has lived many different lives as a host and comedian: one of them centered on the singular conviction that Denzel Washington Is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period, another in service of an institution (the ACLU’s At Liberty), another at the helm of several documentaries and seven seasons anchoring CNN’s prime-time Sunday night slot with his show United Shades of America. He’s now launched Who’s With Me?, a new podcast based on and distributed through his Substack publication of the same name, which he’s grown from an email list of 20,000 to nearly 140,000 subscribers since joining the platform in 2024. The show is not another celebrity podcast, he says, but features a guest list of people he can actually text to invite on: Delroy Lindo, Robert Reich, Ted Danson, Daveed Diggs, Misty Copeland, and more. Made in partnership with Malcom Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries, it’s also a venture he’s owned from day one. We sat down with Kamau to find out how season one is going, ask him about his “white whale” guest, and talk about what it means to own his own work in an industry that’s still trying to decide who it’s for.

You kicked off episode one of the new show by saying, “This is me investing in myself and trying to bet on myself, because the industry is not betting on people like me anymore.” What did you mean by that?

I had one of the great runs in the history of show business. I had seven seasons of a television show at CNN with United Shades of America. That puts me in the showbiz hall of fame. I sort of was aware as it was happening that this was rarefied air that I was in. And then when the show went away, I thought I had plans for my next chapter with another show like that, but the industry sort of turned on those shows. After the murder of George Floyd, there was all this clamor in the industry for “We need to talk to more Black creators and empower them.” In one of those conversations, I got my documentary, 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed. That came out of a conversation with HBO about “What would you like to work on?” And actually, the project was their idea. And so I got something out of that clamor. A lot of Black creators got the meetings and got things greenlit but didn’t actually get projects. By the time it was time to make the projects, the clamor had gone down.

, who is one of the most great and acclaimed directors of our time, is right here with me on Substack too. I think one of the reasons she did it is because she’s like, “I need to get my own voice out there.” And she had to independently raise money for her last movie that was based on a New York Times bestselling book. I still have three children and an 89-year-old mom and a wife, and I need to make sure we’re all eating every day or as often as we want to. So that’s the big story, and that’s happening all through the industry. I’d had all this life in podcasting, as you said, but I never really had what I would define as my own podcast, where I get to do whatever I want to do every week and follow my own nose.

What did that mean for booking guests for the show?

Most are people that I can reach out to directly. So that, I think, on its face means [the show] is different from most of these quote-unquote celebrity-led podcasts. I’m really proud of the fact that so far it is people I’m either in direct contact with or people where I’m like, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to be in direct contact with that person.” I think about Marc Maron’s podcast [WTF with Marc Maron], which if you’re a comedian is the blueprint. It was very clear at some point Marc went from “These are comedians who I have grudges with that I need to solve” to “This is the A-list celebrity whose movie’s out, and now my podcast is one of the cool stops in town.” Right? And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I think that I want to at least establish the groundwork of not starting there. I want to start personal.

Do you feel like having a built-in subscriber base who already knows your voice gives you the ability to skip the usual swings for A-list guests?

I mean, I definitely think that… like, if Sydney Sweeney called me...

Would you say yes?

Here’s what I would say: Do you actually know who I am? It’s important to me that the people I sit down with have some sense of who I am, because I’m not an entertainment interviewer, I’m not a celebrity stopper. And if you’re not willing to investigate and do the work, I don’t think I really need to talk to you. Now, my publicist might say differently.

Do you have a white whale guest?

Yes. My white whale guest has been the same white whale guest since I’ve started talking to people professionally. It’s Zack de la Rocha from Rage Against the Machine.

Have you tried to get him?

No, I’ve never sent a thing to Zack de la Rocha. I just got it confirmed about a year ago that he knows who I am, and I was very excited about that because I just think he’s probably in the mountains of Mexico with the revolution or rapping in his house on tracks we’ll never hear. But I’d say I’m big on not trying to make things happen not in their time.

I think there’s also a need for me to sit down with Denzel Washington at some point. I got invited to his AFI tribute years ago and I met him, and he knew who I was. United Shades of America was such a big deal. If you were of a certain age and at that point a CNN watcher, you saw me at some point. And 9:00 on a Sunday, which is when it aired, was a prime time for people to just turn on their TV and go, “Oh, what’s this about?” I just met Jodie Foster recently, and I was blown away that she knew who I was. That 9 p.m. on Sunday on CNN really did a lot of work for me with a certain demographic of people.

Do you feel like you’re still getting in front of new audiences?

I feel like part of the reason that it’s important to stay active on social media is because you never know when your clip is going to get in front of a new audience. So you never know when someone’s going to be scrolling on their phone and go, “Oh, who’s that guy?” People are also regularly going, “Oh, that’s where you are.” “You disappeared. You stopped being on Sunday nights on CNN, and I thought you dropped off the face of the earth.” So I think it’s important to stay in some of these social media spaces, because you never know when you’ll not even find a new audience, but find your old audience.

What’s the clipping strategy for the show?

Chris Rock taught me this years ago. He said, “More people see the trailer than see the movie.” So I’m very aware that on some level you want the clips to convert people to listeners of the podcast, but you’re also aware that a lot of these are just only going to be taken in as content on their own. And so there’s a little bit of pressure to make sure that it actually works on its own so if they never see the podcast, they got something out of it. But even with my clip recently with Ted Danson—we were promoting the Ted Danson episode, and he does this major apology for blackface—I was very aware, and me and the producers were like, “We don’t want to put up a two-minute clip of him apologizing for blackface on the internet ’cause that’s just going to work against all of us.” People are going to argue with that clip in the comments, when [in the episode] he talked for, like, 15 minutes. So what we did is we basically put together a teaser. Like, him sort of going, “Hey, can we talk about that?” And he’s like, “We can. Let’s do it.” I mean, it was done better than that. As a way to go, people will know what this is, or they won’t. But it makes you have to go find the thing. And also for me, he did such a generous thing by apologizing. I didn’t want to weaponize it against him by turning it into a two-minute clip that was going to take out all the nuance.

Has anyone clipped it independently and commented on it?

There have been some clips, yeah, like... TMZ clipped it, which was sort of hilarious. But the thing about it is that even when you go clip it, I’m finding it’s so clear that he’s earnest, that you have to be a real asshole to turn it into something that it’s not.

How did the deal with Pushkin Industries come to be?

So there’s a guy who works at Pushkin who fans of my Denzel Washington podcast will know under the moniker of Black Judgment. I’ve known Justin Richmond since he was a recording engineer at U.C. Berkeley, and he just happened to be assigned to our podcast because I was recording the Denzel podcast at U.C. Berkeley. Justin reached out to me and said, “Hey, if you ever want to get into podcasting again, Pushkin might be interested.” So that’s why the Pushkin thing started. I, of course, knew of Malcolm Gladwell. I read his books. I “blinked,” I “thunked,” I did all the things. So then I had a meeting with them. The biggest thing that is important in any deal, especially at this point in my career, is my joke is no new friends, unless those friends really can let you know that they know who you are. So it’s like I said earlier about Sydney Sweeney wanting to do the podcast. I am not the kind of product—and I think in showbiz we have to think of ourselves as products sometimes—that you can just throw me on anything and it’s going to work. I’ve met with a bunch of different podcast companies, had some good meetings, but I really kept coming back [to Pushkin].

Do you own the show?

It’s funny, I went in going, “I hope they can pay me for this,” and then after the way the industry fell apart, I was like, “Oh, I think I need to own all of it.” Which means I have to pay for this. And so we have a relationship and a partnership, but the ownership of the podcast is mine. I just sort of feel like it’s important to bet on myself, especially at this point in my career and at this point in the history of this industry, and at this point in the history of this country. Like, I can’t be giving away pieces of myself knowing where everything is headed. Not to say that I wouldn’t do that under the right circumstances, but it was just really important to me. Sometimes you accidentally end up owning things because nobody thinks it’s valuable. And then sometimes—like the Denzel podcast I didn’t own, and sometimes I was like, “It is crazy that I don’t own that.” ’Cause nobody else would’ve come up with that idea. Or I didn’t own it. I do now. But to me it’s like, I can’t go through that again, especially when every now and again now that podcasts are being sort of... you’re seeing them on Netflix and Hulu and whatever, and people are getting paid for exclusive deals. And I’m not saying I want to do that, but I want to have the option that if that happens, it benefits my family the most.

How does Substack fit into the ownership piece?

I brought in my audience and then built an audience that was way bigger than the people I brought into Substack. And I was just like, “Oh.” I had an email list, but suddenly the email list was doing something. The regular practice of writing on Substack became a thing that I really enjoyed, and the fact that some people were giving me $5 a month for it gave me the incentive to be up till 2 in the morning sometimes, like, “I gotta get this out.” When I finally decided I’m going to do the podcast, I was like, “Well, I have to name it Who’s With Me,” ’cause the Substack has become such a core part of my creative identity, and I only want to build on that. And I’ve already planted a flag on this Who’s With Me concept on Substack. Instead of coming up with nine different names for things, I think this thing has a longer tail than I realized when we came up with that name. So yeah, for me, the Substack is why the podcast is named Who’s With Me, because I had built this community of people with Who’s With Me, and the podcast is now growing out of that.

You’re distributing the show through Substack—uploading each episode and sending it out to other listening platforms. Why did you set it up this way?

I find it’s great because it creates a natural hub for the podcast. Yes, you can go get it on all these other platforms, but I like the regularity and the ease of saying that if you join me here, then you’ll know when the podcast is coming up. Because as we know, with the other platforms, your favorite podcast might be out today, but you might not think about it, or you might not get an alert about it. So I enjoy the fact that on Substack it’s just another way in which I can reach people and go, “Hey, come out again. One more thing for you.”

You mentioned you came in with an email list. You’re now at 137,000 subscribers. What was the size of the list you started with?

I think I showed up at Substack with 20,000 people on my email list. I was not doing much with my email list, because nobody knew what to do with an email list at the time. I would send out emails very irregularly. And so once I got to Substack, someone was like, “Oh, you gotta do it weekly.” Very early on, I wrote a thing about Tracy Chapman coming back to the Grammys, and that was my first real breakthrough moment, and it taught me a lot. I feel like a lot of being a creator is like, what do you like about yourself, but what do other people like about you? And do you like what they like about you? And if you do, you lean into it. If you don’t, you stop doing it.

You start each episode of Who’s With Me? by giving your guests their flowers. Is there anyone else on Substack right now you’d want to give theirs?

I love doing this. I’m going to start with a guy that I actually helped recruit to Substack, . I came to him as a fan. He’s a combat-sports journalist, and I’m thinking about him right now because he [was] the leading commentator on the UFC White House fight. And Luke is a guy who, because he’s a little bit of a lefty MMA commentator, it puts him in a sort of a desert because there’s not a lot of left-wing MMA commentators. And so he has been able to come to Substack and just be himself. Now I see clips of Luke on CNN and I’m like, that glow-up has happened. He’s on . That has happened because I think he came to Substack and was able to sort of just be himself and not be a guy who was trying not to get his fans mad at him.

I would also say , who was with the Washington Post, is doing a lot of great work as a journalist on Substack. There’s a lot of great journalism on Substack, but I think about her story in particular, because it’s about getting fired from the Washington Post, and she’s now writing about her arbitration. She’s also somebody who, if you fire her, you clearly don’t know what you’re doing as a business. Seeing her spread her wings on Substack is great.

was one of the first Black creators I knew who was on Substack. He was on Substack way before I was. His Substack is I like to bring him up because he’s really doing important work in the Black food space and just in Black organizing in general.

I can keep going. I’m going to miss somebody. But let’s just do those three!

The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

It can be hard to put your finger on what makes a Substack get-together so memorable. The depth of conversation? For sure. The variety of people in one space? Absolutely. But mainly I think it’s the fact that Substack writers and creators have the same shared notion that culture thrives when everyone is allowed to put their ideas out into the world.

This past month, we’ve seen this in action as Substack events popped off around the globe, bringing communities of otherwise unconnected creatives together in person. Hundreds of creators came together for our annual U.K. bestsellers drinks in London. In Paris, Substack’s burgeoning French scene gathered for an evening of drinks and conversation. In Madrid, Substack writers met for a one-of-a-kind writing workshop, complete with typewriters, to inspire their next posts. More and more, publishers are organizing their own meetups for their communities all over the world.

Bringing writers together, no matter where they live, is something we have always set out to do here at Substack. In April, we introduced the ability to translate all short-form content on Substack—one of our most-requested features—in order to bring creators closer to their global communities. Today we’re going one step further, announcing that longer-form posts on Substack can now be translated from English into 15 different languages, and from 100 different languages into English. This means language no longer has to be a barrier for the work you publish.

We’re also announcing new country leaderboards for users based in the U.K., France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain, which are among the five fastest-growing markets outside the U.S.

These leaderboards offer a valuable way for audiences to find both established bestsellers and up-and-coming publications in their countries, and we are excited about the opportunities this will bring for these publishers. (If you don’t see your country listed here yet, stay tuned.)

All of this is to say that we are building a truly global economic engine for culture; a place where geography or language should not inhibit your scale and ambition for your community, or how far your ideas can spread.

One in three paid creators now exist outside the U.S., and in Europe alone, Substack creators collectively make $90 million annually. What’s more, we are hearing directly from publishers that their audiences are not only growing; they’re growing across the globe. Take food writer , whose Dutch-language publication already reaches readers in 95 countries. Or French film critic , a top bestseller in our film and TV category for his fascinating take on cinema and culture, or , whose Italian publication tops our global culture list.

Country leaderboards and post translations build on the work that we are already doing internationally, including the expansion of our legal Defender program and our events programming.

If you get time today, do explore the incredible bestselling work on Substack around the world, here. You won’t be disappointed.

Harris grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she watched melodramas with her aunt, crime capers with her dad, and, at 12, wrote a letter to the local film critic disputing his review of The Other Boleyn Girl. In this season finale of Open Tab, she sat down with Substack’s head of new media, , to talk about studying journalism (and thinking she might break the next Watergate), her four years at New York magazine’s Vulture, and launching on Substack in 2020. They met at Trees Lounge inside the Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, one of Harris’s home theaters, sipped tequila gimlets, and filled in the rest.

Hanne: So you have subscription revenue as your core, but you also have a podcast, you do TV writing, you still do some freelance for legacy media, and you do some brand stuff. How do you think about the whole mixed-revenue stream, the business of Hung Up?

Hunter: The newsletter is my job. Everything else feels like something fun, something I feel curious about. But I do feel very seriously that people who read the newsletter are customers, and I am fulfilling my contract with them. I just think it’s the most disrespectful thing in the world to be like, “Okay, maybe it’ll come out, maybe it won’t.” Before I owe anyone else work, I owe them work—the readers. And then the brand stuff is just kind of fun. Sometimes it’s like working a different muscle. Like I’ll edit a TikTok and want to kill myself, because my thumbs are too big and my nails are too long to open CapCut. The podcast started as: I just want to have something with my best friend. And it all kind of feels like an ouroboros, where I’m talking about the same thing again and again. But there are people who read the newsletter but don’t listen to the podcast, and vice versa. And the TV stuff is maybe my dream. But if I could write my own series tomorrow, I would still keep the newsletter, because in the middle of the night I’m like, “I love a girl’s emotional support inner wrist tattoo,” and I need a place to say that.

Hanne: You’ve described yourself as having insane tunnel vision. That when you get one of these obsessions, you can really, really follow it. Why do you think that works for you and your audience?

Hunter: I think we just both have the same disease: being insatiable. I think that’s it. Part of it is growing up as an only child, where I just had to entertain myself a lot. And so I maybe will spend more time with something than other people did. The tunnel vision thing really came from one of my old editors who was like, “You have really bad tunnel vision.”

Hanne: Was it a compliment or an insult?

Hunter: No, it was an insult. She meant it. But then I was like, “Oh, yeah, I totally do.” In every part of my life.

Hanne: What’s the most embarrassing obsession that you’ve ever had tunnel vision about?

Hunter: Charlie Puth. I went through a big Charlie Puth phase. He really was the pop prince. Like, he should have been Justin Bieber of the next generation. And then there was one time that I went to see him in concert at Radio City, and I was singing along to every single song and did not mute my camera. And so everyone heard me singing along. One of my friends still talks about it to this day.

Hanne: How do you think about how much of yourself to bring into a celebrity profile?

Hunter: I think, none. In an ideal world you can get a sense of my curiosities, but it’s not about me. Whenever I read a profile that feels like too much about the writer, I’m like, okay, but what did George Clooney have to say?

And then there’s a real romance when you’re preparing for one, where you read everything about this person, everything they’ve ever said, and then you go into the interview and they are disappointing, just because you’ve built them up in your head. But that disappointment should not show up in the piece. There’s a real moment where you have to become very dispassionate. It’s almost like a breakup, because you really have to break up with your idea of someone and just tell the story as it happened.

Hanne: Is the disappointment because you’ve added something into the picture? Or is it always the same, that they’re more human than you thought?

Hunter: I think it’s just that they are human in general. It’s hard to get to know someone like Julia Roberts and be like, “Oh my god, she’s real. She’s a real person.” It’s honestly like when you go out on a date with someone. A little bit of air has just left, because now you’re real in front of me. You know when someone exists on a page for so long and then it happens, and it’s like: okay, we’re just two people talking.

Hanne: A lot of your writing in Hung Up weaves in your personal experience and relationships. What’s the internal thermometer about when you allow your personal life into your writing?

Hunter: The newsletter is written by me. At first I thought I wanted my friends to contribute and all of that. And then pretty quickly I was like, no. This is mine. I’m just such a perfectionist, I have to have my eyes on every single thing. I’ve grown to love that about the newsletter. I’m a star student, star employee, but a terrible boss. And I’m the only person deciding everything, which is nice.

Hanne: What’s your writing process actually like? You’ve mentioned a number of times that you wake up and you just have to write about something.

Hunter: Basically, yeah. I have a note in my phone of ideas that I think about when I wake up or when I go to sleep. Day to day, I’m quite strict about the scheduling. I have to be up, walk my dog, showered and at the desk by 9:30 at the latest. Then I’ll have a little lunch break, and in the afternoon when I can’t write anymore, I’ll watch a screener or go see a movie. And then I have a big burst of energy around 6, 7, or 8 p.m., and I’ll move locations, sit at the coffee table, and write there.

Hanne: You’re also doing the companion podcast for [the HBO medical drama] The Pitt. That seems like a slightly different muscle set.

Hunter: Something that I like about the newsletter that I hadn’t really considered before is that when I write something, everyone knows it’s coming from Hunter, who’s a Black woman, who’s 31, who lives in Brooklyn, who has a dog that’s a schnoodle but she won’t say that. She will say that she has a poodle mix, because schnoodle sounds insane.

When I was writing for Vulture, writing for a magazine, you don’t always have that context. There’d be times where I’d make a joke about SZA and someone would be like, “Oh my god, this white man is talking down to this Black woman.” It plays differently. With The Pitt podcast, it’s the first time in a while I’ve felt some of that, where people who listen don’t know anything else about me. I am myself, but I’m also kind of on my best behavior, because people might not get every one of my jokes.

Hanne: It sounds a little more like being on a stage than being in the living room hanging out with your Hung Up crew.

Hunter: Totally.

FOOTNOTES

Trees Lounge—Unexpected bar within Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

The Other Boleyn Girl—Panned by the Tulsa World critic. Defended by a 12-year-old Hunter.

Vulture’s Gossip Girl recaps—introduced a Hunter to writing about pop culture on the internet.

The Zendaya cover story for GQ

Charlie Puth—Underrecognized “pop prince” and subject of Hunter’s most “embarrassing” tunnel vision.

The Pitt—Hunter co-hosts the official companion podcast to the hit show.

Ouroboros—Ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail. Hunter says her newsletter, podcast, and brand work exist in a loop.

Ask Polly—Written by . Hunter’s North Star on Substack. “I could never be so raw, vulnerable, and also kind of moody and mischievous on the page.”

Friends with Money—Nicole Holofcener film in which all the characters are, in Hunter’s words, “absolutely rancid.”

Incredible movie about eating in bed—Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, and a bowl of carbonara in Heartburn, based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Nora Ephron.

Today we’re introducing the next phase of Substack’s native sponsorships program, with an inaugural cohort of flagship partners who are collectively investing millions of dollars into creators on Substack. If you are a Substack bestseller who is interested in participating and shaping the program, you can publish your Creator Kit now.

The deal most of the internet offers creators goes something like this: We’ll give you reach if you give us your audience. Perform for the algorithm. Hope for a minority share of a platform’s own revenue, or figure out the money part yourself. Build your following on our platform, under our rules, subject to our priorities—and if any of that changes, good luck.

Most creators accept this deal because they feel like they have no choice. The platforms are where the audiences are. And over time, the system shapes you. You learn to make things the algorithm rewards instead of things you believe in.

Substack is built on a different theory: Give publishers a direct connection to the people who believe in them. Let people pay for the work they value.

We know that model works. Now more than 100,000 publishers make money on Substack through the subscription model. The top 10 collectively make more than $100 million a year, while tens of millions of subscribers across the network give creators the opportunity to build both audience and business in one place.

At the same time, some of the most successful creators have been finding ways to expand their business and better serve their community by partnering with organizations that help them offer more perks, invest more deeply in their editorial, and introduce new features for subscribers.

’s sponsored letter with Hinge ranked as ’s fourth-most-engaged letter in 2024. She wrote about this herself that year: advertisements on Feed Me, done right, are not compromising her audience-first model.

built his own Product Pass—a collection of complementary product access and trials to companies like Granola, valued at more than $30,000 and offered as a perk to his Annual and Insider subscribers.

reimagined one of his most-read essays and brought it to life as a video.

collaborated with a design partner to unveil a redesign for her publication, .

These creators, along with their independent agents and managers, handled this work themselves. They had to figure out the outreach, negotiate the terms, manage the relationships, and handle the logistics, on top of the work of showing up for their subscribers.

Making something great is hard enough. We want to help make the rest easy.

Substack’s native sponsorships program makes great partnerships simple. We’re excited to work with our flagship partners, including Yahoo Scout, Whatnot, Granola, Balenciaga, T-Mobile, Polymarket, and Uber. These forward-thinking brands recognize that some of the most interesting conversations happening on the internet are driven by writers and creators on Substack. They’ll be building with, and investing millions of dollars in, the creators who choose to participate

These are not arbitrarily inserted ads. They are direct partnerships between brands and publishers who have already built robust audience-first businesses.

Creators choose who they work with. They set the creative direction. They keep full editorial independence. Our job is to take care of what they shouldn’t have to—the matchmaking, the infrastructure, the logistics—so they can stay focused on the work.

To help these publishers control their experience with sponsorship-related revenue, we’ve built Creator Kits, a new tool for creating a media kit for potential brand partners, available today to bestsellers. By publishing your Creator Kit, you can let us know you’re interested in brand collaborations. It is also your entry point into what’s coming next: a partnership platform where you will be able to connect directly with brands investing in the Substack creator ecosystem.

Learn More: How do I set up a Creator Kit on Substack?

Subscriptions are the ultimate proof point of an audience-first media business. Sponsorships, when correctly aligned, can amplify the value of the direct relationship between publisher and audience, creating a stronger foundation for a growing business and community.

Other platforms have built a model that rewards performance. We’re building one that rewards trust.

The system should serve the people who use it, not the other way around. For creators, that means helping you make money doing the work you believe in.

Hamish: You’re a newshound, a scoop-getter, a news-breaker, and a tabloid journalist of sorts.

Lachlan: Allegedly.

Hamish: Cut from the cloth of an old-school type of reporter. And that’s kind of special in today’s world, because lots of people are just random opinionators and mouthers-off.

Lachlan: I’m an old-school newshound. Some would say a muckraker. I spend a lot of time meeting and greeting and ingratiating and sourcing. I always say I’m only as good as my sources, and that’s how I get scoops—being out and about, going out into the world and finding out new information. And then coming back, standing it up, tapping it up. And as we would say, putting it in the paper, which is now a newsletter.

Hamish: You were the number two editor at the National Enquirer, and through your work there you discovered that they were essentially paying for stories so that they could kill those stories on behalf of some powerful figures: Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein.

Lachlan: That’s correct.

Hamish: Tell me, what was it like to write that story and have it out in the world? Because it was complicated, and it involved so much personal stuff and was a big risk for your journalism career.

Lachlan: And legally a big risk, because I was under, and still am, a nondisclosure agreement. That piece was easily the hardest piece I’ve ever had to write, and it wasn’t fun to write it. It’s fun now to have written it and to talk about it. I remember being at the ASMEs, the magazine awards, and it was right around the time that the indictment had come down against Donald Trump, the hush money indictment. I saw Jake Silverstein, the editor of the Times Magazine, there. I didn’t know him. I said, “G’day, mate. I think I’ve got a cracking yarn.” And he said, “Well, let’s follow up, and we’ll meet about it.” I sit down to write it and I thought, “I can’t do this.” I was getting out old files and I was looking through text messages to re-create scenes, and, as I write about in the piece, my father died suddenly during when all of this was happening. I just thought, I can’t go over this stuff again. It’s just too much for me. And for months, I just couldn’t get anything on the page. It actually took me a year to write. Willy Staley [story editor at the New York Times] said, “Why don’t we do this in chapters? You’re good at writing your column, your newsletter. Why don’t we write this in chapters?” And I finally had the confidence knowing that I didn’t have to file 10,000 words, I just had to file a chapter at a time. I sat down and I wrote the first chapter, and I thought, “Okay, I might be able to do this.” It went through the machinery of the Times. They go [para]graph by graph and give you the colonoscopy of fact checking. They call everyone, and they re-report basically the entire piece out. But it took a year for the whole piece to come together. And it’s easily one of the proudest moments I’ve had when it did finally publish and the whole story was out there.

Hamish: Can you explain for the average person what catch-and-kill actually looks like?

Lachlan: It wasn’t a term I was familiar with when I took the gig as executive editor of the National Enquirer. The first year was run-of-the-mill tabloid fare: Jen and Ben. True-crime yarns. Not Pulitzer Prize–winning stuff. But there were yarns we broke that moved the needle.

It was towards the end of that first year where I had a tip from a very good source who calls me on a Sunday and says, “Weinstein is being questioned over a groping allegation in Tribeca, and I can get you the girl.” I immediately called [National Enquirer editor in chief] Dylan Howard and I said, “I’ve got a cracking one here.” And Dylan just immediately said, “Who’s the source?” Something tweaked in me—Why are you just immediately going to that question, as opposed to how do we get this story across the line?” And it was the next day that the Daily News broke it.

After that, Dylan came into my office and said, “We need to offer her a five-figure amount for her story.” And I was like, “We had the scoop yesterday and we didn’t need to pay her. And now you want to give her money to get her story.” And I just remember thinking, “Something’s off with this whole thing.” She doesn’t want paying. She wanted to get the story out. We had the story yesterday.

Hamish: Why did you start Breaker?

Lachlan: You were telling me for years to strike out on my own as an independent media. You were at me for years. And guess what? You were right.

Hamish: Thank you.

Lachlan: At the time, I thought you were mental when you were like, “What are you doing at legacy?” And you were the bloke who kept saying—because you’ve got to remember, The Daily Beast had a newsletter called Confider, which turned out to be an industry must-read—“Why are you doing this for these people? Strike out on your own.” And you said that to me again when I went to the Hollywood Reporter. Which you were right. I should have just gone straight from The Daily Beast and struck out on my own.

I was freelancing, writing for Vanity Fair and THR and The Ankler, and I thought, I could keep freelancing or I could try and create something myself. And getting back to my late old man, he was 41 when he started his business. And this was right around that same age. And I thought, “Fuck it. I’m entrepreneurial. Here is this opportunity to go off and do it.” What’s the worst thing that can happen? I could lose my life savings.

Hamish: But people respect you more for having done it, even if it doesn’t work out. You are actually improving your career prospects by being entrepreneurial in the first place, by showing you’re willing to do something bold and taking on that risk.

Lachlan: Look, my history has been a series of punts, of gambles. Moving to London at 22 and not knowing anyone. Nailing that and going to New York. But it’s been a series of punts, and most of them have paid off in a weird kind of way. And I think the news gods respect that, if you do take a punt. And starting Breaker was a punt. It’s easily the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m working harder than I’ve ever done—16-, 18-hour days, seven days a week. But I’m creating something that, from the readers I speak to and the subscribers I interact with, is special. It’s something that if it’s not out by 8:30 p.m. on a Tuesday and Thursday, they’re texting me, “Where is it? What’s going on with Breaker?”

Hamish: You were starting this company with a partner. It didn’t work out for whatever reasons. What was that aspect of it like for you?

Lachlan: We had a business that wasn’t growing, so that was problematic for obvious reasons. I’m in a runway situation. I have a certain runway of money, and if this business isn’t growing, I’m in a pickle. And that pickle is me sleeping rough. Things got very real. We had to have a real conversation, and that conversation resulted in him going off in one direction and me having to think very carefully about: how do I propel this business forward?

I said to myself, “I have to resurrect this, and I have the fall to do it. The clock is ticking.” And I thought three things. One, you have to put on a killer event. Two, you have to relaunch the pod with a stellar lineup. And three, you have to break stories that are impactful and consequential. If you do all three, you save the business. If you don’t, we are fucked. And guess what? Fear is one hell of a motivator. The second season of the Breaker pod, we launched with Joe Scarborough, we had , , Jeff Fager, David Remnick. A stellar lineup. We went from being in dive bars to two-star Michelin restaurants. I then broke a number of massive yarns, including breaking the Air Puck story—the deal that Puck was acquiring Air Mail. I broke a Murdoch yarn that CNBC picked up. And I put on one hell of a downtown media party. The New York Times came and covered it, wrote a style section piece. And that three-pronged approach saved the business. It led to a wave of subscribers, it led to a wave of revenue, and it led to me getting to Christmas and thinking, “We’re good. We’re going to hit profitability by year one.” And we were able to announce just the other week that Breaker is profitable. And mate, there was a time I didn’t think we were gonna make it. There was a time I’d wake up in the middle of the night and paint the bathroom, 50 shades of puke. [Now] I can sit here in front of you and say, “I have a profitable business.”

Hamish: What do you think your dad would think of you in this situation?

Lachlan: I do think about what he would think, and he would get a kick out of it. I wish he was around to see it. He went off every day at 6 a.m.to Greensborough, in Melbourne, where his accountancy business was. He started his practice repping plumbers and tradies and ended it repping CEOs and footy stars. And I look at that as the trajectory of Breaker. I’m starting off small, and I have high hopes. And mate, I’ve had a ripper run. It’s not time to go at all, it’s fucking far from it. It’s inspiring to me to think back to those last words that he gave me, which were “Do something you love. Just go off and fucking do something you love.” And I love what I do every day. I meet the most amazing people. I get to tell the most amazing stories, and I’m very lucky.

FOOTNOTES

Tom & Jerry’s—Lachlan’s longtime haunt. 288 Elizabeth St., New York City

Breaker—Lachlan’s twice-weekly media newsletter and podcast covering what’s happening in media, power, and culture in downtown Manhattan and beyond.

Sulzberger barbecue—exclusive annual gathering hosted by the New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger in upstate New York. Where the Breaker fedora made its debut.

Yarn—a story, a scoop, a tale worth telling.

The National Enquirer—Lachlan was executive editor under Dylan Howard. Owned by American Media Inc. (AMI).

Dino the doorman—The AMI source who claimed Trump had a love child, passed a polygraph on secondhand information, and was paid $30,000 for a story that never ran. The first catch-and-kill Lachlan says he witnessed firsthand.

National Enquirer Shielded Donald Trump From Playboy Model’s Affair Allegation—Wall Street Journal story for which Lachlan was a key anonymous source. He fed the reporters the term “catch and kill” as cover. It ran four days before the election.

What I Saw Working at the National Inquirer—NYT Magazine exposé published in April 2024. Lachlan was under a 13-page NDA while he wrote it.

Jake Silverstein—Editor of the New York Times Magazine, whom Lachlan approached cold at the National Magazine Awards after the Trump hush money indictment came down.

Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, and Ronan Farrow—reporters who blew the Weinstein story open in 2017. Their work is what prompted AMI to send Lachlan the legal threat that backfired and convinced him to start talking.

Graydon Carter’s Air Mail—its acquisition by Puck was one of Lachlan’s Breaker scoops.

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology—Where Lachlan studied journalism, after completing a taxing entrance exam whose results were published in the newspaper. His mom drove to a 7-Eleven the night before to get the early edition.

Hanne: For somebody growing up today in journalism school who might not know what old newsrooms were like, what was the culture?

Joanna: Well, I mean, first of all, they were incredibly noisy because you had typewriters. And I am not exaggerating when I say that you would get seven pieces of paper, seven pieces of carbon paper. You would put it into the typewriter, and you would have to think very carefully about what you wanted to say, because if you made a mistake, you had to either rip the whole thing out and start all over again or you had to correct it seven times. And you would have what was called Tipp-Ex whiteout, where you had to cross it out. So there was more planning ahead of what you were going to write. It was fantastically noisy. Then computers came in, and half the newsroom, largely men, would say, “Well, I’m not going to use a computer. That’s ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong with a typewriter.” And of course, those people just disappeared out of the newsroom. But it was a very fun, lively culture, and you felt like what you were doing was important, because it was a way of getting information to people. And it was tribal, so people read The Guardian, and that was their tribe. They read the Daily Telegraph or the [London] Times, and that was their tribe. And now of course, we’re inundated with individual voices coming at us, which you don’t really have a sense of their tribe necessarily. Of course, you know, there are lots of newspapers still going, but it’s not quite the journey that was curated for you by the older editors.

Hanne: It was presumably pretty male-dominated at the time, those newsrooms?

Joanna: It was very male-dominated. I worked on Fleet Street when I was working on the Daily Telegraph, the legendary Fleet Street. So you had the high courts at one end, you had St. Paul’s [Cathedral] at the other, and in between you had the big British newspapers. And so at the end of the day, all the journalists would roll out of the various papers and congregate in two or three pubs, the best of which was called El Vino, which is still there. But the crazy thing about it was—and this was in the ’80s—that women weren’t allowed to order or pay for drinks.

Hanne: That’s unbelievable.

Joanna: Isn’t it? Of course, now I look back on it through the lens of, you know, feminism, and think: how outrageous. But at the time, me and the smattering of girlfriends I had in the newsroom were like, “Well, this is great.”

Joanna: When I was editor of Cosmo, we got two questions all the time, consistently the entire time I was there, and this is probably going back through time immemorial, through Helen Gurley Brown’s days, which were “How do I have an orgasm?” and “How do I ask for a raise?” Every month, my monthly mailbag, those were the two dominant questions. So those were the two things we were trying to answer.

Hanne: So it wasn’t changing the direction, actually. You were listening to what was already being asked for and leaning more into that.

Joanna: Well, I’m assuming those questions came in before I was there. And it wasn’t “How do I give my husband or my boyfriend an orgasm?” It was like, “How do I have one?” And then it was like, “How do I make more money?” Because there was a sense in which women understood they were probably being underpaid—which they were—and they wanted to have the power to ask for something, and be successful at it.

Hanne: When you left Hearst you said, “My route is being recalculated.” What did you mean?

Joanna: The impact of digital on a magazine company was enormous, and I was, in essence, doing what a lot of editors were doing, which is managing decline. And I have managed decline well. We had declined, in terms of market share, probably less than other people. But at a certain point, there’s a moment when you want to start leaning into growth and doing something fresh. And I had been at Hearst for 12 years, and it felt like, oh, there’s a gap in the clouds here where I can sort of take off. My kids were older, and I’d had an absolute blast, but it wasn’t going to last. You know? I think everybody in magazines knew there was a train driving straight at you called digital, and it was going to mow you down, and it was much less fun than it had been.

Hanne: If you’ve worked hard at a professional career you always have moments where something is changing direction in a way you didn’t expect, or perhaps you did but you weren’t ready for. And I love that idea of leaning into it instead of just accepting it.

Joanna: It’s very easy to get stuck. You see people get stuck all the time, and then you see it’s too late for them to change, and you can’t get out. And so I had a moment in the clouds when I could get out. I had a fantastic time at Hearst. I loved working there. But these are hard jobs, and you can’t build the railroad fast enough to keep the train from mowing you down. Or at least that’s what it felt like in the moment.

And now these magazines don’t exist, you know? They just don’t—the physical product, for the most part, doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s not as luxurious, and it’s not needed as much because it’s impossible to compete with the phone. The phone is a fabulous device. These people that say, “Oh my god, the phones.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” The phone keeps us connected. It’s fantastic. There’s so many ideas in there. I can do everything on my phone. It’s incredible. And so to keep sort of running after the phone with an old magazine, sort of saying, “It used to be better in my day”—it’s not true. The world has changed. And you want to be part of that change.

Hanne: When you look at the media landscape today, where do you see the most innovation happening?

Joanna: Well, I think the most innovation is happening on platforms like Substack and YouTube, because people are figuring out what works, what people tune in to. And people are feeling more confident in their voices, I think, which means we hear from a lot of voices that we don’t normally hear from, because they’re mediated by media. And some of them are alarming, and some of them are really interesting, and I love the fact that you can get your own audience by having an authentic voice.

[Before] there just weren’t these places for individual voices to go, and so they were trapped within an old media ecosystem that couldn’t pay them enough, that wouldn’t give them direct connection with the reader. And now we have this incredible set of platforms where you get direct connection with the audience. And you get to do what you’re good at without the heavy hand of corporate America squashing you down, which is often what happens.

Hanne: Do you find your voice changing now that it’s on Substack, that you’re unleashed in a different way?

Joanna: A little bit. For me, Substack is a bit like early Twitter. I was a big adopter of Twitter at the beginning. I absolutely loved it. It felt like you were having a conversation with writers. You could discover all sorts of new voices. And since Elon Musk’s taken over, it’s just completely changed. You get this kind of endless negativity coming in, which doesn’t even feel real. It’s not relevant to me. It doesn’t feel real or useful. Whereas Substack, actually, you feel like, “Oh, I can have a conversation with this person. I love the way this person writes. Oh, I can reach out directly to them.” So you have this sense of a real directness of content, which is kind of high.

FOOTNOTES

, 108 Greenwich Ave., New York—Cozy British tearoom and shop owned by Nicola Perry and her daughter, who produces and publishes the shop’s interview series on Substack.

Ginger cake—served warm with custard.

The Junior Yorkshire Post—where Joanna published her first piece at age 10, for which she was paid £2.

The Spectator—where Joanna began her journalism career in 1984.

Fleet Street—London’s historic newspaper row. Home to the Daily Telegraph, where Joanna worked in the late 1980s, along with most of the major British national papers.

El Vino, 47 Fleet Street—Storied wine bar, still open.

Emma Tucker—editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal. She and Joanna covered the same IRA bombing in their early 20s.

Helen Gurley Brown—Cosmo’s transformative longtime editor. Joanna: “She really re-created the modern template for a magazine. Vanity Fair wouldn’t have existed without Helen Gurley Brown, I don’t think.”

—longtime Elle magazine advice columnist. Writes .

—author of Fire and Fury and three subsequent books on Donald Trump. Writes . He and Joanna co-host a podcast three times a week.

—longtime New Yorker satirist, later let go. Now writes on Substack.

The Bold Type—scripted TV series on that was loosely inspired by Joanna’s career.

Since its founding, Substack has sought to create the best possible conditions for cultures of many varieties to flourish online. Doing so often involves difficult trade-offs, but on top of our core model—where we only earn when writers, artists, journalists, musicians, and so on earn—we’ve managed to chart a distinctive course relative to other platforms. We hope that people, their work, and the communities that form around it all can be more real here than has historically been possible elsewhere, where massive scales and advertising models seem to drain reality even from good-faith creators over time.

A few months ago, we shared this vision for what Substack can be: a place where you can build your own corner of the internet. That means your branding, your community, and your rules, without sacrificing the network that helps you grow. Today, we’re excited to announce the next feature in that effort, which we think will make it possible for even more people to be fully themselves and at home on Substack. We call it Reply Rules, and it combines a couple of elements:

1. Anyone can now set their own Reply Rules, which will appear to anyone replying to them: in comments on their posts, in replies to their Notes, or in Chat.

2. There is now a system that learns every time you hide a reply and preemptively hides replies it thinks you would hide yourself (you can always see these and un-hide them, which the system will also learn from).

Soon, this system will read your Reply Rules when you set them and use them as guidance for its actions, in addition to what it sees you do. Our hope is that it gives you more time to focus on what matters: creating the work that encourages people to stop by your corner of the internet in the first place.

Learn how to set up your Reply Rules here.

Your house, your rules

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed Substack’s arc over the years that we try to think carefully about how moderation of various kinds can help or hurt writers, artists, journalists, musicians, and other creatives. To us, the following principles are of the utmost importance:

• Putting power in the hands of individuals and communities, rather than platform owners;

• Reducing administrative burdens—it shouldn’t require extensive learning, mastering interfaces, or fiddling with controls to have a good experience; and

• Facilitating clear zones of ownership. Substack may be lightly moderated, but in your house, your rules should apply.

Reply Rules reflect these values, and use contemporary technologies to make it easier than it’s ever been for Substacks to scalably set and maintain the kind of order that matters to them, using natural language and natural behaviors. Take a look at how some creators are already using Reply Rules to shape the conversations in their communities:

Write the rules you want. Hide the content you think shouldn’t be there. Let the system learn from you and, eventually, take much of the burden of this work off your plate.

Reply Rules are available today to all publications with their language set to English. To get started, go to your publication settings.

publishes jasmi.news, where she interviews AI researchers, eavesdrops at San Francisco house parties, and reports what she calls “an anthropology of disruption”—on-the-ground dispatches from how frontier technology is changing culture. At Substack’s recent Once and Future Media Forum, Jasmine shared her perspective on the comparative advantages she and other independent writers and creators hold in the age of AI: what skills are gaining value, which are losing it, and where economies of attention are going as a result. She’s the first to acknowledge that writers and creators hold a wide range of views—concerns, optimism, fears, curiosity — about what AI means for their work. But here she makes the case for why writers are better positioned than they might think, and what they can do to exercise that advantage whether they choose to use AI or not. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of her talk.

When economists debate the future of work, they often ask the question: what will humans’ comparative advantage be? I think the key to understanding what the future of work looks like is not, How can humans race against the machine, how can we generate slop faster than the machines can generate slop? but rather, What are the human strengths, and how can we understand what skills are going to go down in value now that AI has made them commoditized, versus what skills are going to go up in value because they are still scarce and because the machines simply aren’t very good at them yet? I’m going to introduce four ideas, or provocations, that have shaped the way that I think about AI and my own media career.

One: The value of summary will go down, and the value of secrets will go up.

Reporting is the act of taking private knowledge and making it public. The things that people have not said, things in whisper networks, the tacit knowledge, the open secrets that have never been put in the public domain—the journalist manages to pluck them out and make them public. When you persuade a source to tell you about some corporate malfeasance, or you venture to a remote town that few people have ever written about, or you sneak your way into a tiny underground party and talk about all the people who are there, you are working in a space where there is no training data.

That is what is really valuable. There’s a reason that robotic startups are paying thousands of people to strap little cameras to their heads so that they can fold T-shirts all day and try to take in the world from a human point of view. There’s a reason that data companies like Mercor are paying Redditors $100 an hour to write up their niche hobbies and explain the intricacies of being a knitter, or playing Magic the Gathering. There are all these details and tacit knowledge that you only know by doing, that AI hasn’t had access to yet because it’s just not in the data. AI can summarize, and it can remix information already out there, but it can’t see stuff. It can’t feel stuff. It can’t break news. And the thing that writers can uniquely do is all of that. You can go out into the world, and you can take that knowledge and you can make that public or you can sell it, and that is something that is really valuable.

Two: The value of static content will go down, and the value of live interaction will go up.

I don’t think we’re that far from a world where AI can take in any of our writing styles and replicate it to the point where your median reader will not be able to tell the difference, as long as you feed it the original reporting that you’ve gathered and some notes. And that is a scary thing. The thing is, though, that your audience does want to feel connected to you, and they want to know that a person is real and that you are the same person generating the text. There’s a reason why behind-the-scenes videos go really viral now. It’s because people don’t just want to see the final presentation; they want to see all the proof of work behind it.

For a solo creator, doing live interaction, events, podcast interviews, meetups and hangouts—these things prove that there is a life behind the voice. It allows people to make a connection between a living being and the words on the page and shows that the person’s point of view comes from somewhere. That stuff is going to be scarce, it’s going to be irreplaceable, and I think that most writers should be doing a lot more of it. Every time I do a big written and reported piece, afterward I block out about a month to just go to conferences, go on podcasts, and talk to as many people as possible. Some people don’t like that. They feel like it’s marketing, and it’s not the part that they really enjoy. But I think about it as building that connection and also as getting the ideas out to more people. If I care about the ideas, I want everyone to know about them, no matter the format.

Three: The value of bureaucracies will go down, and the value of founders will go up.

Anyone who works at a tech company will know that AI has blurred the lines between roles. Engineers became designers, and designers became engineers. And companies are also getting much smaller because one person at the very early stages can be their own data scientist, programmer, marketer all at the same time. I think it’s the same for media founders. I think that AI is going to offer a lot of value to people who are jacks-of-all-trades.

I’m a generalist. I think a lot of media founders, a lot of creators, this is your strength too. You don’t need an editor; you’re pretty good at editing your own work. You’re pretty good at picking your own stories. You’re pretty good at being your own marketer. And I think that it’s a real boon. I like that AI helps me with reading a contract before I sign it and telling me what to ask questions about. I like that AI can help me fact-check articles and look up the cites for every sentence, that it can clip videos, that it can negotiate speaking fees.

Before, people would say that if you’re a woman negotiating your speaking fees, you should ask a white man you know with a very large ego. I ask ChatGPT, and it’s incredibly good at this. There’s a lot of stuff that I do not want to do, and I really want AI to do it for me. And so I think this is going to be an amazing age for people who are media founders, who are excited about being sort of the directors and owners of their project and who take advantage of technology to do all the other stuff and focus on their creative vision.

Four: The value of polish is going to go down and the value of personal charisma and style and weirdness is going to go up.

There’s this saying that I was told when I once asked a senior media person whether I should take a staff job at a big publication. It was not The New Yorker, to be clear, but he told me that The New Yorker “makes bad writers good, good writers good, and great writers good.” When I wrote for the New York Times business section, I felt like I was basically outputting code syntax. It felt totally LLM-able. The reporting was not. Again, I’m very bullish on reporting—but the writing style itself was basically like you could shove that through Claude and be like, “Go figure it out.” And that was a little bit demoralizing, because I like writing and I like style.

The thing that’s really great, though, is that what every Substacker is already really good at is having a very distinct voice that their readers really feel a connection with. I think that your readers probably don’t mind that there are typos. They don’t mind that you get stuff wrong. That is what the AIs cannot do: being able to talk in the first person, being able to be provocative versus hedging every single little thing.

One thing that a lot of my AI and tech friends don’t really understand is that trust is not about information and its quality alone. It’s about the messenger. And so when they talk about having AGIs that do super-persuasion by writing the most persuasive sentence in the world, I think: I don’t think you understand trust, because it’s not about the sentence. It’s about who says it and their track record and what they’ve told me before. And the stronger your individual brand, the trust you build, the voice you have, the track record that is just yours, the better off you’ll be.

I imagine that some people who hear this might disagree with me on a bunch of things about AI progress. That’s okay. But I think that there are a lot of good reasons to be optimistic as a creator right now, as a writer, as an independent writer in particular, somebody who is not part of an institution and really just doing your own thing.

I live in San Francisco, and all the time I talk to my friends who are working at these AI companies, and they’re working 9-9-6 hours. And I’m like, “Why are you doing this?” And for some people it’s a mission. Other people are like, “I’m going to escape the permanent underclass so that in the post-scarcity utopia, I can finally make art and have a coffee shop.” And I’m like, “Dude, you don’t have to wait. You can literally do that right now.”

I really feel that if someone handed me a UBI check and 24 hours in a day, I would be doing exactly what I do right now. I would be talking to people, going out and seeing stuff, writing about it, talking to people about what I write. I really feel that it’s the best time in the world to be an independent writer, and I’m very glad to get to do it with all of you.

Watch Jasmine’s talk from The Once and Future Media Forum here.

Kelly is also the founding executive editor of Wired, where he spent the better part of the 1990s helping people understand technology as culture. Before that, he was a key editor and publisher at the Whole Earth Review and a central figure at the Whole Earth Catalog, the legendary tools-and-ideas resource that shaped a generation of independent builders and thinkers from the late 1960s through the 1980s. He is the originator of the “1,000 true fans” theory—the idea that a creator with direct access to their audience needs only 1,000 people willing to buy anything they make to sustain a living—one of the most practically influential ideas in independent media. In his conversation with Substack’s head of new media, Hanne Winarsky, he talks about his journey through tech and media and the subjects he writes about for his Substack audience at his newsletter, : taking a prototyping approach to life, why optimism is a daily practice, and some guesses for where we’re headed next.

Hanne: There was no web at the very launch of Wired?

Kevin: The web happened within a year or so of Wired. The first couple of years we were working on it, it was going to be a paper magazine with an online presence. So we started Wired Digital, which was actually in a separate building, and we developed a whole bunch of editors and people, and they were inventing what the media would be like. One of the questions that was really unclear to everybody was frequency. How often do we have to update this? We’re doing a monthly magazine. Are we going to have to update this every month?

Hanne: Oh my gosh. Yes, and then some.

Kevin: The thing that a lot of people did not believe was that people would read online. And secondly, people don’t remember, but in the ’80s, there were a lot of people saying that writing was over. Nobody was going to write. What we learned from the web was: no. People are going to write. Almost any of us writes far, far more words per day than our grandparents ever did. We’re all writers, really.

Hanne: And there’s that optimism again. Part of your thinking about communities and audiences at Wired coalesced into an essay around 2008 called “1,000 True Fans”—an idea that in a lot of ways is very much connected to what Substack is today. Can you describe where it came from?

Kevin: The premise is that if you have direct contact with your audience or your customers, you don’t need millions of them to make a living. If you have a label or a publisher or a studio in between you, then you might need millions. But if you take those away and go directly to them, you just have a much more feasible number to get to. You get $100 per year from 1,000 true fans, you can make it. I defined a true fan as somebody who would purchase anything you made. When I introduced this idea, there weren’t any examples of anybody I could find who was doing that organically.

Hanne: Was your hypothesis at the time that there would be a lot more people doing this?

Kevin: Yeah, I thought the arithmetic made sense. Even the weirdest, wackiest, esoteric idea that only appeals to one in a million people, with 8 billion people in the world, there’s still a thousand people who are going to be into your weird thing. The challenge is going to be finding them and making that connection. I think that’s where the next technology is going to be useful—maybe AI—that would allow you to find your thousand true fans.

Kevin: I talk about inevitabilities in technology. A lot of what we have is inevitable given the whole system. AI is inevitable. Any civilization anywhere in the galaxy that invented electricity and steam engines and motors is going to make AI. But the character of the AI is not inevitable. Quadrupeds as an animal are inevitable on any kind of planet with our kind of gravity, but a zebra is not. The specificity is not inevitable. How it shows up, the particulars, are completely up to us. We have a choice in the particulars, and those choices make a big difference. Who owns AI? Is it public? Is it international? Is it closed? Is it open? How is it financed? All those choices are choices we have. But AI itself is inevitable. Those minds are going to keep coming.

Life is going to continue on. There’s almost nothing we humans could do to eradicate life on the planet. But we can still manage natural systems for our benefit. The same thing with technology. I think we do have to manage it and garden it and steer it. The way to steer technology is through use. You want to embrace technologies and use them, because that’s the only way you get to steer them. If you prohibit them or ban them or refuse them, you don’t get to steer.

Hanne: It’s also the only way you start impacting the particulars, the things you actually control.

Kevin: We cannot think our way to the particulars. I call it “thinkism”—this idea that just thinking about things will solve stuff, [that] thinking about technology, we can figure out what it’s good and bad for. We can’t. We have to actually use it.

Hanne: This systems-level thinking, where do you think it came from? Were you just born with it?

Kevin: I don’t think it began that way. I think it’s something I learned. The way I would describe it now is this prototype approach to the world. What we want to think about is our use of social media right now—we’re still prototyping it. And the idea of prototyping your life rather than deciding what you’re going to do for the rest of your life. You try it for a couple of years and you go on. You prototype everything out of cardboard first. You make one to throw away, as the makers say. The first one you’re just going to throw away anyway.

I’ve collapsed some of that into my idea of “protopia.” We aren’t headed to utopia, where everything’s fine. We’re going to come to a world where things are a little tiny bit better, and we’re just incrementally prototyping our way forward. No massive jumps. Just 1% better, 1% better. That means there could be 49% crap in the world, 49% harm, and everybody knows it. I can make a long list of all the things wrong. But there could be 51% good. That 2% difference is hardly even visible.

Hanne: But it is. We are inching incrementally, prototyping, learning, perhaps painfully. It’s a combination of the immediate now and the very long term. The only way to do anything forever is to do something now, concrete, over and over.

Kevin: You sail forward.

FOOTNOTES

The Interval at Long Now—Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, San Francisco.

The Clock of the Long Now—built inside a mountain in West Texas, designed to tick for 10,000 years.

Jeff Bezos—contributed $42 million towards the Clock of the Long Now. Kevin cites him on the competitive advantage of thinking in longer time horizons.

The Whole Earth Catalog—Iconic counterculture magazine and product catalog. Described by Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford commencement address as “sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.”

Woodstock—where Kevin first encountered the Whole Earth Catalog, in a bookstore, in 1969.

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855)—the book that sent Kevin wandering.

The WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link)—one of the earliest online communities, co-founded by Stephen Brand and Kevin. Among the first places humans encountered flame wars, trolling, and people living with completely different online personas.

The first Artificial Life conference (ALife I)— Held at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987, the scientific gathering launched Kevin’s first book. He attended as a journalist and posted live notes to the WELL, “live-blogging before blogging.”

Louis Rossetto—co-founder of Wired, who recruited Kevin with the pitch that the magazine should feel “like it’s been mailed back from the future.”

Wired—launched in March 1993. Kevin served as founding executive editor until 1999. His current title is Senior Maverick.

“1,000 True Fans”—Kevin’s 2008 essay. The math: 1,000 fans who each spend $100 a year = a living.

Kraig Adams—Kevin’s 1,000 true fans example in action. Adams embarks on silent hikes with a drone following him and now sells tickets for fans to walk alongside him in person.

What Technology Wants (2010)—Kevin’s book arguing that technology is not separate from nature but an extension of it. Home of the concept of “the technium,” the self-organizing seventh kingdom of life.

Thinkism—Kevin’s word for the mistaken belief that thinking hard about a technology is sufficient to understand it. He thinks you only get to steer a technology by using it.

Protopia—Kevin’s concept of incremental progress. Not utopia (everything is fine) or dystopia (everything is terrible), but a world that is 1% better, year over year, through persistent prototyping.

Finite and Infinite Games (James Carse, 1986)—A guide to choosing optimism. Finite games have winners and losers and fixed rules; infinite games exist only to keep being played, with as many players as possible. Kevin suggests choosing infinite games wherever you can.

Minority Report (2002)—the Steven Spielberg film for which Kevin served as a futurist adviser.

Twice a month, internet-culture publication logs on with someone extremely online and asks them nearly the same set of questions: What memes are making you laugh? Where do you get your news? Do you text people voice notes? The series is called My Internet, and it’s one of several recurring formats that founders and have built since being laid off and starting their newsletter in 2021. Over the years, they’ve expanded it into a multi-vertical operation, with the free interview series drawing readers in and paid tiers that unlock essays, a Friday media gossip column, and a video series. Kate told us Embedded’s growth has been “a lesson in consistency”: nearly five years of publishing almost every week, building an audience entirely their own.

Kate has made her career in part out of naming what the internet is doing, contributing to our vernacular and comments sections phrases like “millennial pause” (first seen on Embedded) and “rawdogging.” She’s been cited as an expert by the BBC and CBC, and co-hosts ICYMI, Slate’s podcast about internet culture. Today we flip the script on one of the internet’s shrewdest observers, asking Kate to sit for her own Embedded Q&A and talk about the business she’s built around the format.

What’s been your best-performing newsletter post? Why do you think it hit?

It’s never the ones you expect, but this one is far and away Embedded’s most popular post, so much so that it was syndicated and translated into Dutch, and I still get notifications on it at least once a week. As for why it hit, I think you can’t overestimate the value of articulating a simple truth. I can sometimes hold myself back by not writing something purely because I assume it’s too simple or something people already know. But even if people already know something, it’s validating to see it in writing.

Embedded

You might just have to be bored

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci…

Read more

a year ago · 2273 likes · kate lindsay

You started Embedded on Substack in 2021 with no existing email list. What has kept you going?

When Nick and I got laid off, we decided to start a Substack to keep ourselves sane during another pandemic summer. We essentially treated Embedded like our full-time job while still receiving severance. It was exciting to finally have no rules and explore all types of content, and I think this freedom really fueled us those first few months. But I had also spent much of my early career fighting for success within traditional media without much growth, and ironically, once we went independent, that’s actually when those editors and publications found my work. It’s always been extremely affirming to carve my own path rather than fight for approval within the system.

What have been the biggest moments of growth for Embedded?

I will always remember that it was who gave us our first shout-out in her newsletter, and I think we got 500-something subscribers from that alone. Other than that, Embedded has really been a lesson in consistency. We’ll have pieces that pop off here and there, but almost all of our growth came slow and steady from reliably publishing almost every single week for the past five years.

How has the newsletter fed into your other work?

I see Embedded and ICYMI as practically sisters at this point. Often, I’ll write something for Embedded and not even realize it helped me work out my thoughts for an adjacent episode. Sometimes I’ll write something for Embedded that I know could be extrapolated into an ICYMI episode, but want see how Embedded readers respond first. My piece about the phone social contract is an example of one that ended up doing really well, and so that told me it would likely resonate with the podcast audience as well.

While there’s definitely a lot of overlap in terms of the types of readers and listeners, Embedded will always be my rock. It’s the reason I feel even a marginal sense of safety in an unpredictable media landscape.

How do you and Nick decide what goes behind the paywall?

This is something I’ve never been able to get a read on. I can tell you what hasn’t worked: paywalling interviews, paywalling link roundups, and I don’t think paywalling video has either. But I’m having fun with it and I like the privacy of a smaller audience. Otherwise, the things that blow up in terms of paid conversations are almost never what I expected—except for the launch of media_gossip. That went exactly as I thought, because all of us are incurably nosy and self-interested.

How is building an audience on Substack different from other places on the internet? Do you have any advice?

Every day I am grateful to not be beholden to an algorithm that no one can explain and that changes its whims every other month. It means my advice for how to succeed on Substack isn’t sexy, but it’s real: Write for your readers, and if you don’t have any yet, write the newsletter you want to read. Write it consistently even on the weeks you don’t feel like it. And don’t use AI. If you’re using AI to write, I don’t understand why you’re here.

What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?

My friend Jehan and I have a shared language of Stuart Little memes. This is the most recent one to make me laugh, but nothing will ever beat this one:

Where do you tend to get your news?

I do my best to not get it, but it finds me anyway.

What are your favorite newsletters?

I always open , , and on Substack, as well as Garbage Day and Today in Tabs. And then there’s a handful of other newsletters that I should be reading but can’t bring myself to because I’m too jealous.

Do you try to limit your phone use? If so, what methods have been helpful for that?

Yes! Every day is an experiment of how much more I can log off while still being able to do my job. I shared a number of tips here, but the most basic, unglamorous advice is still the most effective: charge your phone far enough away that you can’t use it falling asleep or waking up, do one IRL thing every morning before looking at your screen (truly, even just making coffee), and turn off push notifications. You’re not allowed to complain that xyz doesn’t work for you if you’re not already doing these things as a baseline.

What’s something you’ve observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, and/or boomers?

Unfortunately, observing this one thing about the online behavior of millennials is responsible for my whole career.

Do any of your group chats have a name that you’re willing to share?

There’s “just idiots, swarming,” which is all my friends, “sart of like narmal people,” which is a smaller spinoff from a trip to Ireland, “for making swinging plans,” which is me and my husband and his best friend and my best friend, who are also dating, and then “The Lindsay Family Extended Universe,” which is my immediate family plus the husbands.

What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?

I’m using this guy 🫡 a lot these days to end any sentence in which I’ve declared that I’ve even remotely achieved something, like sending an email.

Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?

I am pro voice note, but I am glad to finally have a space to complain about how maddening it is that listening to a voice note doesn’t register as activity on an iPhone. If someone sends a particularly long note, my phone often goes dark halfway through, cutting off the message and not saving my place. Then I have to start over and regularly tap random parts of the screen so it doesn’t go back to sleep.

What’s your favorite non-social-media app?

Ancestry.com. People talk about falling into TikTok holes—I fall into Ancestry.com holes. I’ve looked up from researching some great-, great-, great-, great-, great-grandfather and realized it’s 1 a.m. I’ve been trying to learn more about my family’s roots in Scotland, so if anyone else from the McPheeters clan is reading, please reach out, because I’ve hit a dead end in 1668.

Have you recently read an article, book, or social media post about the internet that you’ve found particularly insightful?

Yes, but whenever I do, I have a meltdown over the fact that I didn’t think of it. This post from Max Read is my white whale.

What’s the last thing that brought you joy online?

The r/blackcats subreddit. I have two black cats. Black cats are the best cats, and if you don’t believe me, please spend just one minute in black cats subreddit.

Is there any corner of Substack that you frequent that might surprise us?

I just recently started getting into using recipes from Substackers. I made this clotted cream cake by for my friend Rachel’s birthday, and it’s so simple and perfect and I highly recommend.

With , the media company he founded and now runs on Substack, Ashlee is still writing, reporting, and making films, but with his own shop and team. He says his work gives audiences a window into where the world is going six or seven years before the rest of the culture catches up. In his conversation with Hamish, he talks about what it actually takes to get close to a subject, why he walked away from what he called the best job in media, and the stories and formats he’s building as the bet seems to be paying off.

Hamish: Why are we here at Fred’s Place in Mountain View?

Ashlee: I spent most of my early 20s in the Tenderloin [in San Francisco] bonding with dive bars. It was part of my lifestyle. Fred’s has been here for about 60 years. They go back to the ’50s. And down the road, probably about a mile from here, is where Fairchild Semiconductor was—which was like the first real semiconductor company. There’s always been this part of Silicon Valley culture that I like, which is they were boozers. As the chip industry was starting to explode, they were pushing the limits of physics, they were pushing the limits of chemistry, they were all super-competitive at their companies. But as engineers are wont to do, they couldn’t help themselves but come to the bar and reveal how they’d just gotten past something that was challenging the whole industry. They would all share this knowledge, and then the whole industry would move forward. Even today, you have AI companies in this multi-trillion-dollar life-and-death struggle. And those guys don’t go to bars, but they meet up and share their takeaways. They do hot yoga and then share how they figured something out. The same thing, though. So I thought, this bar will be symbolic of those roots and traditions.

Hamish: Ten years ago, you published the first good biography of Elon Musk, which became a massive bestseller and a phenomenon in its own right. You got a lot of access to Elon through the writing of that book. It must have been hard to convince him to give you that time in the first place. Can you tell me about what that experience was like, working on a book like that while giving access to the principal—and this particular kind of principal, who’s prickly?

Ashlee: It was really strange. I’d done a big magazine story on him—that was the first time I’d met him—and we’d got along okay. There was some kind of rapport, and that’s what made me a little bit confident about doing the book. But when I told him what I was doing, he said, “No, I’m not going to participate. I’m not going to help you.” So I spent two years interviewing hundreds of people. Huge chunks of them would report back to Elon. I always thought it was going to work out okay, because he wasn’t actively telling people not to talk to me. He wasn’t making it miserable, which would’ve made life a lot harder. Back then, he was already really litigious. People were afraid of him. Nobody had ever written anything truly revealing. He was kind of the weirdo, almost like a circus freak. I’d come into all these meetings and everyone was like, “He’s going to sue me. I don’t want to talk.” It was really hard for a couple of years.

Then one day I was actually ready to start writing, done with all my interviews. He must have some sixth sense, because it was almost in that moment he called. Elon Musk on my caller ID. I had a landline back then. He said, “You’ve been way more persistent than I ever imagined. I’ll do interviews with you if I can read the book before it comes out and make changes.” I said, “Well, I’m not going to do that. Let’s have dinner and hash it out.” It was one of those moments where he’d either say yes or no. Right there on the spot, he said, “Okay, fine. We’ll do one interview a month for as long as you feel like you need.” Which was incredibly fair.

So we’d meet for dinner once a month. Some dinners were an hour, some were four hours—just depended on his schedule and how things were going. It was totally different days. We’d show up to restaurants in Mountain View, Palo Alto. He’d walk in by himself, sit down at the table. No security, nothing. He had a driver, but the driver didn’t even come in. And nobody in the restaurant seemed to notice who he was.

Hamish: So you got a good book out of it, sold 6 or 7 million copies. What was his response like when it came out?

Ashlee: It was funny. I made sure all the books were on boats heading to stores—about five or six days before it was going to be in stores. I just wanted everything to be where he couldn’t undo it, file a lawsuit and block it or something. But he had spent so much time and been really fair, and it felt like he should read it first. So I sent him a PDF the week before it came out, went to bed, and woke up to this stream of emails. He was basically live-blogging the book as he went through it. He’s always been hung up on the Tesla founding question. Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard, the original founders, would say they founded Tesla. Elon would say, “No, I founded Tesla.” When you look at it, they had filed the paperwork, they were working on it. Would Tesla exist without Elon? Definitely not.

Hamish: Especially not in the way that it currently exists.

Ashlee: No way. In the fact-checking process I told him, “Elon, I am going to say that Marc and Martin founded the company. There is no way around this.” He said, “I understand.” And then in the emails, he’s going off about it again. But otherwise he was okay—really just two things upset him. I’d written about when he and his brother Kimbal were coming out here to start Zip2 and had gotten a used BMW. Kimbal told me he bought it with money from painting houses. Elon said he bought it. I told them they could fight about that. The other thing was a quote from an engineer saying Elon takes too much credit for the engineering at SpaceX. [Elon] said, “You wrote that I take too much credit.” I said, “I didn’t write that, Elon. That’s a quote from an engineer. He’s allowed to have his opinion.” Those were the things he was upset about. Otherwise, fine. He actually sent me an email—which I saved in case things got litigious—saying the book was 95% accurate. For Elon, who already hated journalists, that was incredible.

Hamish: I remember you telling me that at the time. I was like, “Well, that’s an amazing result.”

Ashlee: And it was mostly okay. Then about a week later, the Washington Post did a story: the 27 most outrageous things from the book. A big chunk of it was about what a pain in the ass he was to work for. Funny thing is, when he’d read the book, none of that had really fazed him. He’s actually kind of proud of being a tough boss. But then I think when he saw how the world was reacting to it—Tesla was just starting to get a little competition, hiring was a big thing—I think he worried people weren’t going to want to come work for him. And he just flipped the switch.

Hamish: So a week after he gave you the 95% mark, there’s a press reaction, and then he reacts in the press.

Ashlee: Yeah. He starts saying things—there’s the Google acquisition thing. He’s like, “Who told you that?” I said, “Elon, you know who told me that.” And that was the first time I really experienced firsthand some of what I’d heard about. Emails saying things like, “You’re an asshole. I’m going to destroy your life.” I figured he needed to vent. But then a friend inside Tesla told me, “He’s just asked me to find the world’s best libel lawyer.” And I think—I’ve never confirmed this with Elon—but I think he did ask somebody whether it was physically possible to buy every copy of the book worldwide and make it disappear.

Hamish: Did he know publishers can print new copies?

Ashlee: He knew. He was sending me all this stuff, but he knew. And it was frightening. He wasn’t the richest person in the world, but he had about $4 billion. Part of me thought, “Any of this is good. If he sues me, it’s fantastic, I’ll just sell more copies.” But then you think, “He might actually bankrupt me. I don’t know if the publishers will have my back.” I think he was going through the same calculus—like, “I’m going to bash him, but how much do I want to go? It’s only going to get him more publicity.” We didn’t speak at all for about three years—2015 to 2018. Total incommunicado. Every now and then I’d drop him a note, or SpaceX would do a launch and I’d say congratulations. Nothing really came back.

Then around 2018, I was in New Zealand. I was staying at an Airbnb, and same thing—Elon Musk calling on my phone. The last thing he had said to me was something like, “I want you to die.” And he’s like, “Hey, you’re in New Zealand. I’ve never been. I always wanted to reenact the FBI raid on Kim Dotcom.” That was the first thing out of his mouth. I was like, “Okay, we’re not going to talk about what has transpired.” Tesla was just getting out of the worst of its production hell, and he said, “Look, you’re one of the few people on earth who actually knows the history of this company and what it would take to get through this. Do you want to come speak to all the people who worked on it?” I’d basically stopped reporting on anything SpaceX, Tesla, Elon—PTSD, I just didn’t want to do it. But I said, “Okay, this is pretty good.” And then we just shot the shit for a bit, totally as if nothing had ever happened. That started to open things back up. We just started dropping notes every now and then—Twitter DMs, I think. And then he sent something to the effect of “I understand now what this book did.” Basically: you did a good job. Whatever had happened, he seemed to have gotten over it.

Hamish: You started Core Memory: it’s video, it’s shows, it’s documentary, it’s podcasts on video, interviews, scoops, feature writing—which is a lot. You’ve started hiring people, you’re building up a new kind of institution. What is that institution you’re trying to build?

Ashlee: I think what we’re giving the audience is [a window into] six or seven years out of where the world is going. Because I’ve done this for so long and know so many people, you get to ride along on this journey and have this window into that.

Hamish: You’re six or seven years ahead of what mainstream culture is going to catch up on?

Ashlee: Yeah, especially where tech is going. We get to transport you into where the future is heading. I enjoy eccentric, weird people and I’m not terribly judgmental of them. I like people to hear what those kinds of people think, and then you can make up your own mind about whether that’s horrible or good or interesting. I still have this conversation—and it’s like, “We would really like to see this with the New York Times or the Bloomberg masthead on it.” And I’m like, “Okay, that’s not going to happen. Do you understand that I’ve collected all the world’s people that you actually care about into one spot?” Even from the first month I started on Substack—I know how many readers I had, I had all the Bloomberg stats, [and] people grossly overestimate how many views stories on some of those platforms are getting—from the first month, we were doing like six, seven, eight times as many on Core Memory on Substack.

Hamish: People who don’t know the media as well over-optimize for brands that were prestigious in the last century, not knowing those outlets are not reaching a wide audience—not reaching the right audience.

Ashlee: I’ve got a story I’ve been haggling about with someone right now, and they want the Times or Bloomberg on it because they’re like, “We want SEO for jobs, for new hires.” I’m like, “Do you know how the internet works? Everyone on earth is going to read this story.” Sometimes I feel like the PR people are still in that old world. Because what they’re saying just makes no objective sense.

Hamish: To their defense, the world has changed fast. YouTube taking over televisions, taking over the living room—which is now a true, undeniable thing—happened pretty quickly. At most you could say it’s been 10 years, but even 10 years is a short time given the whole life of media. And people who are in the industries that still write about themselves are so invested in that way of being. I subscribe to all the media newsletters. The degree to which they freak out over who’s running a terrestrial television station is absurd relative to its actual influence and relevance.

Ashlee: Yeah. When we first started our YouTube channel and I saw that 65% were watching on TV, that blew me away.

Hamish: What has changed for you, going from being an employed journalist at institutions to being an owner?

Ashlee: [It’s] super-weird. Exhilarating. It’s been an incredible amount of work. Just to get this off the ground, I had to be the face of things—people were coming for my writing voice, my video voice. I’d spent all these years building some kind of reputation. I’m hiring writers, we’re having other people doing video and podcasts. That’s the way it should go, because I want to build a bigger thing. So this first year has been exhilarating and a lot of work.

I had what I think was the best job in media. Bloomberg paid me really well to do whatever I wanted. I got to talk to the world’s most fascinating people in depth. I had the last cushy magazine writer job. I could go to Ukraine—I didn’t even have to clear it with anyone. I could hang out there for two weeks, take a year to file the story. No one said anything. That used to be the norm for a lot of people. I probably might literally be the last person to do that. So it was a hard job to walk away from. But from day one [on Substack], you write a story and you see people read it, you get feedback, you see money come in for your effort. It’s totally different to a paycheck. And then we’ve been building this team. I wish I’d done this a lot sooner, because I think this was always kind of in me. You do have to be a little bit of an entrepreneur. I was always that way—always doing books on the side, documentaries on the side. In literally four days it’ll be a year since we started. We’ve launched so much, and I wouldn’t go back.

Hamish: It’s impressive to see you here with such energy on a Tuesday morning in a bar in Mountain View, given how much you take on. You are writing a lot, reporting a lot, making videos, making documentaries, running a company. I salute that. Thanks for showing the way for other people.

Ashlee: We’re not even at noon yet. We still have time to do more shots. Cheers, man. Cheers.

FOOTNOTES

Fred’s Place, Mountain View, California—Silicon Valley watering hole where the early chip industry’s best-kept secrets had a way of coming out after the second round.

Fred’s Special—a PBR and a shot of Old Crow

Fairchild Semiconductor—The birthplace of Silicon Valley, just a few minutes down the road.

Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore—Worked at Fairchild before leaving to found Intel.

Geek Silicon Valley—Ashlee’s first book.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015)—Ashlee’s biography. The first serious account of Musk’s life and companies.

The Simpsons, “The Musk Who Fell to Earth”

Zip2—Elon and Kimbal Musk’s first company. Also the source of an unresolved dispute about who paid for a used BMW.

Kim Dotcom—Internet entrepreneur, subject of a dramatic 2012 FBI raid on his New Zealand mansion. The first thing Elon said when he called Ashlee out of the blue in 2018, after three years of silence, was that he’d always wanted to reenact it.

Rocket Lab/Peter Beck—New Zealand rocket company and its founder, from Invercargill. Ashlee did a full road trip following Beck’s life, which became When the Heavens Went on Sale and Wild Wild Space for HBO.

Neuralink—Elon’s brain-computer interface company. Ashlee has had exclusive access for years and is now making a documentary through Core Memory.

Hello World (Bloomberg)—Ashlee’s travel-tech documentary series. Emmy-nominated in its first year. By far Bloomberg’s most-watched show, by a factor Ashlee describes as roughly 10,000x.

EVE Online—A cultish, ruleless, multi-player space battle game that started in Iceland.

Bryan Johnson—Longevity entrepreneur. Subject of Ashlee’s documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever (Netflix).

Kambo—A purgative ritual using secretions from the giant monkey frog. Ashlee underwent a ceremony while filming (“the best nap of [his] life”).

George Hotz—Hacker who built a DIY self-driving car in his garage. Ashlee broke the story, then rode in the car on what turned out to be its first freeway run.

Zoox—Autonomous vehicle company. Ashlee did an early ride from Palo Alto to San Francisco.

Substack for Media Founders

is a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, a serial entrepreneur, and, for the past decade, a writer, podcaster and media founder. No Mercy / No Malice, the weekly newsletter he started as a testing ground for book chapters, now goes out to more than 400,000 subscribers, and his media business, , generates roughly $20 million a year in podcast revenue across his portfolio. His reach among the 25-to-54 demographic, he told us, beats the most-watched shows on CNBC.

No Mercy No Malice lived for most of its life passed around a series of email platforms that, as his team describes it, were built for enterprise marketing departments. For the year and a half before they came to Substack, another newsletter, Prof G Markets, was running on beehiiv. In March, the team made the decision to consolidate everything under one roof, bringing a full portfolio of newsletters, video, livestreams, and new subscriber-only content to Substack. In the two months since, they’ve launched three new newsletters and are preparing to debut The Week, a Friday roundup across the Prof G universe. Starting May 27, of Raging Moderates will be co-hosting a weekly livestream with of , their first Substack-exclusive show. “For the first time,” his team told us, “we’re supported by a platform purpose-built for content creators.”

We sat down with Galloway after his first two months on the platform to hear what this subscription revenue has unlocked for him and why he projects that Prof G Media will reach $1 million in ARR on Substack by the end of the year. He was characteristically direct about where media is going and about what it actually costs creators to build on platforms that hold the leverage—where your margin, as he puts it, is their opportunity. He is also honest about what’s hard, what he hasn’t figured out yet, and why he thinks the real test is still ahead.

You’ve been publishing the first of your weekly newsletters, No Mercy / No Malice, for what will be 10 years this summer. What were you first hoping to build when you started?

I just enjoy writing, and I used the newsletter as a kind of petri dish or incubator for chapters for a book. I would have a thought about something and just write. It was literally me at midnight on a Thursday writing something. Usually the top was business-related and the bottom was more personal. It was me punching out something Thursday night as a means of exploration, and it was just cathartic.

Did weaving in personal stories feel intuitive to you from the start?

I enjoy writing about family and my sons. I sometimes write about topics that upset people, or people find my content not in line with what they were expecting, or sometimes I just get it wrong. There have been a couple of seminal business moments [in the newsletter]. I wrote a piece saying WeWork was ridiculous. I got the S1 and wrote up an assessment saying it was a ridiculous idea that this company was going public and I think we’re credited with being one of the forces that stopped the IPO. So there have been some important business moments. But immediately it was obvious that the thing that resonates with people is the personal stories. The most-read post I’ve ever published was a post I wrote about putting my dog down. There’s a wide space for men of my age to talk about their emotions.

The WeWork story makes me think about risk-taking and being publicly outspoken. How do you evaluate what risks are worth taking?

I don’t do a risk assessment. I believe what Sam Harris said: if you have economic security and people who love you unconditionally, you have an obligation to speak your mind. I think when I say something off-mark or wrong, that’s what people enjoy the most, because it gives them a chance to weigh in. I try to write as if the only people who are going to read it are my kids in 20 or 30 years. I want them to understand me better and the world a little bit better. But I try—I can’t always say I do it—I try mostly to ignore the comments. I talk about money, about a lot of my personal failings. I know it resonates with people. There’s a real danger in getting too caught up in thinking about what your audience is going to think of what you’re writing, as opposed to what you actually think is going on.

If not the audience, who serves as a check on you?

You need [checks and balances]. It’s important to reflect. Prof G Media is 27 people, and there are a lot of people in the company who tell me when I’m wrong or disagree with me. The newsletter has evolved dramatically. As my following grew, the number of people working on it grew, because now it involves a lot of data. I take the responsibility seriously that 400,000 people are reading it, not 400. You have a responsibility to do more fact-checking and review it more carefully. It used to be literally me at midnight on a Thursday giving myself 90 minutes to bang something out, and publishing it with the typos and a few charts. Now there are probably three or four people who touch it before it goes out. Graphics. It gets a host read-over. It’s its own podcast now. I have a lot of people who, quite frankly, save me from myself on a regular basis.

You built out your consulting firm, L2, specifically to maximize enterprise value, then sold at a significant multiple. Is that a model you’re trying to replicate with Prof G Media?

When I was 26 in business school, I started a strategy firm. After about eight or 10 years, I wanted out. We were doing $10 million in revenue. I sold for $33 million—3.3 times revenues—which is fine, but it was transactional revenue, not recurring revenue. When I started L2, I got a study from Deloitte that had looked at outcomes of private company transactions. They sussed out that companies whose exit multiple was in the top decile typically had four features: recurring revenue, they owned a niche, they had defensible IP, and they were international. So from day one, I set up L2 that way. Instead of charging Nike $800,000 for an engagement, I charged them half a million dollars a year for a quarterly membership.That company got bought for eight times revenues.

With Prof G Media, to be blunt, I’m economically secure. I want to do something I enjoy. But the business is doing really well, and I recognize that people working at Prof G want to have their own houses and cars and college funds. About two years ago, I started thinking there’s enterprise value here. Key to that business is subscription revenue.

Our business does about $20 million top line in podcast revenues, but that business has a multiple of probably two to three times. We just started on Substack and wanted a subscription offering. My guess is we’ll be at an ARR of about a million dollars by the end of the year. That revenue has probably a four to six multiple. In addition, the entire company trades at a higher multiple when subscription revenue is growing faster than your core business. Substack’s role for us was to diversify the revenue mix and create a more valuable one. That’s the entire rationale and motivation for going on Substack.

How would you describe what you’re building on Substack?

We found on YouTube and other platforms, you have to be pretty vertically focused. What we wanted with Substack was a repository for everything we do, because we try to bring a voice of education and insight. We want people to learn and feel like they’re getting real insight, and also entertainment. We try to be funny, irreverent. We wanted a repository where someone could come for all things from Prof G Media.

The two biggest subscriber drivers so far have been our interview with and ’s deep dive on storytelling—she puts together all my decks for my presentations. We’re still learning. I don’t know if I would have guessed those things would drive subscriptions. We’re adding about 150 paid subscribers a week, and a lot more unpaid. Have we cracked this nut? I don’t think so. We’re five or six weeks in. We look at people we admire, like or , and we try to understand what the secret sauce is. What about our content will drive subscriptions? We’re absolutely still in learning mode.

Is it right that this is the first time you’ve ever asked anyone to pay for anything Prof G–related?

I think that’s right, we’ve never asked anyone to pay for anything. It’s always been advertising-driven. When we started Prof G Media, all the podcasts and newsletters were nothing but a marketing funnel for my speaking business. The speaking business was three to four million dollars. The entire media and book business was a million dollars. Now the speaking business is two to three million—I just don’t want to travel as much—and the media business is a $20-million business. But when we first started, all the media was top-of-the-funnel marketing for speaking gigs.

How did you think about what the paid product should be?

We’re still trying to figure that out. You have to offer a ton of value. I think if you have an existing brand as we did, at least initially you’re going to come out of the gate strong because you’re monetizing goodwill, not necessarily the product offering itself. I think I could say to people, “Just help us out, everything’s for free, but subscribe”—and I think we’d get 5,000 subscribers because a lot of people like what we’re doing. But that’s not sustainable.

I’m constantly telling my team: these are the salad days. These are superfans. The real test will be after you have 10,000 subscribers and you’re trying to say to someone, “This is definitely worth $200.” When I look at what people who are successful on Substack in terms of paid subscriptions are offering, they’re just offering a lot of proprietary content. I think anyone who’s making more than a million dollars a year on Substack is exceptionally talented and exceptionally hardworking.

You’ve written a lot about platform dependency and the way intermediaries extract value from creators over time. How does all of that factor into why you’re building here?

I know several people who make their living off Instagram, and I know exactly what’s going to happen to them. These companies will let you grow to a certain amount, and then your margin is their opportunity. YouTube’s a little bit better—they have a revenue share model. But the reason I’ve leaned heavily into podcasting is that there’s so much competition in audio that no one platform—Amazon, Apple, Spotify—can extract the kind of rents that others do. If I put out a podcast, what do I get on Spotify? About 97%. If I had a show on MSNBC, they’d be taking 95% of the revenue for access to that distribution.

If we post something on YouTube, they decide what runs on the right rail. They decide what video comes up next. There’s not a lot of branding that can happen. They decide what you see next. Anyone who is totally dependent on a monopoly or oligopoly should just assume at some point they will turn the tables on you. I was on the board of the New York Times, and we had About.com, a content farm that would do something on, say, cooking, get a ton of traffic, have ads displayed, optimized for Google. One night we woke up and our revenues were down 60% because Google decided they didn’t want to send traffic to About.com. When you’re dealing with an oligopoly, just assume that at some point they will turn the tables on you. I’ve never wanted to build a business on YouTube, TikTok, or Meta. I see that as marketing to drive people to other channels where the split is more favorable towards the creator.

You have a reach that rivals most legacy media organizations. What do you make of that?

I can show you numbers that we’re reaching more people in the core demographic than any show on CNBC. The average age of a CNBC viewer is 63. The average age of a Prof G Markets listener is 34. On Prof G Markets, between video and audio, we’ll get about 300,000 views and listens. That’s 200,000 people in the core demographic, 25 to 54. The most popular CNBC show gets between 300,000 and 500,000, and 30% are in the core demo. We get $45 CPMs for advertisers. CNN gets around $13. The average age of a CNN viewer is 67. It’s 69 for Fox. Sixty-four for CNBC. These direct-to-consumer media companies that can hold onto the majority of the revenue, reinvest back into the content, and reach a younger audience—does anyone under 40 even turn on a TV anymore unless it’s to watch a streaming service?

Traditional media is still a very profitable business, but every minute of every day it’s leaking viewers, advertisers, and revenue to something more authentic that bubbles up organically. The death of traditional media has probably been exaggerated. It’ll die slower than people think. But there does appear to be a pretty big market for whatever you’d call alternative media.

Podcasts are essentially TV shows with a lower-cost means of production. Forty percent of our views on Prof G Markets are on TV, streamed through YouTube. Effectively, podcasts have become TV shows where you get 80% of a TV show for 10% of the price. A million-dollar podcast can be profitable. There’s no such thing as a million-dollar TV show in terms of production value that’s profitable.

Stephen Colbert is the best example. Colbert makes $60 million a year but costs $100 million. [When he leaves CBS] he’ll go to a podcast, take the six or dozen most talented people, make $20 million and clear $15 [million] in EBITDA. The arbitrage is dramatic. Podcasts are becoming TV shows that are almost as rewarding, almost as well-produced, and cost a lot less—so the creator holds onto a lot more of the revenue.

You said you have 27 people across all the Prof G Properties. How have you thought about who to hire and how to keep them?

I’ve always been an operator and the CEO of the companies I’ve started. The difference here is I no longer wanted to be the operator. I just wanted to be the talent. I wanted to hire people who could run the business so I could focus on writing, speaking, presenting, and podcasting. My core competence is storytelling. My superpower is finding and retaining really talented people. The woman who runs Prof G Media, Katherine, I’ve worked with for 15 years. Our chief growth officer I’ve worked with for a decade. My CTO and head of engineering I’ve worked with for 11 years. The team with the best players wins. I’m very proud of retention. We have a general cultural value that’s important to me, and that is we overcompensate. My aim is to pay 50% above market. We have a minimum wage of $100,000 a year for full-time employees and $50 an hour for part-time employees. Most people make substantially more than that. The median age is 26, and the average compensation is about $200,000. I spent my whole life trying to get rich, and I’m still trying to get richer, but a close second is trying to provide economic security for other people. Compensating well is a big cultural value for us, and quite frankly it’s a decent business strategy, because if you have the capital and the business to do it, it results in higher retention. In the eight or nine years Prof G Media has been around, I think one or two people have left voluntarily.

What do you think people are getting wrong right now in business, in tech, in society?

I think AI, from a valuation standpoint and a labor destruction standpoint, has been vastly overhyped. I think the catastrophizing about a labor apocalypse is a fundraising technique, to convince corporations they should continue to spend the millions or billions these companies need them to spend. AI has not come up with a lot of different moisturizers or cooler furniture. The only way they can justify these valuations is if they convince companies you can have the same revenue with 20% fewer employees in the next 24 months. I believe, over the medium and long term, AI will create more jobs than it destroys. I think the valuations are unsustainable. I think we’re going to see a similar drawdown as the dot-com implosion—the technology will survive, the companies that are really seminal will survive, but I’ve been to this movie before.

How are you thinking about AI internally, for content and for the business?

It’s not that disciplined or strategic. We have several younger associates who are very facile with AI, and we’re constantly challenging people to figure out how to be more productive around content production leveraging AI. What we’ve found is that it’s not good for creation. It’s more a supplemental tool for research. The biggest insult I can give anyone when I get a draft of a presentation or written material is: this feels or looks like it was produced by AI. Our view is that AI is all chip, no salsa. And what people want is salsa. But in terms of content strategy, AI is for research, refining, finding data. Pretty much all of our content starts between someone’s ears.

Do your sons have any interest in doing what you do?

They’re different. The only thing I would recommend to anyone who has kids is to have two, because the most fascinating thing is how different they are. One, if I take a picture, will say to me right away, “No social.” He doesn’t want to be on social media. The other wants to start a podcast with me so he can be famous. They’re just so different, and that’s the fascinating thing. Whenever I meet people who have one kid, I say: just have a second, because you’re going to be fascinated at how different they are.

The thing I find interesting and sort of weird about young people is they’d rather be famous than rich. When I was their age, I absolutely would have chosen money over fame. I do worry a little. I get a lot of negative feedback on some of my content. Some of it’s a function of me saying something stupid or being plain wrong. But a lot of it I also think is just that the bigger footprint you have, the more algorithms enjoy an incendiary comment about you. I worry sometimes about my kids reading that stuff and being upset or thinking less of me.

What does a good week look like for you across all of this?

I’m finally in a position in my life, rounding third, where I really enjoy what I do and the people I work with. Most people don’t get to do something they really enjoy and make good money at. It’s taken me a long time to get there. Consulting and analytics were rewarding, but that was real work. This is fun. I’m not an interesting person. I work, I work out, and I spend time with my boys. That’s about it. My best week is when I get to produce good work, I get to hang out with my boys, eat well and exercise so I don’t become depressed and angry at everybody.

On the day of the 20th anniversary re-release of her book Mating in Captivity, a cultural touchstone on the topic of desire, we’re sharing a conversation between Esther and , Substack’s head of new media, recorded at Temple Bar in SoHo, New York. In this second episode of Open Tab, Esther discusses how she hires and has built her businesses, how work has replaced religion as a source of meaning, whether AI can give good therapy, and how she’s made it her life’s work to re-create the proverbial village online.

Hanne: You talk a lot in your work about security and desire and the balance between them—in families, in work, in all kinds of relationships. What is the relationship between work and risk?

Esther: There are so many ways to answer this. I have never worked for anyone. I’ve worked for clinics, I’ve worked in hospitals, but I’ve never been a full-time employee somewhere. And I always said, I can tolerate the lack of security better than I can tolerate the lack of freedom. This was the life of the therapist. You do it all by yourself. And that’s part of why at some point I feel like I want more, I want something else. I want to meet people. I want a meeting. I’ve never had a meeting. Everybody else complains about boring meetings. I want a meeting with five people who are all thinking out loud together.

The theory on trust and risk has never been conclusive. Do you need to take risks in order to learn to trust, or do you need to trust in order to be able to take risks? That is the big question, and there is no answer to it.

Hanne: Why was the podcast [Where Should We Begin?] not a risk?

Esther: Because I think I know what I’m doing when I meet a couple. Because couples therapy is among the most compelling stories you can hear. Because I know that people are really lonely and have no idea what’s happening in the couple next door, and their best friends can come and tell them they’re divorcing, and they never saw it coming.

Hanne: Many people who are in the act of culture-making notice a moment that musicians call flow. What is that for you?

Esther: I can be in flow in many different situations. As a child of Holocaust survivors who spent years in concentration camps and could not do anything—on some level, in a symbolic way, not being helpless, having agency, being able to have a mark on society or on other people’s lives, having impact, control, change, whichever way you want—that is probably one of the most existentially important things for me. I don’t think of it as risk. I think of it as meaning. I get flow from that. It’s when I feel powerful. I don’t feel helpless. I don’t feel impotent. It’s not a concrete thing. I’ve never really said any of this, actually. It is probably at the core of what drives me. I like to matter, because if I matter, I can’t be erased.

Hanne: You said earlier that you never wanted to build a media business, but you have. What makes you different as a leader?

Esther: Because I’ve always been self-employed, I have gravitated towards people who are like that too: experts in their own field. When they tell me what to do, I listen and I do it, because I think they understand this like I understand that. It’s not really hierarchical. My team tells me what they think, what to do. They speak back. They understand what I know, but they understand what they know, and I think that’s a very different structure.

I expect people to really communicate with each other a lot, because everybody is interdependent with the others. The Substack people need to interact with the podcast people, need to interact with the content people, need to interact with the newsletter, with social. Substack has become that gathering place. That’s why I joined Substack. I needed one place where all these people who were talking to each other could actually put everything together. I always talk about how I wanted to bring the therapeutic ideas into the public square. Now I wanted to create a public square for myself.

Hanne: You are now a very well-known set of ideas and culture in and of yourself. What is it like to be a human and also be a brand?

Esther: I connect to the fact that if people stop me on the street, they don’t just recognize me. They come to tell me they read this, and they listened to that. I was there for their divorce, I was there for their grief, I was there for their heartbreak. People recognize me by my voice. They don’t necessarily know what I look like, but they hear me. I’m on a plane and somebody says, are you who I think you are? I say yes. And then I say, What do you do? Do you read? Do you watch or do you listen? And then depending on whichever way they learn, I say, and what was it? What’s one thing that has actually been useful for you? And then I can handle it. Then I feel like there is substance here.

FOOTNOTES

1. Temple Bar, 332 Hudson St., New York—SoHo fixture with a long bar and low lighting.

2. Summerhill—The progressive boarding school in Suffolk, England, cited by Esther, founded in 1921, where children set their own rules and class attendance is optional.

3. “In Search of Erotic Intelligence”—The article Esther wrote for a professional therapy magazine in response to the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, which landed on the cover of the Utne Reader and led to her book deal.

4. Mating in Captivity—Translated into more than 30 languages. The bestseller challenged the conventional wisdom that love and desire are natural companions, instead arguing that the qualities that nurture love—security, closeness, predictability—can erode desire. The new edition includes a preface on two decades of cultural change, from dating apps to AI.

5. “The secret to desire in a long-term relationship”—Esther’s viral TED Talk, delivered in a salon rather than on the main stage, improvised from memory.

6. Where Should We Begin?—Esther’s long-running podcast, in which she talks to real life couples and individuals navigating complex relationship issues, for all to listen in.

Emily has worked in media and tech but built her current audience of over 10,000 paid subscribers natively on Substack, post by post. She told us she sees Feed Me as a studio, with extensions like a podcast, job board, and thriving subscriber comments section where she’s “never scared that anything bad is happening.”

Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie sat down with Emily at Old Town Bar in Manhattan’s Flatiron district to talk about building her independent media business from scratch and the glimmers of hope she sees for media on Substack and beyond.

Location: Old Town Bar, Flatiron, NYC. Order: 1 Guinness each

Conversation Excerpts

Hamish: A lot of Feed Me is about money, power, and status. How does that influence how you do [your] job?

Emily: Well, I’ve had a lot of jobs, which has opened me up to a lot of different networks of people. So I’m not coming out of journalism school and writing about the DTC world, or about the hospitality world, or about newsrooms that I’ve never been in. I’ve worked in newsrooms, I’ve worked in venture-backed companies, I’ve worked at Facebook, so I can write about all these things—I don’t want to say “with authority”—but with experience. I know what the chairs feel like in the Meta offices at Hudson Yards.

Hamish: What do they feel like?

Emily: Bouncy, like very adjustable. Everything is like, bring it up, bring it down. I know what the New York Magazine office—

Hamish: What are those chairs like compared to Facebook’s?

Emily: That was the only job that I had a proper cubicle at. It was at the old Varick Street office when Adam Moss was the editor. I loved that job so much. Olivia Nuzzi was one of the first women to ever come up to my desk and be like, do you want to go smoke a cigarette? That happened to me. I’m not writing about her from over here. I hung out with her. You build up your own sources. You’re not blind-calling anyone, because you’ve been around a bit. I think that has given me a lot of perspective when I write about work.

A big thing when I started Feed Me in its current form is that I like to write about the way that people spend money and what that says about them. And I think that’s changed a bit. It’s a little bit more like New York news, and it’s probably a little bit less judgy about how people literally spend money. I think I was probably forcing myself into that narrative a bit.

Hamish: You used to be more judgy?

Emily: I didn’t have an audience. I could hit so hard. I have so many people watching me now, it’s hard. I also don’t really have a team, so if I have a bad day, there’s nobody I’m really looking at [who’s] being like, “It’s fine.”

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Emily: I worked at Meta, and during Covid I started writing on Substack. I started writing short horror fiction that was super informed by my time working in social media and the sort of consumer moment that was happening. Matt Levine from Bloomberg linked to one of those stories in his newsletter, and a bunch of my friends sent me photos of their terminals. They were like, “Levine put you in Money Stuff.” And I was like, wait, you’re reading newsletters for pleasure, and there’s cross-promotion in newsletters? It opened my eyes to the traffic potential but also the pleasure potential of reading newsletters. Because in the past, it was like this chore that you gave to somebody on the audience team, like “Aggregate a bunch of stuff and put it in the newsletter.” It has to happen, nobody wants to do it, but we have to send it.

Hamish: The newsletters were used to try and drive traffic to the stories of the property.

Emily: Right, right. To check off a box. And the best-case scenario was that somebody wouldn’t [flag] it [as] spam or unsubscribe. And I was freelance writing at the time while I was at Meta. I wrote this story about the phenomenon of “shoppy shops” for New York Magazine. I thought: tech people want more of this. Consumers want more of this kind of writing. And the CPG brands and marketers also want to be talking about this more. So I started writing shorter versions of that every day behind a paywall on Substack.

Hamish: Why did you do the paywall?

Emily: Because I could, and I wanted a little bit of space. I didn’t have an online following. So I was just like, let me keep this safe and protected, and if you really want to read it, you can. I had really hot takes, and at the time most of my friends who were having those kinds of takes were being taken care of by an editor, to make their takes cooler or safer or maybe a bit more palatable.

Hamish: People appreciated that you didn’t have that filter. And you put it behind a paywall, so it’s kind of like a secret club.

Emily: Exactly. And I think that’s why my comment section... I mean, there are thousands and thousands of paid readers below that paywall now. It’s such a wonderful experience. Every day when I see my comment section, I’m never scared that anything bad is happening there.

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Hamish: So what does it feel like to be the owner of this business and responsible for this thing that is suddenly big?

Emily: It’s great. It’s a big business. You guys see the network effects of it all, and how many people read it. Everyone sees how big it is because of the leaderboards, which is great for me. I’m very proud that I have amassed that many people without, you know, bringing them over from somewhere else. But that part of the job is also pressure, like the purple checkmark. It doesn’t not put a target on your back as a journalist, because it’s so different from other people who are working in journalism who are not having the same type of experience at all.

Hamish: The purple checkmark on Substack means you’ve got at least 10,000 paying subscribers. And so a lot of journalists are probably looking at their shrinking newsrooms, the jobs disappearing, the insecurity... and potentially jealous of that, do you think?

Emily: Yeah. People can do back-of-napkin math and figure out how much money I’m making, and I’m sort of tired of being on panels and always being asked that. And then being followed on a talk or panel by an investor or a CEO of a media company who’s never asked that. That’s something I started actually pushing back on in interviews.

Hamish: Do you think that’s because you’re a young woman running the business, or do you think it’s a media business curiosity thing?

Emily: I think it’s both. But a smart person can also see that I’m putting money back into my writers and I’m putting money back into my free parties. I also know that I’m doing more than just writing. I’m a product manager, a social media manager, a graphic designer. I’m emailing my warehouse all the time, talking on the phone with them about stocking products. I’m running payroll. I’m an event planner, an event producer. I do a lot of jobs. And I love my job. I feel crazy half the time, which might be coming through in this conversation, but it’s an awesome job. I feel really grateful when I can connect with other media operators and trust them and get along with them. But I also feel like there’s this competitiveness, especially with people who have been doing this longer than me and might look at me like, where the fuck did you come from?

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Emily: What’s cool is that a lot of the people that write for me aren’t career writers. , who hosts Expense Account, the Feed Me podcast about restaurants—he’s an artist, he was a wine distributor. He’s not a writer by background; he’s just an excellent writer. And Teddy, who writes about movies and entertainment—he asked if he could go to Sundance. And I was like, I kind of want to go to Sundance, but I’m not going to go because I have this SF trip. And I was like, yeah, put together a budget, tell me what it would look like. Yeah, go. We can run this. Nobody else is writing about it. Get in there. Be weird. I love identifying interesting people and then doubling down on them and having them build out their own little worlds within the newsletter. But it’s also real—I’ve never managed anybody before, so it’s new for me and I’m learning as I’m doing it. The only thing I can do is talk to other media operators who have been through it and try to get best practices from them. There are some true business benefits to running a newsletter on Substack—and this isn’t an ad—but a lot of the operations are sort of dealt with, and the founders and the other people that work at the company are so present on the feed that you can reach out to them and get a response.

Hamish: I hear they’re real pricks.

Emily: No, they’re great. They’re really great and they’re very interesting. There’s this backend foundation, and that is why you guys take a cut of writers’ income, but that has never been a problem to me.

Hamish: Well, to try and broaden it: we’ve always tried to take all the bullshit off the table for our writers so they can focus on the most important thing, which is the work itself, the editorial work. How do you feel about where the media ecosystem is going, what media jobs or the future might look like? People are feeling a lot of doom and gloom at the moment, but do you have any feelings of optimism?

Emily: Here’s what I’m wary of: taking cash up front for a business that doesn’t exist yet. I think raising money is risky. As somebody who’s never done it and runs a really successful media business, venture capital in general scares me. But I’ve seen glimmers of hope in a few different places. I think food media is one of them. I think we’ll see some of these people come out and win. I wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of the year Puck launched a food vertical. I wouldn’t be surprised if Punchbowl, the D.C.-based publication, launched more lifestyle stuff. I think people want more niche, specific news that they’re interested in. I’m also seeing a lot of local news publications on Substack that make me really happy. I don’t know if these people are doing it for the love of the game or to try to make a lot of money, but there’s the , which is just for Boerum Hill, and the East Side Rag, which is focused on Silver Lake and Echo Park. They’re making people really happy and feel connected to their neighborhoods in a way that newspapers used to do. I don’t think that everybody is in this game to make a ton of money and then sell and buy a house in the Hamptons. I think some people are truly just trying to better their community and spread information and make interesting content.

~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~

Emily: I almost feel better about my job when I talk to friends who work in totally different industries. I learned some of my best qualities as a good person and a good operator from people who don’t do anything close to this. Like talking to my friends who are moms who just get their kids to school on time, or make sure to send a birthday card... just good people. And that sort of radiates out. Show up to things. Bring somebody a birthday present. Respond to the text. Do things that you say you’ll do. Life is easier after that because you know where you stand.

Footnotes

Rabbit holes and references from the show

1. Old Town Bar, 45 E. 18th St., New York. Longtime media drinking hole in operation since 1901, making it one of the oldest bars in New York City. Novelist Pete Hamill, a longtime teetotaler, reportedly said of it: “If I ever had a drink again, this would be the place.”

2. The Bloomberg burger

   

3. Great Jones—The DTC cookware startup where Emily worked.

4. Emily in Matt Levine’s Money Stuff—The Bloomberg newsletter that linked to Emily’s early Substack fiction.

5. Long Island, NY

6. NY Mag’s Welcome to the Shoppy Shop.

7. Newsday’s Kidsday—Early scoops from the early aughts.

   

8. Feed Me merch in the wild

   

9. The End—Emily’s short documentary about Gardiner’s Island, the oldest privately owned island in America.

10. —Hyperlocal Substack covering Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

11. East Side Rag—Substack focused on Silver Lake and Echo Park in Los Angeles.

12. The Machine in the Garden

13. ’s Fashion Week reporting

14. Nothing sexy happens on Slack—Emily’s survey on sex and the workplace.

    Feed Me

    "Nothing sexy happens on Slack."

    Yesterday, I wrote about a study that said 50% of people currently have a work crush. All around the office, managers, direct reports, CEOs and peers are spending some untold portion of company time daydreaming about or flirting with each other. When I posted about this on my Instagram Story, a flood of DMs from strangers started sharing their office romance stories with me, so I decided to run an anonymous survey about how and why people engage in something so risky, and got hundreds of remarkably vulnerable, albeit anonymous, responses…

    Read more

    2 years ago · 70 likes · 27 comments · Emily Sundberg

15. And lastly, Babygirl—The Nicole Kidman office-sex drama that Emily says inspired the survey.

Substack for Media Founders

New episodes of Open Tab drop weekly through June. You can watch on YouTube, listen wherever you get your podcasts, and always find the full series here on Substack.

Open Tab is a new interview series hosted by Substack co-founder and Head of New Media , who sit down with a different independent media founder each week to ask them how they did it. Every episode of the show is filmed at a neighborhood bar, restaurant, or café where the guest likes to spend their time. And in each conversation, Hamish or Hanne joins with, “I’ll have what you’re having.” Episode one comes out tomorrow, May 7.

The guests are writers, editors, and creators who have built thriving media businesses and communities from the ground up. Among them: a techno-optimist with a thousand-year view, and a relationship therapist with a warning about AI’s impacts tomorrow. A journalist who wrote the definitive book on Elon Musk—before, he says, Elon tried to buy up every copy. A tabloid insider who spent years protecting a secret source and then became a whistleblower himself. Internet natives and legacy media icons who have reported on power and celebrity from up close. Some built their audience entirely from scratch; others arrived with a career’s body of work and found a home for it here.

We kept returning to the unvarnished reality of building something on your own: the appetite for risk, the rewards of independence, and what it means to do this in a time when a single person with a point of view can rival—and often exceed—the reach of the most storied media institutions.

New episodes of the show will drop weekly through June. You can watch on YouTube, listen wherever you get your podcasts, and find the full series here on Substack.

The most ambitious media founders in the world are building on Substack.

Substack for Media Startups

Great podcasts have loyal communities: the people who show up for every episode drop, create a dedicated group chat with their friends, or scour the internet looking for takes. We’ve worked directly with hundreds of podcast creators to build tools that allow them to own and grow these communities on Substack—whether or not they’re using the platform as a primary hub for distribution. An email list of people who’ve opted in to hear from you is an asset that doesn’t disappear when a recommendation algorithm changes, a deal expires, or you want to try something new.

Episodes go directly to your subscribers’ inboxes and can be distributed to other podcast platforms via RSS, and you can record natively—including with remote guests—using Substack Recording Studio. Chat functions like a group chat for your listeners, a dedicated place for your audience to talk to each other and to you between episodes. Live video lets you engage, react, or connect in real time. Notes, Substack’s short-form feed, is where new listeners find you: post a clip, a quick thought, or a moment from a recent episode, and it surfaces to people who aren’t subscribed yet. The Substack network drives more than 50% of all subscriptions on the platform, meaning growth is built in when you post.

In partnership with the Signal Awards, we recently spoke with , a host of , and from about how they use Substack to host their shows, distribute episodes, and build community through Chat, Notes, and more.

“We’ll throw on the Substack live chat feature on a Saturday and interact with our people there,” Richard said about using Chat on game days. “It helps to know that we’re being supported by like-minded community.” Once started building its community, Biz said, it took on a life of its own: “The community is self-sustaining. People do meetups and stuff all the time that have nothing to do with us. That’s one of the beautiful things about making something like this—it takes on its own life without you.”

There are a lot of ways to think about building and growing your podcast community on Substack. Here are three models we see working well:

A lightweight companion and fan community

Use your Substack publication to send episodes directly to your listeners’ inboxes. To take it a step further, you can add a lightweight companion newsletter and a chat where your audience can find each other. Companion posts don’t have to be elaborate: a weekly recap, links to things mentioned on the pod, or a short note from a producer or the host can all work. In the simplest version, the chat can be set up as fan-to-fan, so you don’t have to moderate it.

This is a good starting point for podcasters who aren’t ready to launch a paid tier but want to start building an owned audience. It’s free to run, and it builds daily engagement quickly. The people who show up here are dedicated fans who are likely to convert to paying subscribers, should you choose to launch a paid tier—and now you can reach them directly whenever you need.

Case study: Giggly Squad

’s Substack is where their show lives between episodes. Hosts Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo use their newsletter for weekly roundups of what they’re wearing, watching, and obsessing over and their Chat as a dedicated space for the community to talk to each other.

Bonus paid content layered on top

Use Substack to add a paid tier to your podcast that includes bonus content, like behind-the-scenes extras, episode research, or cutting-room-floor material from your conversations with a guest. The additional material might be an extra 20 minutes or so of more personal and candid conversation, with the option to take listener questions.

A paid bonus model structurally changes the relationship with your listeners. Paying subscribers aren’t buying a product; they’re supporting your work. That’s a different dynamic than ad revenue, and it tends to create deeper loyalty.

Case study: Wiser Than Me and Bialik Breakdown

sends her subscribers exclusive background notes and research behind each episode, like a deep dive on actress Glenn Close that supplemented their episode together. It’s context that didn’t make it into the show itself, delivered directly to the people who want to go deeper.

uses her Substack to share a host of extras, like bonus clips, exclusive letters, and live content, for subscribers.

A full multimedia content hub

Use Substack as the comprehensive home base for distribution and community for your show. Send your episodes directly to subscriber inboxes, and distribute them automatically to YouTube, or to Spotify and Apple Podcasts through RSS. Offer bonus drops, extended cuts, AMAs, essays, lives, and collabs with other creators. It’s the whole world of your show, in one place, with community and network growth built in. For many creators, subscription revenue at this level becomes more lucrative than ads. But the more durable thing it creates is a self-sustaining community.

Case study: Pantsuit Politics and Diabolical Lies

publishes four or more premium episodes a week, distributing directly through Substack. They also send a newsletter, host regular live sessions, and keep an active chat for their community.

uses Substack as their full distribution channel, paywalling their deeply researched, hour-plus episodes that drop twice a month. Subscription revenue has enabled them to do fewer episodes and go deeper on each one, a model that works because their subscriber community is so engaged in the work and each other.

However you decide to set up your community and your show on Substack, the underlying logic is the same: your audience wants somewhere to be, and it’s to your benefit to be able to reach them directly. At the Signal Awards event, Biz and Richard shared some of what they’ve learned from building their shows and finding new audiences on Substack.

Podcast success is often built on intimacy—the sense that someone is talking to you specifically, that you’re in on something special. Regardless of how you set up your community, Substack is where that feeling finds a home, and where built-in engagement tools and network growth make sure more people find it.

For most of the past decade, has been offline: no Instagram, no scrolling, with a trusted collaborator managing her digital presence. Last year, she and that collaborator—strategist —decided to make an exception, and Lena got her Substack login. “It was like when I graduated from rehab,” Lena told us. “Very adult.”

Since then, Lena’s become increasingly active on , writing about everything from reading lists to her favorite Etsy finds to how she organizes her Notes app. Now she’s promoting her new memoir, Famesick, from bed, both at home and onstage, where she’s been hosting a kind of roving variety show from under the covers—and all over Substack.

In the days leading up to the memoir’s release, Lena made guest appearances on publications across the platform, an online book tour that let her collaborate with some of her favorite writers. Each piece was written to fit its home: a ’90s fashion nostalgia trip for , a Q&A on body image and rehab for , a meditation on moviegoing for . Writer of After School took note: “I can’t recall a single book launch that has utilized the Substack platform so handily.”

We talked with Lena and Dolly about “going where it’s warm,” why they promoted Famesick sideways rather than head-on, and what Dolly would do differently next time.

You’ve been in bed with everyone from the NYT to in the last few weeks. How’s the press tour going?

Lena: It’s been a ball! Last time I really did this level of public anything was the last season of Girls (and if you read Famesick you’ll see that I wasn’t really in the place to, uh, enjoy it). Since then I’ve been largely behind the scenes as a writer and director, which means you can rely on your cast to hold it down, press-wise. I have definitely pushed myself out of the little comfort zone I’ve found in recent years, but that’s because, as all the many authors of Substack know, when it comes to a book, there’s only you. So I realized I was going to have to find a way to do promotion and a tour that didn’t leave me physically and spiritually fracked.

It felt like you were everywhere in the days leading up to Famesick’s pub date. What was the strategy for your Substack tour?

Lena: Dolly is always such an incredible sounding board, but our strategy was kind of not a strategy, in that it wasn’t super calculated. It was the result of my happily accepting the chance to collaborate with the newsletters I actually read. “Organic” is an overused word, at least in Hollywood, but I do think that when you’re a fan for real and having a genuinely great time, people can feel it. All press is not good press (another lesson of Famesick), and if you’re stiff, anxious, and out of place, then what’s the point? Whereas I love writing. I have a myriad of interests and hobbies and there’s a newsletter that speaks to them all. I’m also chronically ill, and so getting to show up as my best self, the self who loves to write and go down little Wiki wormholes and eBay trapdoors, is a rare treat. Writing has always made me feel like part of the world even when I can’t be, and I feel very lucky to have made new pals and learned a lot.

Dolly: Lena and I first started talking in December 2024 about what it might look like for her to publish a Good Thing Going newsletter. We had been working together since 2020, and it always pained me to cut down her beautifully written Instagram captions to fit a character limit. She needed more real estate for her words. When we initially discussed a newsletter, there was some hesitation around committing to a locked cadence, but I tried to encourage her to throw out the “rules” of how to show up online. Lena is a writer. Substack made sense for her.

When it came time to promote Famesick, we had a large kickoff with the full team: publisher, agents, PR, management. While the PR teams focused on traditional media, I was thinking about Substack as an equally important layer of the ecosystem. Lena is the only person I know who is so offline yet deeply aware of what’s happening online. She’s an avid Substack reader, subscribes to dozens of publications, and is very engaged with her own community through DMs, Notes, and comments. So while there wasn’t a rigid plan, collaborating with publications she already read felt like a natural, grassroots way to introduce Famesick without it feeling too promotional. Some opportunities came through her DMs, some through my inbox, and others were friends and writers who felt like an organic fit.

What were you hoping to achieve here versus other arms of the tour?

Lena: I wish we had a more mustache-twirling evil genius plan, but I was just “going where it’s warm,” as my father always advises. It feels like Substack folks are way more “my people” than on any other app, or on the stage of a talk show or in the pages of a magazine.

Also, as a late-in-life data nerd, it’s been really interesting to see how committed certain audiences are. I love that a newsletter with more followers but a less engaged audience doesn’t have the same value as someone with a tiny but rabid fan base. As the girl whose show regularly clocked under a million viewers (a number that, in showbiz, might as well be 10), I connect to that vibe: small but noisy, mini but mighty. It’s so cool to me that so many people are making a living as writers who wouldn’t have found a way to do that even five years ago.

In January, you introduced Dolly and revealed that you haven’t posted on Instagram directly in years. You do have your own Substack password, right? Are you fully in the driver’s seat on and Notes?

Lena: I sure am! That was a big moment, because I literally hadn’t typed into a social media app in well over half a decade. But I was getting FOMO.

It’s a testament to how much fun I was having, and how safe the community feels, that this even seemed like an okay idea. I joined Substack purely for pleasure. I love reading, and I’m always looking for new avenues to take in unvarnished and inventive voices. I wanted a place to share book lists and niche vintage shopping fetishes and all the delicious bits of being alive that don’t have a home anywhere else creatively. Quickly, I started having fun, and fun isn’t a word I’ve equated with social media in many, many years.

You used a bunch of formats in just a few days: a column takeover, a live Chat AMA, Notes. Did you go in pitching format and topic, or did each one grow out of the publication you were working with?

Dolly: This happened pretty organically. The column takeovers were part of the collaborations we had planned, but the other formats unfolded in real time. The AMAs came from the idea that Lena would already be answering audience questions on her book tour, so we thought, why not source those questions directly from the brilliant minds on Substack? The responses were so strong that it led her to create her own advice column, Dunhamisms. Notes ended up being a major learning. She would text me every time she saw a spike in followers. We quickly realized that consistent posting on Notes was a key driver of engagement and discovery.

On , you promoted Famesick sideways: posts about coats, self-help, and if our moms actually have the capacity to change. How much of that was mapped out ahead of time as part of the official strategy?

Lena: Dolly and Penguin Random House know I’m pretty allergic to the “hey y’all, preorder my book!” sales style. I never judge anyone for giving it a go, but it’s the same way that I could never take a very serious nude. Some people have it in them and some don’t! I have to find a way to make it feel fun and engaging to me, which is also the only way to make it possibly pleasurable for anyone else. I love marginalia, writing about writing, talking not just about process but what makes up a writer’s life. Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings was the first blog that ever felt like it was my little home on the internet, because it captured how much frippery and fun there is to being an artist, and also the many ways to inspire and be inspired. I hoped to capture a little bit of that and perhaps preserve some of what goes into putting a memoir together, in a little bit of a Proustian cookie way.

How do you think the Substack press impacted preorder sales?

Lena: Someone I trust told me that, in book sales at least, every single Substack follower is the equivalent of many more Instagram or X followers because Substackers are way more likely to follow through and buy a book. While I don’t have the actual numbers, that feels anecdotally true to me. There’s an appreciation of the written word that suffuses this whole place. Most of your readers are also going to be writers themselves, who know just what writing a book takes.

Dolly, how are you measuring whether the Substack leg of the press tour actually moves the needle? Do you look at numbers after posts go up, ask publishers to share data, track preorder velocity or Lena’s subscriber growth?

Dolly: We actually could have done this better. Because everything we were doing was intentionally collaborative rather than overtly promotional, we focused primarily on subscriber growth. If I were doing this again or advising someone else on this, I’d recommend setting up unique tracking links to better measure conversion from Substack. That being said, I think there’s a bigger lesson here: as grows, so does the surface area for talking to our audience. We built that growth by having fun with it, and that in turn made the book promotion more effective.

Many of our readers are writers themselves—some writing books, some writing for the inbox every week. What does memoir ask of you that writing online doesn’t?

Lena: What I love about Substack is that it’s a writers’ community. Not since my LiveJournal days have I been so surrounded by like-minded folks. And a lot of us came of age when the confessional memoir and blogging were starting to braid together and people started to tailor their own narratives to the algorithm (a lot of “9 Ways Game of Thrones’ Red Wedding Was Like My Last Breakup!” energy). That was very much the world we were swimming in on Girls—Hannah dreamed of making money writing a breakup-themed listicle.

Writing at a particular cadence is amazing for the creative muscle. That’s what writing TV taught me: to be athletic and not precious, since you have to grind out an episode whether you feel it or not. At the same time, it requires that you metabolize life quickly and that you always have something to talk about. A lot of memoir [writing] is slowing down enough to understand where you’ve been, what was significant about it, and to dig into larger themes, since all my favorite memoirs are not, at the end of the day, only about their author. Figuring out how to tell stories again and again, to be able to rely on yourself to produce cogent ideas even when not in the mood, is an amazing skill and can really be the difference between a writing career and a hobby in this day and age. At the same time, I don’t think that memoir, at least in its truest form, can be produced with a stopwatch in hand.

What, if anything, would the Girls girls be writing about on Substack in 2026?

Lena: I am terribly afraid that Hannah would be doing a lot of “everything I wish I’d said to the man who called me cutie at the ATM this morning!” type of stuff, but maybe I’m doing her dirty and my girl is a better writer than that. Shosh’s NYC guide would be a little bit basic but at the same time, she doesn’t do anything in half measures. She would be the West Village Girl to follow.

Writing a memoir requires a kind of excavation, and then a press tour asks you to talk about what you found, over and over, with strangers. Has this revisiting taught you anything about your own life or career that you didn’t have perspective on when you were still writing it?

Lena: There is a distinct irony to doing a press tour to talk about the damage you did to yourself on press tours, but it also offers a chance to revisit old habits and come correct. Being able to show up and be open to these brilliant people but also clear in my own boundaries has actually been a wonderful correction, the rare chance for a re-do and to see lessons in action.

You spend however long writing the book, trying to speak with clarity and intention. Then you’re asked about the same experiences but in a context with no editor, no guardrails, and no control. On my last book tour, I didn’t realize that I don’t always have to offer something new. It’s okay to say, “I worked hard to say that with specificity and integrity, and I hope people will read it in context.” It’s also a cool chance to turn it away from my own story and toward some of the larger themes: chronic illness, how our culture ingests and spits out women’s stories, and, of course, being a person who loves to wear weird coats.

Dolly, what does “this worked” actually look like to you?

Dolly: I’ve always felt very protective of Lena’s online presence. The internet has been so cruel over the years, and every recommendation I’ve made has been about helping her be understood on her own terms. Seeing such a strong wave of positive sentiment has been the clearest signal to me. There’s genuine admiration for her voice, her thinking, and the book itself, and that’s incredibly meaningful, both professionally and personally. It all makes me very happy.

Who changed your life today? Who stretched your way of seeing the universe? Who challenged you to think deeper about the culture around you, or to question the state of the political world? Who introduced you to a new song, a brand-new way of cooking, or even a new rose to plant in your garden? If you’ve been on Substack for a while, my hope is you’ve found these people here.

Because that’s always been part of Substack’s mission: to make good on the internet’s promise as a place for the universal exchange of knowledge and ideas. We want to make it easier for you to stumble upon ideas that not only enrich your life but that challenge your thoughts and sharpen your thinking.

Today, we’re cracking open the world of ideas even further as we introduce new translation features, starting with the ability to translate Notes written in English into 15 languages, or into English from over 100 languages.

That means you can now read and engage with writers and creators anywhere from Trondheim to Tokyo. What’s more, in the coming weeks, we’ll also be adding translation to posts, meaning you can take a deeper dive into your favorite writers’ work, wherever they are across the globe.

For writers, this will open the world to your work. The post you publish in English will be able to find readers in Istanbul. The newsletter you write in Japanese can build an audience in Buenos Aires. A poet in Lisbon and a food writer in Marseille are no longer separated from each other—or from the readers who would love their work—by the language they happen to write their Notes in. The addressable readership for every writer will have grown meaningfully larger.

Because ideas should not be limited to geography or thwarted by language. Good, smart, interesting ideas should be allowed to flourish wherever there is a willing mind to engage.

I’ve had the chance to preview these features, and the writers I’ve discovered have already expanded my horizons. Just this weekend, I stumbled upon a discussion about the ethical responsibility of AI from an Italian writer I had hitherto not heard of. And I found intellectual kinship with a Dutch writer who somehow managed to articulate every thought and feeling I’ve had over the past few years about the blandification of culture. A young Japanese writer living in Barcelona taught me the word komorebi (it means “sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees,” and is apparently as much a philosophical dictum as it is a visual effect), whilst a chef in the south of France just made my life infinitely better by sharing an orange miso sauce that works like a dream with raw fish.

The point is, you don’t have to cross a border, get on a plane, or even speak another language now to connect with ideas that might change your life. Translations bring the world of ideas to your doorstep.

We’re still in the early days, and translation, especially at scale, is technically and culturally complex. And we have many more languages to go. But the translation of Notes is an exciting starting place, and your feedback can help us make it even better: when you see a translated Note, click the “translated” icon to tell us how we did.

The appetite for this kind of exchange is already clear in the numbers. Writers and creators everywhere are building real audiences and livelihoods on Substack. As of today, nearly 100,000 publishers are earning money on Substack globally, including almost 30,000 outside the U.S. In Europe, creators are now collectively earning more than $90 million annually.

And we’re continuing to invest in that community. We’re bringing on nine new partnerships hires to support writers and creators in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Nordics, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Japan, joining a dedicated U.K. team. Alongside these new hires, we are also expanding Substack Defender, our legal support program for publishers who face legal uncertainty or pressure because of their work—a core pillar of our commitment to a free press.

All of this is in service of what the internet, at its best, can do: make the world wider and closer at the same time. If you’ve been thinking about starting your own Substack and sharing your ideas with a global audience, come to one of our upcoming international masterclasses. We’d love to meet you.

This month, we’re shipping a range of updates that give you more control over your publishing workflow—from scheduling Notes in advance to new live video tools, post templates, and design details that make your publication feel unmistakably yours. Here’s what’s new.

Post templates

You can now create and save templates for longform posts, directly within the post editor. If your workflow includes recurring elements like calls to action, disclaimers, section structures, sponsorship placements, or code blocks, you can save them once and reuse them in new drafts instantly.

This removes repetitive setup work and helps you stay consistent without starting from scratch each time. Build your format once, and reuse it whenever you need it.

Learn more about using post templates in our Help Center.

Drop caps

Enable a drop cap—the large, stylized first letter that opens a piece of writing—for your Substack publication. You can turn this on in the Website Editor in your publication settings. From there, click “Posts,” toggle on “Drop caps,” and click “Save.” Visible on web, drop caps are a small detail that can give your writing a more considered, editorial feel.

Learn more about adding a drop cap to your post in our Help Center.

Live video: more control over how you stream and manage events

We’ve expanded Substack Live with new tools for publications running regular video programming:

• Choose where you stream: You can now decide which publication to go live from each time you stream, instead of being limited to your primary publication. This is available across iOS, Android, and web.

• From the new live video management dashboard page on desktop, you can now:

  • Schedule on behalf of a host. Contributors and admins can now schedule a livestream for another creator on your publication.

  • Edit scheduled streams. You can now update the title, timing, host, and notification settings for any scheduled stream after it’s been created. If a host needs to swap out or a time needs to shift, you can handle it directly from the dashboard without canceling and starting over.

  • Have quick access to stream keys. Contributors, admins, owners, and hosts can now view and copy stream keys directly.

Learn more about managing live video in our Help Center.

Schedule Notes

You can now schedule Notes to publish at a specific time, on web, iOS, and Android. Write in advance, set a publishing time, and your Note will go out automatically. All scheduled Notes appear in your Notes Drafts tab, where you can continue editing right up until they publish.

• On web, click the 📅 icon in the composer

• On iOS and Android, tap “…” and select “Schedule”

• Choose a publishing time in your local time zone

• Find and edit your scheduled Notes anytime in the Drafts tab

  

Learn more about drafting and publishing Notes in our Help Center.

Refine your feed with clearer controls

The “show less” control in your feed is now more visible and easier to use. When you see a Note you’re not interested in, tap the X to tell us why—whether it’s not relevant, feels like clickbait, or just isn’t what you’re looking for. Your feedback helps shape what you see going forward, so your feed stays focused on the work you care about.

Subscribe homepage block

The subscribe block—a customizable banner that prompts homepage visitors to subscribe—allows you to tailor your message to free, paid, and founding members. Now you can also customize its color and add a logo, giving you more ways to make it feel like yours.

Callout block

Add callout blocks to your posts: visually distinct, formatted containers that let a piece of text stand apart from the rest of your writing. Use them to highlight a key idea, surface a quote from another writer, flag a note to readers, or draw attention to something you want to make sure doesn’t get skipped. It’s a clean way to add visual rhythm or reference something you want your audience to see.

These updates are available now

We’re continuing to build tools that give you more control over how you publish and how you connect with your audience. As always, let us know what’s working and what you’d like to see next, in a Note, in a post, or by restacking.

Why move to Substack?

Whether you’re a solo writer, a video podcaster, or a full newsroom, Substack brings everything you need into one place, without requiring technical experience or stitching together separate tools. It’s free to start, and when you choose to turn on paid subscriptions, you keep 90% of what you earn. Because Substack only makes money when you do, our incentives are directly aligned with yours.

When you publish here, you’re also reaching beyond the subscribers you already have. The Substack network drives more than 50% of all subscriptions on the platform, from millions of active users discovering posts every day—so you can gain subscribers and income simply by publishing on Substack.

Substack is designed to meet you where you are:

• Writers and journalists: Build a direct relationship with readers who pay you for your work.

• Podcasters and video creators: Host natively, go live, and publish automatically to Substack, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Offer premium episodes to paid subscribers.

• Media companies: Run a full newsroom with multiple writers, sections, and podcasts. Substack handles payments, distribution, and subscriber management.

• Experts and educators: Teach what you know and share your work on your own terms, with your audience paying you directly because they value it.

We’ve made it easy to bring your content, audience, and payment relationships with you to Substack. This guide walks you through everything you need to get set up on Substack, so you can take advantage of the network and tools to build a stronger connection with your community.

Step 1: Set up your publication

When you first set up your Substack, you’ll be prompted to choose a publication name, URL, and one-line description. You can always come back and update these elements later.

How do I create a publication on Substack?

Make sure to put your publication in private mode, an option you’ll find in your dashboard settings under Privacy. This will give you an opportunity to get everything set up before your audience sees it.

From your dashboard, you can also open the website editor to customize your publication’s look and feel.

• To enable customization, make sure that you’ve switched out of “Profile” mode and selected “Custom” under the theme menu.

• You’ll then be able to update your design, layout, and logo before you go live.

Two more elements to personalize before you go live:

• About page: This is where new readers learn who you are, what you write about, and why they should subscribe. Learn more

• Welcome email: When someone new signs up, they’ll get an automatic email from you. Use it to say thank you, point paid subscribers to their benefits, and give free readers a reason to upgrade. Learn more

Step 2: Import your list

You can import your email list during the setup process or come back to it later from your settings. You’ll need a CSV file, which you can export from your previous host.

How do I import my mailing list from another platform?

A few things to keep in mind:

• Before you bring your list over, make sure everyone on it has opted in to receiving emails from you on your previous platform.

• When you import, you’ll be asked to give your list some context. Label your upload with the name of your previous host so there’s a clear record of where the subscribers came from.

Skip the welcome email for now. Since you’ll be letting your audience know that you’re moving, a default welcome email will feel redundant. Instead, save that momentum for your first full post.

Some publishers choose to offer new subscribers a free 30-day trial as a gesture of goodwill when they migrate, especially if they’re coming from a platform where paid subscriptions couldn’t be transferred directly. You’ll be offered this option when you import your list.

Step 3: Import your content

Substack makes it easy to bring your work with you. Here’s how:

Paste your URL: Most of the time, you can paste your blog or newsletter URL directly, and Substack will pull over your 15 most recent posts. This works for Ghost, Mailchimp, Beehiiv, TinyLetter, and more.

Or upload a file instead: If you’re able to download a CSV, XML, or JSON file from your previous platform, you can upload that. Check whether your platform has an RSS feed or a JSON archive available for download. From your Substack settings, you’ll be able to upload it directly.

How do I import my posts from another platform?

Step 4: Set up your Stripe account

Stripe is the sole payment provider for Substack. If you used a Stripe account on your previous platform, you’ll be able to connect it to your Substack in just a few minutes.

• If you are coming from Ghost, Beehiiv, or a custom build where you owned your Stripe account, you can visit your settings and connect your Stripe account by signing in.

• If you are coming from a platform like Memberful, or one that uses Stripe but where the platform owns the payment account, there are a few additional steps. Contact support, and our team can help you bring your payment relationships over.

• If you’re coming from Patreon, you can find our comprehensive guide here. We’ve worked with a number of writers and creators to develop a strategy that will help you get the word out about your move.

How do I set up my Stripe account?

Step 5: Make the most of your announcement

Use your first Substack post to zoom out on your work and to bring people along on the journey. Sharing your story in an announcement post can motivate new and existing subscribers to support you and spread the word.

Great announcement posts:

• Make it clear that existing subscribers don’t need to change anything. “We wanted to let you know about this move, but the tl;dr is that you don’t need to do anything except enjoy an improved Exponential View.” — and when they switched from Ghost

• Let subscribers know why Substack is better for their experience.
  “Switching to Substack will allow for much better community features, annual memberships, and a lot of other stuff that we honestly should have been able to offer listeners all along. In terms of speed, smoothness, and ease of functionality, there’s no comparison between the two platforms, and we’re excited to take advantage of our new, much snazzier home.” — when he switched from Patreon

• Keep the post free and open. This should be a free post so as many people as possible can see it. Don’t forget to add buttons reminding your audience to subscribe.

Post a Note: Post a Note to let people know you’ve arrived. The Substack network drives more than 50% of all subscriptions across the platform and 30% of paid subscriptions, and the Notes feed is one of the easiest ways to tap into it.

Learn how to use Notes to grow your audience on Substack:

Demystifying the feed

When you post, you’re not just reaching your existing audience. You’re putting yourself in front of potential new subscribers who might not have found you yet.

Bring your social media audience with you: Put your Substack link in your bio across every platform. It pays to clear out other links: creators who remove competing links, including Linktree, see significantly more of their audience follow them over. When followers have multiple options, they often choose none. For more platform-specific best practices and a deeper look into bringing your social following to Substack, see our comprehensive guide:

How to bring your social media audience to Substack

Start a Substack