yet.

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, we can't be too, we can't be too like the rate of development with this generative art stuff is incredible. And we can't be too far off, like 10 years from being out to like if you died right now. Like I could load up my Pampa app and have a conversation with you that seems original and where you're actually responding to me, or at least I'm watching a video message from you with a new idea based on all the things that you've said in the past, or the things you've written in the past and your image. And no, I'm gonna like, that's, that's fucked up. That's 10, that's, I'm, I'm sure that's gonna be possible within 10 years. And so I might never have to end my relationship with you despite you not being on the

• 1:20:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:28Speaker 03

  this mortal coil anymore.

• 1:20:29Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the other

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  It's gonna be crazy.

• 1:20:31Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the other piece of this that, um, Plan actually has this skill and, uh, I've never said this to her, but it's like talking to a computer sometimes. Like, we'll be talking about something. She's like, oh, that reminds me of, and she'll pull out because she's just spent so much time, like, this person said this, or this event in this person's life, or in this profile, they did this, or whatever. And what you start to think about is like, Google does the same thing. And like, all, all these systems are just mapping information or data points, and they're able to begin to understand the relationship between them. And so a writer, what do they do? They write thoughts. So if you're writing about economics, for example, if, uh, you mention, you know, March of 2020, when the market crashed, like,

• 1:21:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Substack knows what your writing was back then. It can easily go and see that. And you have, uh, if a writer is trying to kind of build an ecosystem of content, they're linking back to old pieces. And like, it, it does become like a very interesting technology problem where maybe you don't actually generate the article, right? Or, or the piece, but can you almost say like, hey, by the way, you just talked about this concept, you know, reminder, you mentioned this three times in the last two years, and then here's the hyperlinks to the pieces, right? Or something like that.

• 1:21:41Speaker 03

  I love that. Yeah. The machine, the machine, the system can be prompting you, but not forcing you to include other like references to things that you've done in the past, or that appear in other parts of the network. Like, oh, you're writing about, you were writing about Obama's legacy. Do you know that like four years ago, Andrew Sullivan published this big thing based on an interview he did with Obama, blah, blah, blah. Maybe you wanna like, this, this sentence seems to be relevant to exactly the thing you're writing now. Do you wanna reference it? It's, um, yeah, I think it's sort of like, if you start To create a central network for writing like that, then the opportunities for that kind of advantage present themselves. And it's cool to think about.

• 1:22:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I completely agree. What do you think is the greatest critique of Substack? When you think of all the critics that are out there, what's the one that you agree with? Or the one that you're like, you know what? I actually think that that's like a pretty fair thing. We're working on it and you know, hope to be better or improve the product in that way or whatever.

• 1:22:40Speaker 03

  I think the potential for audience capture is a difficult and interesting problem to work on. So, you know, when you're shilling subscriptions, people might choose to pay because you're telling them things they want to hear. And you might get it in your mind that you don't want to say anything that they don't want to hear. And I don't think this is a big problem. I actually think it's a worse problem on social media. But it is like a risk, like effectively you could be running a cult. You might be a charlatan or a huckster, just like selling bullshit because you know, it's going to turn into money through willing participants who choose to subscribe because they love to hear that stuff.

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  And I think that's actually like an education problem for society. But there might be some product design and platform design things that we can do to,

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  you know, help people connect with the people who have high integrity ratings or

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  make sure that there might be more like you get exposed to more perspectives than you might have otherwise come across had you just, you know, followed this one writer. So I think there's not nothing to that critique. There is a risk with a subscription model that audience capture can happen. And I think it's incumbent upon us to be like hyper aware of it and sensitive to it.

• 1:23:57Anthony Pompliano?

  My last question for you is if we do this again in 10 years, which of course we will, what is the vision of what Substack has become? Is there something different than what the public would think?

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  I think one version of it is that it just could be like a vastly larger expression of what it already is, which is this like a network of publications where writers have direct relationships with their readers. And sometimes those writers are actually doing podcasts or video or live chats or like mostly focused on community type stuff. And I think the like tremendous value will come when the network gets thick. When you start to get more and more readers and more paying subscribers just because you're a part of the network and there's lots of interaction between from readers to readers and lots of interaction between readers and writers and writers to writers. I think that can

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  get really large and that there might be new sort of supporting business models that Substack can explore and that writers can explore within that. For example, I would say that Substack at the moment is gone, taking the media through a phase of unbundling at the moment, but there are going to be new bundles in the future. And so ultimately, I see like a huge media ecosystem that's more valuable than the ones that have been presented to the world for the last few hundred years. And I see a system where writers have a lot more control and ownership and they capture the majority of the financial value created within that ecosystem. And readers have a lot more agency and they're getting

• 1:25:34Speaker 03

  better experiences than they were given by the media ecosystems that have dominated today. So I think it can be really rich and vibrant and deep and valuable.

• 1:25:45Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I hope that world comes to fruition. That sounds amazing.

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  You're helping, you're helping make it happen, man.

• 1:25:53Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, no. What, where can we send people to find you on the internet? Or if they want to learn more about Substack itself, where can they go?

• 1:26:00Speaker 03

  You should check out my Substack. It's at substack.com. There's a bunch of writers there you'll find to love. You should create a Substack, substack.com/signup. It's much easier to publish things than you might think. You don't have to commit yourself to a big newsletter. Just write one thing or post one photo or one video. Substack.com is the place I'd send people to. Don't go to Twitter. Twitter's where the brains go to die.

• 1:26:25Anthony Pompliano?

  You may not be wrong, my friend. All right. I appreciate it very much. We will definitely do this again in the future.

• 1:26:30Speaker 03

  Awesome. Thanks, Paul.

• 1:26:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends, and I'll see you all for the next episode.