The Ledger, every show

“I think a lot of science is totally broken. I think that they're like, I think that a lot of the, and I think that the scientific project is incredibly important and one of the most valuable things in history, but that the practice of science and the Current s…”

“The people that it really, I think in 20, 20, the thing that surprised me, the people that felt the brunt of that were not conservatives. We're not Republicans necessarily. It was the people in the liberal media. In, you know, in, in, in my telling, I would sa…”

“I don't think our role as a platform on the internet should be to tell you what's right and what's wrong or who to trust and who not to trust. And it's a seductive idea that it should be that role. And a lot of platforms took that stance and it just didn't wor…”

“The elephant in the room is TikTok. It's like this Chinese run slot machine game thing. And the type of people that are attracted to making that thing are not necessarily the ones that are going to Make for the strongest democracy, right?”

“I think that the podcast market that can be supported by advertising is small and sad compared to the audio market that could be supported if we had an effective way to pay for it.”

“The fact that this thing that we were creating this new economic engine for culture that gives you this independence happened to be there at a time where a bunch of the most interesting writers in the world were getting summarily Tossed from their long-time in…”

“And I think there are definitely like the thing that would break Substack is if we just looked at the same way that the legacy social media things built advertising and said, oh, we're just going to copy that. Like that's going to work because And if we did th…”

“I had this speech that I would give to people at the time. I was like, think of sub stack as your getaway vehicle. You don't have to get in it right now, but like, Fuel it up, have the engine idling, like create your account, like claim your handle, have this …”

“If something comes to our attention that is against the broadly applicable substack rules, we're going to take action. But we're not changing what we enforce based on pressure.”

“We're not running the company to, like, turn a profit, but the thing that is true, and we've kept true pretty much the whole time, is we don't need to raise money again. We're not on this clock. We have, like, we are in control of our financial destiny.”

“COVID has just accelerated that pre-existing trend. And that's something that's not gonna, you're not gonna turn back time on that after that happens.”

“No, I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think this is the thing you get when the internet creates kind of a global marketplace for things is you want to be the best in the world at something. And that either means being the best in the world by being reall…”

“I think that micropayments, as we sort of traditionally think of them as like, I'm going to quickly decide whether I want to spend 20 cents unlocking this thing, just don't work on sort of a fundamental product level. I think when you decide to pay for somethi…”

“A system where people are paying directly to writers they trust is going to create better, more trustworthy content, more trustworthy relationships, more valuable culture at the end of the day than a system where people are trying to like game the engagement a…”

“People are willing to pay more to subscribe to one writer on Substack than they'll pay for, like, Netflix, because this sort of relationship that they've built up over time reading somebody has so much value to them.”

“The trick is that you have to do it intelligently. You can't come in and impose bundles on people, because then it kills that golden goose of the direct relationship between readers and writers.”

“We think there's basically a market failure where all of society would be richer if there was more efficient mechanisms to like allocate more resources to creative people that are making kind of culture writ large”

“So I'm not saying that everything's going to be individuals and there's not going to be any big sort of media things, but I think it's going to look like there's a meteoric rise of individual creation.”

“And the advice we give people is basically take your best, most accessible, most focused stuff and make that free. Right? Like make your sort of like your very thoughtful essay on a specific topic free, because that's how people are going to share it. That's h…”

“I think the pendulum's really heavily swinging the other way now. Like people that were sort of like my generation were like the least likely to want to pay for stuff. And we are getting increasingly more likely to want to pay. And then younger generations are…”

“I think the answer is it won't replace the social network aspect of it. The thing that Facebook and the social networks are great at is having the relationship between you and like the people, you know, in real life... The part of it that should absolutely be …”

“I've always seen the free speech thing as sort of an important pillar, but not the main pillar of what Substack is actually setting out to do.”

“I think the right to exit is really important. People thought that was very dumb. They said, well, if you just let your customers leave, like won't they just leave? And I think in the short run, that might be true, but in the long run, that created the right s…”

“And I think there's a version of unlocking, you know, more economic opportunity, more economic upside that is aligned with the idea of independence, the idea of having differentiated value and quality. And so we're very interested in doing that, but you know, …”

“This actually reminds me of one of the first things Mark Andreessen ever said to me when we were talking about Substack. He said, you're gonna do to media what the venture capital industry did to software companies or to tech.”

“And I think that that side of media is going to get supercharged. We have very sophisticated AI goon bots now. Is that a good thing? I don't know, but it's happening. And we're going to have that across like, you know, everything, every Short form video, every…”

“And if you're a messaging app, and your big drive is your half on Blackberry and half on iPhone, if you lose half your users, you don't actually lose half your users, you lose like, 95% of your users.”

“The problem with Facebook is not that it doesn't work, right? The problem with Facebook is that it works too well. And doesn't serve the people who use it. Right. Yes, it kills all the newspapers, but it's a massively successful business that takes, takes adva…”

“The sort of social media universe covering, like, this Cambrian explosion of citizen journalism and news, but where the incentive system seemed to create sort of a pull towards madness”

“You can't really change human nature. You can't Change what people want, or how they think about the things that you're building for them, but despite not being able to change that, you can change the behavior that gets rewarded, the behavior that ends up flou…”

“If your underlying algorithm is maximizing for engagement, you're not going to be able to, like, turn up the, like, don't make bad content dial in the algorithm and have, like, a permanent fix for that.”

“It feels a little bit like podcast downloads are almost like the banner ad impressions of the early internet.”

“But if you're someone that has, let's say, 10,000 fans that find you completely irreplaceable and wouldn't want to go on living without you because you're the most amazing thing in their life, but there's only 10,000 of them, you're never going to make money o…”

“I suspect as I kind of hinted before that there's a lot of podcast advertising that's in a little bit of like an emperor's new clothes state where like too much is it's overpriced. And because there's just not metrics there, it's just like waiting for like som…”

“And so the direct connection, in addition to being this way, you can bring your audience with you is a way to give humans the power to override the algorithm and say, Hey, I've got this trust relationship with my audience. I want to exercise it and go out on a…”

“If you want to be successful, if you want to make a successful paid sub stack, you have to have a free sub stack.”

“We're, we, we're building a live product that basically feels like, you know, I do a, feels like doing a FaceTime call and then magically turns into a highly produced podcast and a YouTube video and a series of short form clips and a transcript. And pretty soo…”

“A hundred million.”

“In part to raise money, and in part kind of like as a, in answer to the question, what do you do if you have a very popular messenger that lots of people use, but you don't know how to make money from it?”

“I devised this like parlor trick where when somebody told me they would never pay for something on the internet, I would say, well, who's your favorite writer? And they'd say, oh, you know, Guy Raz, or whoever. And then I would say, would you pay five bucks a …”

“And this had happened with Facebook pages at this point. They created a thing where people spent all this money getting people to like their Facebook page on the assumption that that meant they'd built up an audience. And then they said, oh, just kidding. Actu…”

“Bill's launch happened. And we had no, I had no idea what to expect, but he made like six figures his first day through this like duct taped, like stripe setup that I had built in the preceding weeks.”

“It's surprising how much you have to do that multiplication for people. Like, it's not that they can't do it themselves, it's that they won't do it. And the number of times I've had a conversation that's like, you know, so-and-so has 10,000 subscribers paying,…”

“I mean, a big part of it is the business model, right? Like the fact that we was paying subscribers, we didn't have Advertisers who were getting spooked and boycotting us, bringing us under pressure.”

“By the time it went down, the share of Substack traffic that was coming from Twitter had been on a steady decline for years.”

“I think we can say there's over five million now.”

“We're not gonna not have people able to directly connect with a large audience. That's a change in the world that, you know, put the genie back in that bottle. We're not gonna go to a world where new people can't start their own media empire, start their own c…”

“Substack is an attempt to push in the other direction. It's an attempt to say, hey, the way that you win is by earning and keeping the trust of people who deeply value what you do to the point where they might want to pay you.”