Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media

Let's talk a little bit about the future of media. Are people going to be reading less?

Great writing, great media, great culture in general—it's this inherently valuable thing. We've entered a world where attention is the scarce resource.

There was one platform that stood up and said, “Hey, we are protecting free speech,” and that was Substack.

This was also an era where the blogging ecosystem was sort of dying. A really important moment was to actually save blogging and writing on the internet.

In the early days, people would often say to me in an accusatory tone, “Substack is just blogging with a business model.” And I was like, “That sounds pretty good.”

We've been talking a lot about disrupting media. What are the big plans here?

I aspire that the Substack app can be a place where you look back at the time you spend on it and think, “Damn, I'm glad I did that. That made me a better person.”

Catherine, we've been talking for years about how much we love Substack, even before we were formally affiliated with the company. Why don't you go first and talk about what you find so remarkable or striking about Substack's impact?

Yeah, I think the impact is truly understated. I think we've moved so fast as a country, as an internet, and as a world in the last few years that we've sort of memory-holed what it was like in 2020 and 2021—but particularly for media, how crazy the 2020 moment was for anyone in the thought-leadership space or anyone in the media space.

Let me just go back to the summer of 2020. James Bennett, who was the editor of the op-ed page at The New York Times, was forced to resign for publishing an op-ed by a sitting senator who is still in office. The craziness around writing anything that was seen as heretical, asking questions, or saying something that was seen as unorthodox was extraordinary.

In 2020, there were mass firings. Twitter deplatformed a sitting president. Facebook did as well. It was an extraordinary time, and a fearful time, where many people were afraid to say what they were thinking.

There were always rumors of people having unfettered conversations, and of how dangerous it was that people were having these conversations behind the backs of journalists. There was one platform that stood up and said, “Hey, we are protecting free speech,” and that was Substack.

I think people forget that because it's just seen as, “Of course, we're in this new time. Elon bought Twitter in November 2022. The Overton window has swung open. People can say what they thought.” People have forgotten that only a few years ago, we were in desperate times where people were losing their livelihoods. No one was willing to say that freedom of speech was under attack.

But the one platform—the infrastructure—that was there to support those people—it was Chris, it was Substack, and they never wavered. I think that is the cultural impact. Where we are today, we would not be where we are today without Substack.

I get very emotional. I'm a superfan of Substack. I was on Substack in 2021, and I'm very proud of that. I think we need to remember that we could have been living in a totally different time and a totally different culture had people not stood up and had the courage to say that freedom of speech matters.

Yeah. This was years before Elon had bought Twitter, and it was just the first bastion of free speech.

Chris, why don't you talk about when the moment was, or what the evolution was, that led you guys to decide, “Hey, we're going to take this stance,” even if it's going to upset some of our most important writers, some employees, some investors, and the ecosystem? Talk about what that was like for you.

I've always seen the free-speech thing as an important pillar, but not the main pillar of what Substack is actually setting out to do. The way that we think of Substack is that we're making a new economic engine for culture.

It's not a partisan idea or a political idea directly. It's just this idea that great things are made by independent voices who can do the work they believe in, make money, have editorial freedom, and have a direct connection with their audience.

The backdrop of starting Substack was just this idea that the internet came along and smashed a lot of the existing business models for culture. What came in the wake of that were these massive, internet-scale networks that are phenomenal businesses. They connected everybody like never before and had a lot of amazing positive attributes, but in my estimation—in our estimation—they were kind of driving us crazy.

The core of Substack is this idea of independence. The individual left to do the thing they believe, say the thing they believe, and make the thing they believe, supported by an audience that's there for them, is this crucial ingredient in a healthy culture and a free society.

Freedom of the press and freedom of speech are necessary preconditions for that. I think that in the long arc of history, that's not, hopefully, that controversial of an idea. I think it's a very American idea.

But at the time, just because of the world as it was, it was kind of out of vogue, shall we say, quite severely. The people who really felt the brunt of that in 2020, which surprised me, were not necessarily conservatives or Republicans. It was people in the liberal media—in my telling, selectively, the best and most interesting people—who were getting thrown from the ramparts.

The fact that this thing we were creating, this new economic engine for culture that gives you this independence, happened to be there at a time when a bunch of the most interesting writers in the world were getting summarily tossed from their longtime institutions—that lined up really well for us from a business perspective. It was spicy from a cultural perspective, but that's the gig.

Maybe to quickly add, it's amazing to see on the other side of the coin, with the blogging ecosystem, how much that's changed. We've gone through LiveJournal, Zanga, and Blogger, and we had Google Reader RIP. Then you had basically a phase when I first met your co-founder, Hamish, and the company was 3 people.

This was also an era where the blogging ecosystem was sort of dying. You had the open, WordPress-powered blogging ecosystem, but there was no economic model. You ended up with a lot of spam and people hacking these poorly maintained PHP websites.

I think this was also a really important moment to actually save blogging and writing on the internet—to create a model. For a long time, people just thought, “I'm going to plug an Amazon book and get affiliate fees, or I'm going to put Google AdSense all over my blog.” That was the only way to create any sort of economic thing.

For all of us who are in tech, it was cool to see Ben Thompson from Strateery really show that there might be an alternate model. But it was almost always a curiosity and something that was annoying to actually build. You'd have to set up your blog, set up your payments, and do all these other things.

I think it was also a really important moment for Substack to emerge from the internet-media side, clean all that up, and make it easy to put together something that became the big economic engine.

In the early days, people would often say to me in an accusatory tone, “Substack is just blogging with a business model.” And I was like, “That sounds pretty good. If that's all it was, that would be pretty cool.”

It turns out it's more. It's podcasting. It's a whole network. I don't know—that seems good.

Yeah. It really achieves the dream of reaching your audience. If you have 100,000 Twitter followers but can't really engage them, and you're dependent on the platform, that's not as thrilling as owning your own email audience.

I think what I love about what you guys did is that you took the risk that, “Hey, we're going to give people their emails, and they could choose to leave if they want to,” as opposed to being trapped on the platform. You're just going to build such a compelling offering that writers are going to want to stay.

It's amazing, years later, to see a large majority, if not all, of the biggest writers stay on the platform. There's only one thing that's better than people staying on the platform, which is when people leave the platform, take advantage of the export features, and then subsequently return to open arms.

We call them boomerangs, and we love to see that too. I think the right to exit is really important. People thought that was very dumb. They said, “Well, if you just let your customers leave, won’t they just leave?” I think in the short run that might be true, but in the long run, that created the right structure for us.

It meant that we have to—and still have to—build a network that has enough value that even though you can leave, you don’t want to. And even if you do leave, you might choose to come back. I think that has caused us to keep the right thing at the forefront of our minds.

But I would say there’s something even more important about the direct connection. It’s not just that I can leave; it’s that, in my mind, what a subscription is is the option to reach out and tap you on the shoulder. It’s to say, “If you want to, you don’t have to send me an email all the time if you don’t want to. But if you want to send me an email, if you want to send me a push notification, if you want to show up at the top of my inbox, I kind of give you that right.” Something that lets you do as a writer or as a creator is take creative risk.

Something that I hear a lot from YouTubers—people who are very good at YouTube, who have massive followings, who are very successful—is, “I have this idea for a thing that I could make, and I know there’s an audience out there who would like it, but I can’t make it. If I made it the way that I want to make it, no one’s going to see it because it doesn’t align with the algorithm.” In addition, you can bring your audience with you. That’s a way to give humans the power to override the algorithm and say, “Hey, I’ve got this trust relationship with my audience. I want to exercise it and go out on a limb and say, ‘Hey, I want to call in that favor and have you pay attention to this thing that I’m saying is good.’”

Sometimes it might be bad and you might unsubscribe, but sometimes it might be great. It might be something great that could not have existed if the only way to reach everyone was to please the algorithm every single time.

So, in the beginning, it was a blogging platform with a business model, as we just said, and the vision has gotten bigger into more of a network, more of a platform across formats. Expand on what the big vision for Substack is, and I’m also curious how that’s evolved—if the vision in 2018, 2019, 2020 is the same vision as it is now. Tell us the vision, then we can talk about tracing the evolution of it.

I would say that we started from the very beginning with this very ambitious—some might say derangedly ambitious—vision. Again, the backdrop was that we think the internet has massively reshaped the economic incentives for media.

The origin of the company—I’ll just briefly tell this because it’s germane here—was that I was taking some time off at my last startup, and I’d always wanted to be a writer. I’d always been an avid reader. I’ve always thought that what you read matters. The media you consume is not just a way you spend your life; it changes who you are. It changes who you are as an individual. It changes how you see the world, and it changes cultures and societies. Great writing, great media, great culture in general is this inherently valuable thing.

My first instinct was, “I should make some of that.” I could write an essay. How hard would that be? I know how to program. I know how to type. I started writing what was supposed to be this essay or blog post detailing my frustrations with the media economy on the internet.

So this is where it started. I’m like, “Look at all these great things the internet has done, but it’s also created these mimetic evolutionary landscapes that are driving us nuts. This is going nowhere good. Look at how the culture is shifting.”

I sent this essay to my friend Hamish, who’s actually a writer, and he let me down very gently. He said, “You know, it’s 2017, and your essay is about maybe the newspaper businesses are in trouble and maybe Facebook is not an unalloyed good. Dude, we know. Everybody knows that—or everybody who’s in my industry knows that. But the better question is: Let’s say that all of those things you’re complaining about are true. What could you do about it? How could that be different?”

Then we started arguing about that. That started this sort of—I think maybe this is an a16z-relevant thing—techno-optimist idea: You’re not going to turn back the clock. These are new, powerful technologies that are changing how everything works, and those things come with trade-offs. There are upsides and downsides, and there are contingencies—historical contingencies—where the world could tip in one of many ways.

The right way to address that is not to lament it or to wish, “Hey, we should go back.” It’s, “Hey, we should put these things to use in service of people. We should imagine what the best version of this future is as these new networks take off, as these new technologies take off, and we should work proactively to help usher in the better, freer, more exciting version of that future.” Heady stuff.

Then we had this big idea, this big, grandiose thing, and we had the kernel of the way to start. The way to start was that we could make it dead simple to start a paid email newsletter. There were probably 20 people in the world who really, really wanted it, but they really wanted it. It was going to be the best thing ever for them.

That was the kernel. It was the smallest possible instantiation of that much bigger idea: You were going to create this new economic engine that lets any independent voice make the things they believe in and make real money doing it. It’s a way around the cold-start problem because you could have an individual person. The very first Substack newsletter made total sense.

We started with a very grandiose version of Substack firmly fixed in our minds. We’d always imagined a version of this; even then, I think we looked at YouTube as maybe the closest version of this thing that already existed.

Talk more about how you decided to launch Notes, or go from, “Okay, we’ve got this sort of business engine where we’ve got all these writers making a lot of money. Where do we go from here?”

I’ll tell one step before that because it went into my thinking. Very early on, in the early days of Substack, we were like, “Okay, the thing that’s going to be really different about Substack is it’s all going to be paid,” because that’s the thing that aligns the incentives. That’s the thing that makes this thing different.

In order to be very pure to our vision, we weren’t going to allow anybody to have a free Substack or to send emails to free people. That evaporated with our first customer because he was like, “Oh, okay. Then I’ll just use Mailchimp for the free version, and then I’ll funnel the people here.” He created this stitch-together thing.

It was like, “Oh, this is really dumb, because if you want to be successful—if you want to make a successful paid Substack—you have to have a free Substack.” In order to make that experience good and have the conversions actually work, we should just support that. It’s not an abrogation of our vision. It’s actually—you need, in order for the thing to work, to provide this other thing.

Then the thing that we realized not too long after that was that the same was actually true about Twitter and the social networks. In 2018, 2019, if you wanted to have a successful Substack, you had to also have a successful Twitter, a successful Facebook, or a successful LinkedIn. You had to have some top-of-funnel place. The same way that legacy media was struggling, you had to have Facebook traffic, Google traffic, or something. There were always these other networks that were the source of your business.

So even if you were this independent creator, you were downstream of these other platforms. That had both a philosophical consequence—we’re trying to make this place that has these different incentives, but you’re still at the whim of the crazy Thunderdome, right? You still have to play the Twitter game or the Facebook game—and a very practical problem: Those networks don’t give a shit about you as a creator that makes money.

Mark Zuckerberg can decide, in a fit of pique, that people are annoying him about politics, so he’s going to turn off politics. If you’re a politics creator who depends on Facebook for your livelihood, that’s an existential event. It’s not even because they’re trying to do that. It’s just that these networks twist and turn.

They don’t really have any intrinsic interest in helping you build your audience and make the thing you believe in. So we had this idea that, in the long run, the only way we were going to really make that work for people was to build one of these networks ourselves that was built on different laws of physics.

We were going to build a network, a place, a destination—a place that you could go and experience the internet and have all of those great things that you get from social networks, but with a different business model and a different incentive structure.

And it’s not going to replace them, but it’ll live alongside them, and it’ll be the one place on the internet where it actually does want you to succeed. It actually does want you to go and find something interesting and long-form to read or long-form to watch. It does want you to find and fall in love with something enough that you might choose to pay for it, and that’s going to create a very different feel from everywhere else that just wants to keep you glued to the screen.

So we had this theoretical idea of why we had to do this thing, but we also knew that it was going to be quite difficult. It’s very hard to start a new internet-scale network, and it took years. Increasingly, to your earlier point on the algorithm, it’s so interesting to watch all of the major platforms move toward the algorithmic “For You” world.

Because in that world, the creator’s relationship with their audience is even further away, right? It maybe literally doesn’t matter. This all originally started with, “Well, we have this problem with any social app where you need people to follow enough folks so that they get enough feed content.” One way to solve that is, even if you’re not following somebody, maybe we’ll just suggest things. It turns out the algorithms are so good that maybe their entire feed should just be suggested content.

But what does it mean as a creator to even build a following on one of these platforms if, even if you have 100,000 followers or whatever, maybe they’ll see none of your content because the algorithm doesn’t care? It’s caring less and less about the follower graph these days.

Definitely. And I think there are two takes you could take with that. The first reaction that I think a lot of people have is to say, “Oh, well, algorithms are bad, right? The algorithm is whatever. It’s severing our ties. It’s putting us into bubbles. It’s exposing us too much to people outside.” There are trade-offs with algorithms; therefore, algorithms are bad.

I think a more productive take is that algorithms are powerful, and they’re a tool that people use. They serve the ends that we tell them. If we tell them better ends, they’ll help us get better results. This is something we talked about a lot at Substack, because there were a lot of our users who felt like, at the time, “The good thing about Substack is there isn’t an algorithm, and I just connect directly. That’s the thing that’s actually good.”

I think the take that we have is there’s something much better than that. What if there was an algorithm that actually served you, that was actually trying to help you find the things that you deeply valued, and that actually had—you know, the nerd term for this is an objective function? If the objective function was actually closer to your own interest—in other words, if the secret hidden master that the algorithm is serving is actually your own interest rather than trying to sell you more ads—

You have a very sophisticated writer base and, by extension, a very sophisticated reader base—very high-value audiences. Now, especially with video, people aren’t used to paying for video in the same way they’re used to paying for writing, partly because of your Substack innovation there. Will you also launch an ad network at some point, or do you think that risks the golden goose in some way? How do you think about that?

I take the same approach to the thing we talked about with an algorithm, and the same approach to building a network. I’m going to say the same thing when we talk about AI, which I assume we will do. Sponsorships and advertising are powerful forces, and I think the thing that would break Substack is if we just looked at the way that legacy social media companies built advertising and said, “Oh, we’re just going to copy that.” Like, that’s going to work.

Because if we did that, what we would be doing is importing the incentive structure and the business model that puts the platform at odds with the people on the platform. On the other hand, there are a ton of Substackers today. Some of them are, in my opinion, some of the very best Substackers who are selling sponsorships.

I think there’s a version of unlocking more economic opportunity, more economic upside, that is aligned with the idea of independence and the idea of having differentiated value and quality. We’re very interested in doing that. But my belief is we have to take a first-principles approach and not just stuff ads in a thing, but ask the question: What would the good version of this be? Then help build that.

Yeah. I think the bear case for ads has been sort of dumbed-down content or clickbait for the masses. The bull case has been that it allows niche writers to monetize without charging their audience a ton, or it doesn’t succumb to audience capture in the same way that a subscription could. Basically, there are pros and cons with both business models, and you guys have to figure out how to integrate it in a way that works for the reader and the writer.

I think the same is true of all of this magical AI technology that’s coming online. We’re building a live product that basically feels like doing a FaceTime call and then magically turns into a highly produced podcast, a YouTube video, a series of short-form clips, and a transcript. Pretty soon, it’s going to be in whatever language you want.

We’re going to be living in a world where one thing you could have is a bunch of AI slop that keeps dumb people clicking. The other thing you could have is a future where there’s way more creative leverage, and where the people who are making this independent stuff, who have the independent voice, can do way more, make something much better, and realize their vision much more fully.

In all these things, I think you look at the technology not as good or bad. You look at it as a powerful means to an end, and if you pick the right ends, then applying the technology is very exciting.

This is something I think you were so early to understand, and it’s sort of common knowledge now, or becoming more common knowledge, but it wasn’t 5 years ago: Everyone can be a creator, and we don’t have enough content. I think there’s this horrible meme that podcasts are over, that we have too much content, that there’s too much online. It’s like, actually, it’s the opposite. If you look at any of the For You feeds, most of it is now AI slop, which says that there’s just a dearth of extraordinary content.

What I always thought was so brilliant about what you understood about professional writers—and having been a professional writer, it was almost like you were inside my psyche—is that the hardest part about writing is writing. It’s really, really hard to get started writing if you’re a true writer and you have writer’s block.

Everything you can do to make the production of that writing easier, everything you can do to create the flywheel where your readers are expecting something—you’re artificially creating deadlines. If you can create something very quickly that turns into a host of different products, that then gives you the positive feedback loop you need to keep doing it, there was something about it from the very beginning: You really understood the artist’s way, or the writer’s drama, of just how difficult it is to be a creator.

That exists within everyone, right? None of our day jobs are writing, but all of us are writers. All of us are creators on this pod. There’s something about how, if you can make people’s lives much easier and make the creation loop easier, people who have day jobs will then do it and create magical, great content to rival the terrible content that’s now being produced by these meme farms.

I think that was a very early insight, and you’re seeing AI push this direction. It’s going to be a hybrid of really creative people using AI to make beautiful products where, otherwise, the barrier for entry would be way too high.

Yeah. I started a whole company to procrastinate from finishing an essay, so I definitely know that feeling.

But the way you’re describing it, and the way I would have put it at the time—and I would still put it—is that we’ve entered a world where attention is the scarce resource. That’s actually not new with AI. I date this to the social media, the internet revolution.

When I was a kid, you could get bored. You could be sitting around and you’d be like, “Dang, I wish I had something to pay attention to right now, and if you could give me something free to distract me, that would be a really good deal.” That was the situation where the original social media network giants rose up. It was like there’s this land grab for attention. Everybody has so much attention to give and not enough things to distract them.

And we have won that war. We have won the war on boredom, right? Nobody has the problem of, “I have 5 minutes. I don’t have anything to do to kill that time.” But the amount of attention I have is not infinite. And so now I live in a world where there’s no scarcity of content, but there’s a huge scarcity of good content. There’s a huge scarcity of things that are worth paying attention to.

This is the fundamental insight of Substack: as somebody who has one life to live, if I could spend a little bit of money to get better culture, better ideas, more interesting use of my time, and things that help me become more the person I want or aspire to be, that’s actually a phenomenal deal. It would be insane of me not to be willing to spend money or a bit of effort to find that better thing. The culture is starting to catch up now, I think, to this reality that’s been true for a decade: you’re spending your life when you choose what media to consume.

I think another huge contribution that you guys have made is around price discovery, where it turns out that the true value for, let’s say, Noah Smith isn’t $80,000 writing at Bloomberg; it’s $1,000,000—or whatever it is that he makes now—writing on his own. If only it had existed when Katherine was a reporter at The Washington Post, maybe she wouldn’t have had to suffer through this venture.

There are 2—maybe 3—people on this. All of you are actually people that we’ve tried to recruit to be Substackers but wound up at a16z instead.

Yeah, exactly. And so it was just fascinating to see how you guys aligned value capture and value creation in a way that wasn’t aligned beforehand. We’re starting to see not just people go independent, but also the rebundling happen, where people like Barry, where Katherine is on the board of Repress, build sort of Substack-first media companies, and other people as well.

This actually reminds me of one of the first things Mark Andrees ever said to me when we were talking about Substack. He said, “You’re going to do to media what the venture capital industry did to software companies, or to tech, which was: There used to be a time where, if you were somebody who knew how to build great software, the way that you could do that would be to get a job from somebody in a suit who would tell you what to do and pay you a salary.”

The hidden reality of that situation was that the people who actually could make the things were creating so much value that they were massively getting underpaid and underrecognized compared to what they were doing. More interestingly, once you could free them up from that structure and actually put them in charge—put the people who are actually making the thing in charge and make them the boss—it massively increased variance in this very positive way.

It didn’t always work, right? Not every software programmer is going to be a great founder. But the best founders who actually build the thing are so much better, and the results are so much more interesting, extreme, and wonderful than in the world where they just got bossed around by whoever was the software company middle management.

The net effect of pulling the talent out, unleashing it, and putting the lunatics in charge of the asylum in tech was this renaissance, basically. I think the same thing is possible in the cultural industries. I think the people who are actually making the stuff are the heroes. They’re putting themselves on the line. If we’re going to have a renaissance and a new flourishing of culture, those are the people who are going to make it.

The people who are investing in them, investing their time and their money, and participating—and the ambition that I have, and that we have at Substack, is to basically just build what they need: build the tools they need, build the network they need to have a fighting chance to win. I think we’re on the way.

Yeah, it’s interesting. Even in VC, there are solo capitalists, like the Noah Smith example, but there are also people who go on and build bigger platforms, much bigger than their individual selves.

I think of them as ambitious media founders, right? We have a whole team at Substack who’s dedicated to the principle that, if you’re an ambitious media founder, we want Substack to be the best possible place to realize the biggest version of your ambition.

Let’s talk a little bit about the future of media. There are only 24 hours in a day. There’s only a portion of that that people spend engaging in content, and it all competes with each other. Looking out a few years, do you see the amount that people spend on content overall increasing? I’m curious: If video is obviously going to increase, are people going to be reading less, or is it just going to be more of everything? How do you view consumption habits changing over time?

I wrote this piece called “The Two Futures of Media,” where I argue that, inevitably, when you ask these questions, you get into weird philosophical questions, like: What is the purpose of media, and what are we doing here?

One of the purposes of media is to entertain, to have some effect. People use media like a drug, right? I’m going to sit there, I’m going to scroll this thing, I’m going to watch this thing, and it’s going to have some effect on me in the moment that’s going to create a pleasant feeling. That’s one of the things that I want from it. I think that side of media is going to get supercharged.

We have very sophisticated AI goonbots now. Is that a good thing? I don’t know. But it’s happening. And we’re going to have that across everything—every short-form video, everything that could be like this. It’s almost approaching wireheading, the science-fiction idea of plugging a wire into your brain that stimulates the pleasure centers.

I think that future is—we’re well into it. It’s only accelerating. The stronger the technology gets, the stronger that thing becomes, and the stronger a hazard it is for people, quite frankly, because there’s a mode of consuming media and culture that is like drug addiction. It’s compelling in the moment. It’s something you want. It’s something you’d even be willing to pay for, or at least spend your time on. But it pulls against your long-term interest.

Remember, the media you consume is not just how you spend your time; it’s who you become. And so it degrades you. It makes your tastes get more base and makes you want more of the dumb thing. It sort of pulls you in. That’s already happening. It’s going to continue to happen. That’s a big part of the future. I think that thing is baked in right now.

But that’s not the only purpose of media, right? The other purpose of media is culture. The other purpose of media is to live in a society, become the kind of person you want to become, and figure out how to live and act back on the world—the intersubjective multiplayer game of building with other people. And that is something that people really, really want as well.

I think the same technologies that are making the first thing much more compelling can make that second thing much more compelling as well. The thing that I think we can do at Substack is create a version of that thing that is also fun, good, and empowering. You don’t have to be a monk to use Substack. You might think, “Well, I could scroll TikTok, or I could go to the library and flip through some microfiche.” It’s like, yeah, you could do that, but nobody’s actually going to do that.

So if we can take the good, interesting, culture-laden future of media and make it really good and really compelling, make it so people make money from it when they make something truly great, and have the Substack app be a place where you look back at the time you spent on it and think, “Damn, I’m glad I did that. That made me a better person. That made me more interesting,” I think that is possible.

When there are these massive changes, when the world changes, when technology reshapes everything, I think the fact that there’s going to be change can become inevitable. But which version of the change happens, which future you go to, is contingent, right? People often ask, “Is the future determined, or is great man theory true? How does history happen?” And I think it’s just both, right? There are these inexorable changes that are going to happen no matter what, but in the moments of change, which future emerges is contingent on the choices people make, the accidents of history, and individual decisions.

And so I think the thing that is possible for us to do is build a version of that second future of media, where people are reading things that make them smarter or listening to conversations that plug them into the world in general, acting back on the culture and participating and engaging in ways that they value. And that creates a ton of economic value and creates—this is why it’s an economic engine for culture—a whole world that is intensely valuable and great.

Is that going to be the world that everybody goes to? No. Some people are going to sit on the AI goonbot. But I think we can make a real difference by making that second future as good as possible.

Building upon your culture point, I've started to see some academics also on Substack. We've been talking a lot about disrupting media. I'm also curious if you think much about academia, books, or these adjacent industries, or if that's a distraction, or you don't think about it super deliberately.

I'm a total crank on the subject of academia. It might be fun, although this is sort of ill-considered on my part, but I think a lot of science is totally broken.

I think that the scientific project is incredibly important and one of the most valuable things in history. But the practice of science and the current situation in academia, especially in academic publishing, are pretty far from good—even to the point where I think maybe peer review is a huge mistake and doesn't actually work. We've got this thing that's supposed to make everything good, and there's this massive crisis of huge bodies of fake science that nobody believes because it's all lying.

I'm very interested in the idea of applying some of these same principles. What if you give people an alternative? What if there's just a way you could do science, if you want to, which is to go on the internet and publish it? I think that's actually pretty radical and pretty interesting, and I see some early shoots of people doing that. It's a topic that I'm excited about and think there's more that we could do, but it hasn't been central to our effort so far.

I was just going to say something about books, right? I think the process of why people decide to write books today is itself a really interesting decision, because first you have to spend—it's a multiyear project—to actually write a book. I worked with HarperCollins to do The Cold Start Problem. I think it was 3 or 4 years ago, but it takes 3 years or something like that to actually write a book.

Many of you know that if you literally just get enough preorders to sell 10,000 units, that's a bestseller. I mean, people are not reading books right now, which is insane. There's literally, I think, 1 book printer left in the US. If Michelle Obama decides to write a book around the same time as you, they're like, “Oh, the printer's booked for the next X months.” That's just how it is—all down to 1 set of printers—which is itself insane.

Chris, when you compare that to the amount of work involved in writing a book versus being able to click the publish button and have that go to 100,000 people's inboxes each day, it's a completely different thing. It is fascinating that there's certainly cultural prestige in the fact that books have been around forever, but I have to imagine that it just changes over time.

I imagine that when people were playwrights and film gets created, they're like, “Oh, wow, people love film, but it's not as prestigious as plays.” Then TV is the same: “People are watching a lot of TV, but it's not as prestigious as being in a film.” Then we're going to go down the same path with YouTube stars, streamers, or whatever.

A lot of this stuff is obviously very much lagging. The ability to reach hundreds of thousands of people with something that you write over a cup of coffee is itself so powerful when you really think about it from an ROI basis of writing a book or a Substack. Of course, they're not mutually exclusive. If I were to redo my whole thing again, I probably would have written it all on Substack and then taken it and put it into a book, as opposed to thinking, “I'm going to lock myself into hotel rooms during my vacations and try to crank out all these pages,” and then do it all as one big thing.

Yeah, no, I agree with that. I think there's this cyclical moral panic that happens, and it certainly happened in media, where it's like, “People are writing on the internet without an editor. Oh my God, edit! No one's editing the writing on the internet. What are we going to do?” That was the media's version of this. It's the same thing happening with books: People are reading, but it's not in a book.

They're reading things on the internet, but the book process is incredible to me, and it happens all the time. It's always legacy industries realizing that the internet actually is a thing, and that it becomes easier to produce the same thing you were going to produce in a book format—or the same thing you were going to write for a print paper—and put it on the internet. It's the same content.

You could say that there's a huge problem if young people grow up never having read an actual physical book that was written before the current times. That's a different discussion. But the moral panics about the actual medium, I think, are very cyclical. They have been happening since the birth of the internet, and they haven't necessarily affected our ability to read.

They've affected the freedom of what we can actually say and the freedom of what we can get our hands on, but they haven't necessarily affected our ability to read. Certainly, I would argue they actually haven't affected our ability to make arguments either, which I know would be controversial in some domains. I think it's more the moral panic of industries realizing that things are changing and they have to adapt.

Yeah. And there's an interesting question about what the source of intellectual culture is these days. Is it more streamers? Is it more Twitter anons? Is it more professors or journalists? Alex Danco wrote a really interesting case for why long-form writing is important, and one of the reasons he gave was that it's not that everyone reads the long-form writing; it's that an important group of people reads it and then translates or transmits it in a different format, and then the masses read or engage with that content.

I think that having a more sophisticated understanding of the supply chain gives us a greater appreciation for long-form writing as a source.

Yeah. And, Erik, to your point there, what that means is that everything you read in traditional press, in printed-out pieces of paper, is delayed by a huge amount compared to the actual discourse that's happening on the internet. Long-form, of course, is where you're actually able to generate really original thoughts, and then all the meme wars are where the real discussion happens in real time.

You kind of have both flows generating cultural knowledge over time.

Chris, we're here partially to celebrate your big round—100 million. Is that right?

100 million. Yeah.

So talk about why you raised 100 million. You're already crushing it as a business. There's already a lot of cash. What are the big plans here?

I think the big story of this, to me, is that we've had this long-term ambition for what the pieces of Substack are. I literally put this meme in my pitch deck, which was the handshake meme: On 1 hand is a model that supports independence, and on the other hand is an internet-scale network.

To me, this is the core of what Substack has always meant to be: This model that supports independence, but also this place—this part of the internet—that's a first-class destination, that has a thriving scene, and that feeds it. After years and years of working to make that a reality, we have that fledgling network alive now, and it's growing.

I see the next phase of Substack as feeding that machine and helping it grow and throw off all of this value—economic value for the creators and cultural value for the world. It's going to mean rebuilding the company to match that scale and ambition. This fundraise was really just a way to unlock that kind of transformation, so we're in an exciting period of reimagining the product, the company, and what this thing can become now.

Well, that's a great place to wrap. Chris, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks.