In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I speak with the founder of Subscramack, a website that helps journalists get their work out there and find outlets for their ideas. We talk about how he got started, why he started it, and what it s like to be a writer in the 21st century. And we talk about why he thinks there s a dark side to the internet, and how to deal with it. It s a great episode, and I hope you enjoy it. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts, and don t forget to leave us a rating and a review! It helps us to keep bringing you quality, high-quality episodes like this one every Monday morning. Tweet me if you liked it and let us know what you thought of it! Timestamps: 4:00 - How to win at the game 5:30 - What's the best way to get your message out there? 6:20 - What do you think of the current state of the internet? 7:00 8:40 - How do you feel about the current trends? 9:15 - What are your thoughts on the internet as a place of power? 10:15 11:30 What's your favorite thing about the internet right now? 12:00 | What are you're working on? 13:30 | What s your biggest takeaway from this episode? 15:40 | What would you like to write about? 16:30 // 17:15 | How do I would like to see more of it? 17: What s the best thing I m working on in the future of the future? 18:20 | What is your biggest challenge? 19:40 22:00 // Is there a better place for me? 21:00 / 22:10 | How can I win at this podcast? 26:10 27:30 What s my favorite thing that I m trying to do in the world? 25:00 + 27: What do I think about the most important thing you can do in my life? ? 28: What are my biggest takeaway? 35:00 & 27:20 29:30 Is it possible to be good in the face of the other people?
00:01:16.000And I started writing what I thought was going to be like an essay or a blog post or a screed or something, outlining my frustration with the state of the media industry, the state of incentives on the internet, basically complaining, wah, wah, wah, social media is breaking our brains,
00:01:56.0002017. It's really perfect timing for when everything started getting really heavy in terms of censorship and also the chaos that came about because of the pandemic and journalists getting canceled and there was so much weird stuff in terms of what you were allowed to write about or not allowed to write about.
00:02:17.000And then, of course, the Hunter Biden thing, the laptop, all that stuff came about in the first few years.
00:02:23.000A lot of the best writers in the world, in my estimation, were getting kind of tissue rejected from the places where they would have been before.
00:02:36.000Like an organ transplant that fails kind of thing.
00:02:38.000They're getting sort of pushed out from the places that would have been their home and where they could have done the thing that mattered to them before.
00:02:50.000What steps fell into place that caused all this?
00:02:55.000My theory on this is that it's a combination of natural human affairs, right?
00:03:03.000Like there's human nature, people act in certain ways, there's dark tendencies that come out when you get people together at scale, colliding with the consequences of the first generation of the internet revolution, basically.
00:03:16.000The way that the first generation of the internet played out was this massive land grab for human attention.
00:03:21.000So first of all, the computer and then even more so the smartphone kind of gobbled up all of the slices of people's lives that were just sitting there.
00:03:30.000People used to get bored and then the smartphone came along and that just didn't exist anymore.
00:03:34.000And in that phase, the things that won were the things that were the most efficient at...
00:04:08.000Well, I mean, bad in some, like, be outrageous, be...
00:04:11.000The ultimate tweet, as I've found out myself sometimes, is not the thing that everyone agrees with or even the thing that everyone hates.
00:04:20.000It's the thing that maximally divides people.
00:04:22.000The thing that most separates the people that are in your tribe on your side and makes them kind of, like, cheer and at the same time spits in the face of the other people.
00:04:32.000That is the recipe for a successful tweet because...
00:04:37.000That's the incentive landscape that makes Twitter succeed.
00:04:40.000Yeah, it's just I go on Twitter once a day, maybe twice a day just to see what kind of shit the monkeys are throwing at each other.
00:04:49.000It seems like a mental institution sometimes.
00:04:53.000I see people arguing over things and things that are trending that have zero impact in my life, and I don't understand why people are putting so much attention to it, but it seems like The recreational outrage that comes about because of Twitter is one of the most addictive things I've ever witnessed people take part in.
00:05:41.000It's very strange, because I never thought Twitter was going to become that.
00:05:44.000I always thought Twitter was just some innocuous thing.
00:05:47.000When it first came around, it was silly.
00:05:49.000A lot of comedians loved it, because it was a great little...
00:05:53.000Because in the beginning it was only 140 characters, it's great to keep your jokes succinct and short little blurbs and try to find fun, funny things to say.
00:06:03.000But then it just became some strange way for people to expose their mental illness.
00:06:18.000And it creates this, like, false reality that everyone sees that slowly drives us crazy.
00:06:23.000So how difficult was it to A, start Substack, and then B, get journalists to come on board?
00:06:31.000The hardest part of starting Substack was convincing ourselves that it could work.
00:06:36.000Because it started as I was literally writing this essay.
00:06:38.000And Hamish and I were talking, and we just came across this idea of, like, what if we let writers go independent themselves?
00:06:45.000What if we let you start your own thing, you get the email addresses, you own everything, people can pay you directly, now you're getting hired and fired by your readers.
00:06:53.000It sounded too simple to possibly work.
00:06:55.000We're like, if this thing could work, somebody would have done this already.
00:07:27.000Well, I mean, so he'd had this newsletter that he'd been writing for free and paying for the privilege of sending that was just like, what the hell is actually going on in China for anybody who needs to actually know?
00:07:40.000And, you know, lots of business people, government people all over the world would read it.
00:07:44.000And he's been like, instead of paying to send this thing out, I should charge people for this, obviously.
00:07:50.000But I couldn't figure out how to wire up the payment with the sending.
00:07:56.000You just needed someone to handle the details of it.
00:07:59.000And we were like, great, we'll do that for you.
00:08:01.000We'll do everything for you except the hard part.
00:08:05.000So you got him, and how did you get the word out?
00:08:09.000How did it start to really become a player?
00:08:14.000A lot of it was we started with Hamish's friends, like people who he knew.
00:08:19.000And we would just go and talk to them.
00:08:21.000And especially early on, a lot of it was just telling people about why we were doing this thing and what we thought was wrong and how this fairly simple platform we were building could help.
00:09:46.000And so there was this weird thing where nobody thought it would work in the abstract, but it worked once you had something that you cared about.
00:09:52.000So we kind of crossed the, like, it's never going to work thing, and then immediately got into the it's working and it's bad time for a bunch of things.
00:10:01.000Probably the most prominent of which is we started with this really strong commitment to free speech.
00:10:06.000If we think that we're making a platform for writers that is...
00:10:10.000You know, can be a positive force in our intellectual climate.
00:10:16.000That's something that's an important principle.
00:10:18.000And we came up in a time that not everyone believes in that at all.
00:10:23.000We took a lot of shit for a bunch of different times for, well, why do you let this person send emails to people that want to get it from them?
00:10:31.000Specifically, can you say what writers were problematic?
00:11:20.000You're not allowed to advocate for literal violence.
00:11:23.000There's a few things that are sort of just like bright lines that are intended to be Kind of like a really high bar and allow for space where there's a lot of shit on Substack that we ourselves disagree with and find awful.
00:11:38.000We think that the old school ACLU approach on this is correct, where they're protesting to help the Nazis have their free speech rights.
00:11:48.000Not because we think those things are good, but because we think that airing them is more valuable and in the long run better than I'm trying to solve the problem I'm censoring them.
00:11:58.000So there are people that are on Substack that everybody sort of agrees are gross?
00:12:04.000I mean, I don't know if there's anybody that everybody agrees are gross.
00:12:07.000But for any individual, I think anybody that exists could find someone on Substack that they think is the greatest thing ever, and they could find someone on Substack that they think is terrible.
00:12:16.000And we take that as a sign that we're doing it right.
00:13:09.000And so when it comes to like controversial things, like I'm sure a big controversy, I know Alex Berenson was a controversy because he was publishing a lot of negative studies and things on COVID vaccines that a lot of people didn't want him to talk about.
00:13:30.000And this is how he got kicked off Twitter.
00:13:32.000This is how he wound up suing Twitter and actually winning and getting back on Twitter, which is pretty fucking crazy.
00:13:38.000I could not believe they let him back on.
00:13:41.000The problem is he's citing scientific studies, you know, from other countries that they don't like what the data represents.
00:13:50.000And there was also the CDC study where they were talking about boosters for 18 to 49 people and they didn't want to release the data because they felt it would contribute to vaccine hesitancy.
00:14:00.000And he's like, what the fuck are you doing?
00:14:03.000And that kind of stuff, like publishing stuff that makes people uncomfortable but that is actually accurate, it's a big part of journalism.
00:14:12.000And he wasn't able to do that in these public forums like Twitter.
00:14:21.000I mean, I think publishing things that are true but uncomfortable is obviously journalism, and the value to that is obvious.
00:14:28.000And history is exceedingly clear that you can't always sort out at the time, which is which.
00:14:34.000And the thing that that leads us to is that even things that aren't, like, we don't want to be in the business of trying to adjudicate what's true.
00:14:55.000And we think that it's better to allow the stuff to be, like, to have people have a platform and have freedom of speech and let that stuff get sorted out because...
00:15:07.000All of the alternatives that sound really good end up in disaster.
00:15:51.000Because Truth Social does censor things on the January 6th committee and all the investigations that are currently underway.
00:16:01.000I don't think they want to shine a light on the fact that not only did that happen, but there's some really troubling things about a lot of people that were involved in it.
00:16:13.000As soon as you get to the place where you think your job as a platform, as somebody that's making the things where people are publishing their ideas, is not to let people publish what they want and let the market sort it out,
00:16:30.000but instead to Push some narrative, even if the narrative is right, even if you're like, you know, trying to push something that's unambiguously good and true, by trying to publish it through censorship and through forced conformity,
00:16:45.000you end up doing more harm than good, at least we believe.
00:16:49.000Do you think that social media was the driving force for these ideologically driven journalists now?
00:16:59.000Instead of being a journalist that reports uncomfortable truths even if they don't agree, even if the side that they're supposedly on, whether they're conservative or liberal, whatever those uncomfortable truths are, that fly in the face of whatever the narrative is that that side is pushing.
00:17:17.000Is it social media in the echo chambers and worried about the blowback from either followers or other journalists?
00:17:32.000And I think, you know, it's not a new thing, right?
00:17:35.000If you look at every age, people who are saying things that are true and are uncomfortable to some dominant narrative, that's always, like, people always take flack.
00:17:46.000There's always efforts to censor them.
00:17:48.000You can go back and look at, you know, people who are accused of being copyrighted.
00:18:07.000Displaying being very upset can create a false sense of consensus.
00:18:15.000Twitter and some of these platforms, you can get even like 30 or 40 people that are just really mad, can make it look like the whole world is coming down around you and that everybody hates you and wants to burn you as a witch.
00:18:31.000Even if that's not actually true, even if it's just a small fraction of people feel that way.
00:18:36.000And if either you aren't strong enough to deal with that, or more likely if you're part of an institution that doesn't have the fortitude and the principles to push back against that, that's where I think that force can cause things to crumble in a way they ought not to.
00:18:55.000And it is, well, it's an increasingly growing number of people, but it was relatively small initially.
00:19:02.000And now it seems like there's these mobs of people that hop on any narrative to try to enforce, like, it's almost like they're just trying to get a win for the team.
00:19:14.000It seems very strange that that's taking place in journalism because it's always disturbing to me that people don't remember the lessons of the past and we have to keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
00:19:29.000Like the example that you used at the ACLU, how they were literally defending Nazis and their right to free speech because their perspective was free speech should be an absolute thing.
00:19:39.000And the correct response to that is not to censor these people.
00:19:46.000It's to correct them with correct speech.
00:19:50.000The optimistic take on this is that every generation has to learn this for themselves.
00:19:57.000The lessons from the past don't feel real until you've lived through it.
00:20:02.000But that once we live through it, People will understand.
00:20:06.000I think people are starting to get a new appreciation for why free speech is a principle that matters.
00:20:15.000I think if you come up taking that for granted and living in a world that you enjoy all the benefits of that without ever having to really think about it, you can forget why it matters.
00:20:25.000And then as soon as that comes for you, it flips it back on.
00:20:30.000I think we'll see if people will come in the other direction.
00:20:33.000I think people are starting to turn in that direction now and I think that's it speaks to the success of Substack that people are recognizing that you really do have to have some sort of a forum where someone can speak their mind and not have I mean your fears of criticism I mean that's not that's not the issue the issue is being deplatformed where you can't express yourself anymore because whatever you're saying troubles people Right.
00:21:02.000And then the consensus reality is that these viewpoints, nobody is saying these things, when in fact there are people that would be saying them if they hadn't been kicked out of the thing.
00:21:15.000That has been one of the things that we've...
00:21:51.000But having people read things that are smart and good by somebody whose incentive is to earn and keep people's trust, even if it's not something they're going to get canceled for, that stuff doesn't always exist unless you have a model that supports it.
00:22:09.000And with Substack, do you have an algorithm, like say if you enjoy Barry Weiss's work, I recommend this?
00:22:18.000So the way we do this is very thoughtful because on the one hand, we want to have a network effect for the platform, right?
00:22:25.000We want it to be true that when you come to Substack, you know, yes, it's a great tool.
00:22:30.000It's free until you take money and then we charge you 10%.
00:22:34.000But we also want it to be like, you're going to grow, right?
00:22:36.000You're going to find people who would love your stuff are going to be able to find it.
00:22:40.000And by being here, you get more benefit than we're asking in return.
00:22:43.000On the flip side, all of the obvious ways that you would do that, if we were to copy the way that Twitter does this or the way that YouTube does this, We would just be recreating some of the things that we kind of like set out to fight against.
00:22:57.000And so as we build those features, we do have a thing that introduces you to recommended writers.
00:23:01.000The difference is it's not Substack or Substack's algorithm that's recommending.
00:23:06.000It's the writer that you already subscribe to that's recommending.
00:23:17.000She has the guest post, and she's sort of like, the same way that people coming on here can be like a career-making thing, like people going on Common Sense can be like a major turning point, and she can bring somebody into the world that the world needs.
00:23:30.000When I say the pushback against Substack, have there been major critical articles written about Substack?
00:24:34.000I mean, look, we knew what we were getting ourselves into when we set out to build this thing, right?
00:24:39.000We're like, hey, we're making something that is aimed at the heart of the culture war.
00:24:44.000We're making something that we think can make some small positive difference in the forces that are tearing things apart and breaking things down.
00:24:55.000And if we are successful at that, there's no world where we get to do that where we don't have to take a lot of heat.
00:25:44.000They were talking about him constantly and it gave him press.
00:25:48.000And the thing about what's happening with Substack that parallels with mainstream media and podcasting is that they're bringing about their own demise by their very format.
00:26:02.000But what they're doing is sort of highlighting the strengths of what you guys have been able to accomplish.
00:26:08.000And one of the parallels in podcasting is, you know, a show like CNN is never going to be able to truly compete with a show like Breaking Points.
00:26:19.000Breaking Points on YouTube with Sagar and Crystal Ball.
00:26:22.000The reason why they're not going to compete is that, first of all, they're captured by whether it's executives or the corporations that run them.
00:26:34.000On whatever particular thing that's in the news that whatever interests need them to have a slant on, brought to you by Pfizer.
00:26:45.000We see these things over and over and over again in mainstream media to the point where people have lost their faith that this is objective journalism.
00:26:54.000And so these other shows thrive, like the Jimmy Dore show and all these shows that highlight real problems.
00:27:00.000And the real journalists of the world, like guys like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, like those people flock to them now.
00:27:09.000Like, surely there's got to be a rational take on this.
00:28:23.000You have to just be curious what people actually think, rather than bring people on to be the avatar of some opinion you already want, like the theme you already want the show to be about.
00:29:07.000I think there's a lot of people that work for The Times and a lot of these other organizations that are much maligned that do great work.
00:29:13.000They're great journalists, but I think they're captured in some ways by the institution that they work for.
00:29:21.000And it's flooded with ideologically driven people and a very left-leaning ideologically driven populace.
00:29:29.000This is not, like, there's not a lot of, like, very popular, very influential right-wing publications that compete with all the left-wing publications.
00:29:41.000And it's not like the right-wing outlets that do exist are bastions of, you know, free speech and independent ideas and not having a narrative.
00:30:02.000You know, we talk about the way the internet changed all this stuff.
00:30:06.000The internet changed all these businesses, too.
00:30:08.000Because they exist in a world where they're competing for a slice of people's attention with Twitter, with TikTok, with YouTube, with everything.
00:31:10.000S-T-R-A-U-S-S. This is just at the tip of my tongue.
00:31:15.000He was a sports journalist and kind of left the...
00:31:20.000For a bunch of these same things, we kind of got disillusioned with how things were going and just started a newsletter and a podcast on Substack.
00:32:03.000But YouTube, they gave us a hard time about a bunch of episodes, particularly during the pandemic when they didn't like having dissenting opinions and different scientists that had different perspectives.
00:32:16.000There's one woman on Substack who's amazing, Emily Oster.
00:33:22.000Well, the problem is oftentimes they're wrong.
00:33:25.000And a lot of that information that they say is disinformation or misinformation turns out to actually be accurate.
00:33:32.000And the place where you're getting misinformation is the mainstream reporting.
00:33:37.000What's true is often very hard to sort out in advance, especially when something's developing rapidly, things are changing.
00:33:45.000It's the idea that, you know, you can have an official source that can just adjudicate in real time what's real and what's not is a fiction, right?
00:33:55.000And I think everybody, when pressed, would admit that.
00:33:58.000Nobody thinks that there's one authority you could go to and say, yes, they're going to have exactly all the answers.
00:34:03.000And yet, when you get into the regime of saying, well, who's allowed to talk about this?
00:34:08.000You know, this is the thing people fall back to.
00:34:10.000Like, well, we'll just see who the official things say are good.
00:34:13.000And it's even more complicated than that because individual people, the kind of thing that makes people interesting, and this is true in, like, science and technology as well, is the kind of, like, personality that makes you someone that can do exceptional things can also lead you to do crazy things.
00:34:32.000I like the example of Isaac Newton, who co-invented calculus, invented a lot of the physics that engineers use to this day, and it turned out that he had a side hustle of weird Bible conspiracy theories slash alchemy,
00:34:51.000where he had this thing where he was basically a lunatic, like a conspiracy theory guy.
00:36:09.000But he was a terrible person in a lot of ways.
00:36:12.000I mean, a lot of the stuff he did and a lot of the stuff he said, he was just constantly snorting coke and drinking and screaming at people and throwing things at them.
00:36:23.000There's a famous video of him having a gunfight with his neighbor.
00:37:56.000I think there's room for a certain amount of chaos in individuals that have something to offer.
00:38:06.000You just can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
00:38:11.000I think this is how you make progress.
00:38:13.000If you insist on having a low variance and everything needs to be as safe and as good as possible, you might limit the downside or how wrong things are, but inevitably you also limit the upside.
00:38:26.000If you prevent people from being You know, doing something dumb that's against the consensus, you always prevent them from doing something that's genius that's against the consensus.
00:38:37.000And it's that thing, there's like asymmetric upside there.
00:38:40.000It's that genius thing that moves the world forward.
00:38:43.000And so if you cut it off, it breaks things.
00:38:47.000And that's the argument for freedom, right?
00:38:49.000And that's the argument for freedom of expression, freedom of speech and of thought, and the ability to be wrong, the ability to communicate in a way where you don't have to jump through hoops to get your thoughts out.
00:39:09.000And, you know, I think there's pros and cons that come with that, right?
00:39:13.000You know, you're going to have some people write things that, well, boy, it would be nice if we had an editor to go over this.
00:39:20.000But it's also really nice when I know there's not an editor.
00:39:23.000When I love reading, like, Barry's writing, that I know that's coming from her.
00:39:30.000Because I've talked to Barry about pieces that she wrote where, I mean, there's a thing she wrote about me for the New York Times where they had a change, they wouldn't let her say something.
00:39:38.000Or they add a headline that's like subtly different than the thing.
00:39:51.000It's a collaborative venture and ultimately the person that you're subscribing to, the person that you're choosing to trust is the person that you're hearing from.
00:40:13.000You know, it's like, you need other perspectives.
00:40:15.000But you also, you know, there's, I mean, I guess this is what you get from podcasts.
00:40:20.000This is one of the things that I'm so fascinated about Substack is that I find real parallels with the way Substack is dealing with journalism versus the way podcasts are dealing with free-form conversations.
00:40:33.000And there's a lot of similarities in this world where it's like, okay, the attention monster social media things are taking over everyone's attention.
00:40:44.000Everything has to be in one of the apps on your home screen to be in your life.
00:40:50.000And it turns out that most of the apps on your home screen are controlled by one of these algorithms that's kind of working against you to just grab as much of your time as possible, with a few exceptions.
00:40:59.000One is the podcast app, where it's using this RSS format where you subscribe to things.
00:41:03.000And then those things from the people you subscribe to show up.
00:41:07.000And you have this unmediated connection where you can actually choose who you want to spend your mind and life with.
00:41:14.000And another one is the email app, where people can send you emails.
00:41:19.000And those last sort of like bastions of direct connection between people that are making things and people that care about them is the source of a lot of the power of the model, I would say.
00:41:32.000This thing where you're, you know, I'm subscribing to you on Substack, I'm listening to your podcast because I trust you to curate a slice of my intellectual life for me.
00:41:42.000If what I read, what I listen to is who I am, you're one of the people I want shaping who I am, that's a big investment.
00:41:49.000We shouldn't be handing that off to what Twitter thinks will make me mad.
00:42:18.000Once you start charging money, we take 10%.
00:42:20.000So if you're a writer, when you make more money, that's how Substack makes money.
00:42:24.000When you're a reader, when you find stuff that's valuable enough that you actually want to choose to pay for it, that's also how Substack makes money.
00:42:31.000And so that sort of guides us in the things we want to build.
00:42:35.000It's like, hey, we want to Do the things that help writers, which are all the things that help readers, which are also the things that help Substack.
00:42:41.000And the dilemmas end up being, like, okay, how do we do that?
00:42:44.000And how do we do that in ways that don't erode the fundamental value that we're creating?
00:43:22.000The power that all of these social media platforms have harnessed, but do it in a way that puts the people in charge, puts the writers and the readers in charge.
00:43:30.000There's not really a blueprint for that because that hasn't existed, I don't think, fully until now.
00:43:36.000What do you do other than an algorithm?
00:43:39.000And people are terrified of algorithms because they've seen the effect that it's had on Twitter and YouTube.
00:43:46.000It's unfortunate, but it does sort of highlight the worst instincts in human nature in terms of accumulating information.
00:43:54.000You go towards things that are outrage-oriented.
00:44:09.000When we say algorithm, we mean, like, something that is showing you stuff in a way to achieve some goal that it has that might or might not be your goal.
00:44:23.000And so I think the way to think about it is not like, do you have an algorithm or not?
00:44:27.000But it's like, what is that algorithm trying to do?
00:44:30.000If the algorithm is trying to get you to use TikTok for as long as possible every day, that's going to have a different consequence than an algorithm that's trying to introduce you to a writer that you trust enough that you might want to pay for them and care about them.
00:44:48.000How do you find an algorithm that's going to introduce you to someone that you would think would be interesting based on who you already think is interesting, other than creating an echo chamber?
00:44:58.000These are the exciting problems we get to solve.
00:45:00.000I'll tell you, some of the stuff that's working really well so far is this principle of putting the writers in charge and putting the readers in charge.
00:45:08.000So we added a recommendations feature, and rather than say we're going to Figure out who you want to do.
00:45:18.000You can say, I'm not going to, you know, people come to me, I'm not going to send anybody anywhere.
00:45:22.000Or you can say, hey, if you're coming to me, one of the things that I can do for you is put you on to other things that I think are interesting, that I think are worthwhile.
00:45:30.000And I'm sort of putting my name on that as something that you would check out.
00:45:33.000Now, that's going to be less efficient if you just look at the numbers of how much engagement does that get.
00:45:38.000It's going to be impossible to build something that is as efficient as the YouTube page that's like, I know what you want better than you do yourself.
00:45:46.000But as a reader, I'm going to choose to spend my time on Substack Around that stuff because it creates a real alternative.
00:45:54.000Because I know that I'm not giving my mind to something that's kind of operating against me.
00:46:00.000And I know that if I'm seeing something, there's like a human being that made that decision.
00:46:21.000There was a period of time when I first moved where my ears accommodated before my voice, and so I sounded like I had a funny accent to myself, which was very unsettling.
00:46:31.000I feel you, because I had a Boston accent for a while, and then I heard myself on television.
00:47:03.000I think that, I mean, the thing that, success for Substack looks like being an independent company, right?
00:47:08.000We're trying to bring this thing into the world that's new, and we think that it's got a real business model that works.
00:47:13.000We think we're onto something important, and the way that we can best serve that is staying independent and running it ourselves and making it into the best thing that it can be.
00:47:23.000And I think at some point, you know, you can go public and do that, and there's ways to do it that are not Don't subject you to the kinds of pressures.
00:47:34.000How could you do that, though, if the whole business model is about...
00:47:38.000I mean, if it's a public company and people buy stock in the company, you have an obligation to your stockholders to make a maximum amount of money.
00:47:48.000And this is actually maybe at the core of how I think about Substack.
00:47:52.000One way you could say this is, well, we have a choice.
00:47:56.000Either we can do the things that make us money, or we can do the things that we think matter.
00:48:00.000And we're just going to be really good, virtuous people and ignore all that money and just do the things that matter.
00:48:06.000And I think a better solution to actually making change is to find a way to set things up so that in order to make money, you want to do the things that matter.
00:48:30.000There's ways that you can set it up where the things that we do to grow and the things that we do to be successful are also the things that make the ecosystem good and make the writer successful.
00:49:35.000By tying our hands in this way, the fact that the people on Substack can leave means that the only way to make money and grow is to make it good enough that they choose to stay.
00:49:46.000Other companies are like, we'll lock you in.
00:49:47.000We'll make it so that you can't leave.
00:50:10.000It's like, no, let's figure out a thing that actually works and makes financial sense and does something that matters.
00:50:16.000Well, when you say turn down the money, your business model is entirely dependent upon people enjoying and subscribing to these journalists.
00:50:29.000That seems to be where the pressure comes in, is when advertisers either don't like content or they don't like particular points of view that people are espousing.
00:50:42.000Yeah, and I actually think that advertising, a particular kind of advertising, is the root problem that created a lot of these dynamics on the social media networks, where it's not just advertising, but it's Programmatic advertising,
00:50:59.000Where, you know, I'm not buying an ad on Joe Rogan necessarily, but I'm buying an ad to show to like Jimmy Smith, this person who I can target minutely.
00:51:09.000And so all of Twitter and Facebook and all these things, they sell these things that you can target down to the level of the person.
00:51:14.000And so the thing that the platform's ultimately aggregating is just a bunch of attention that maximizes how much of people's time that you have.
00:51:24.000It doesn't actually matter what they were watching in between.
00:51:26.000The advertiser doesn't know or care unless it's embarrassing for them and they want to cause some stink.
00:51:32.000But that dynamic, the fact that that business model works so well and then they're doing the things that make them money and it pulls in a bad direction is why we are the way they are.
00:51:43.000It's not like the people at Twitter are evil.
00:52:02.000It's like if you want to find out what's going on, it's like the best place to go to immediately to find out like, you know, some country got overthrown, some chaos is happening somewhere in the world.
00:52:54.000And I think we're living through one of those things where we've got this, like, for the first time very quickly, every human being in the world is wired together into one giant network and, like, paying attention to this thing is insane.
00:53:07.000And we shouldn't expect that that goes over smoothly and everything just works perfectly the first time.
00:53:12.000It's going to make a mess and we're going to have to figure out how to make it serve us.
00:53:16.000It's kind of wild that there's really only one, though.
00:53:21.000Speaking about Twitter, it's kind of wild that there's really one place where people go to bitch about things.
00:53:30.000I guess people go to Facebook, too, but I don't read that either.
00:53:34.000Every time I go to Facebook, it's like these long diatribes and people screaming in the comments.
00:53:40.000It's kind of the same thing, but Twitter in that short format of tweeting and quote tweeting and that kind of thing, it seems like it's bizarre that no one has replicated YouTube successfully.
00:53:55.000As much as you might not like the algorithm, it's fucking genius in that it really does captivate people.
00:54:05.000And it really is dependent, like my friend Ari did a test once where all he looked up was videos on puppies.
00:54:43.000It's not bad to have stuff that's fun though.
00:54:45.000We don't want a world with no puppies.
00:54:47.000That shouldn't be the only way that we find out everything about the world.
00:54:50.000But it's just fascinating that these algorithms – you've seen the Social Network documentary?
00:54:56.000I mean, I think what those folks have kind of exposed that worked in these social media companies is that they knew what these algorithms were going to do, and they did it anyway.
00:55:08.000And they know where this is going, and it seems to be going in a terrible way.
00:55:13.000It looks like civil war or some sort of horrible divide of our country just based on human nature applied to this very disruptive technology.
00:55:31.000This stuff was going through my head when I did the stupid essay in 2017. And at the time, it was like, even saying that out loud, even being like, there could be a civil war was like, felt insane.
00:56:25.000The lack of nuance and perspective and the lack of objectivity in recognizing the flaws of both sides.
00:56:34.000I mean, you obviously see that in politics, right?
00:56:37.000You're always going to see that where the people that are in the positions of power, whether it's the White House press secretary, they're always going to give you the best possible spin on everything they can.
00:56:49.000And when the questions get weird, they end the conversation and they leave.
00:56:53.000They're just trying to propagandize, just trying to promote a certain thing.
00:56:56.000The trap is believing that it's a battle between these two teams.
00:57:01.000It's like the left versus the right and that the other team is so bad that whatever our team does to fight them is necessary and justified.
00:57:09.000And the reality is it's like everybody who's sane versus...
00:57:14.000Actually, a tiny minority of people who are nuts, but who have massive, amplified power because of the way these dynamics work and the way that institutions have played out in the whole thing.
00:57:25.000Also, the things that they're talking about, they're consequential.
00:57:29.000When you have a small amount of people that are arguing about things or yelling about things, These things are consequential and these are these little battlegrounds that these ideas play out on and they recognize the significance of these battlegrounds and they put all their time into it.
00:57:47.000And then you have a lot of people that are just like genuinely mentally ill because of these platforms.
00:57:51.000I think it's ramped up anxiety at an unprecedented level.
00:57:56.000I mean, and there's some people that it carries over.
00:57:58.000I have some friends that are on Twitter too much and then we'll go out to dinner and they carry Twitter out into the regular everyday life.
00:58:12.000And you're freaking out about some argument that people are having about something that has literally nothing to do with you.
00:58:19.000Yeah, I find myself doing it, because I'm sort of addicted to Twitter as well.
00:58:22.000I go through a phase where I delete the app, and then I get it on my browser or my phone, and then I hate myself, and then I delete it again.
00:58:28.000And when you get into it, you talk to someone who's just a normal person in the world, and you find yourself saying something about what's happening like it makes any sense, and you're like, what the hell am I talking about?
00:58:39.000This is literally insane, and I couldn't realize that it was insane until I just talked to someone that just had no idea what the hell.
00:58:47.000But on the flip side of that, I felt that same way about all the woke chaos that was coming out of universities in like 2014. We were talking about it in 2014 and 2015 and people were like, why are you focusing on this?
01:00:26.000You know what would be good, though, is if we actually took the lessons we learned from coronavirus and prepared correctly for the next thing.
01:00:34.000Well, we need a Substack for medicine.
01:00:47.000The problem is there's great consequences in those industries if you step outside the lines and you talk about things that are unpopular.
01:00:58.000And that's one of the real positive things about Substack, is you do give people, if they get cast out of these institutions, you give them a very viable and often better alternative.
01:01:11.000And now, because of the popularity of Substack, there's a real good argument that they wouldn't just reach the same amount of people, they reach more people.
01:01:20.000Particularly if these things get promoted by other people like Barry or other journalists that are very popular in Substack.
01:01:29.000And there, you know, there is a cost to that, right?
01:01:32.000Sometimes people get cast out of places because they're nuts and they're wrong and they're crazy.
01:01:53.000Choosing which human beings you trust on Substack, building a relationship over time with people, making your own guess of their integrity, and then being able to find out who's reading what, who's sharing what, who's promoting what, I think is a better answer to how can we get all of the points of view out,
01:03:13.000And then when people join the company, they know that stuff.
01:03:17.000And if you come to Substack and you're like, actually, I think you should, you know, not give people a platform and not put writers in charge and have this tight view of what's real, it would just be crazy because it's just not putting the work into something that's against what you believe in doesn't make sense.
01:03:33.000Also, it would be kind of like managing its scale.
01:03:37.000When you have tens of thousands, so that means you would have to have tens of thousands of people going over everyone's stuff, making sure that it's accurate and it doesn't promote some harmful narrative.
01:03:51.000And those people end up making mistakes, and the mistakes are really unfair.
01:04:37.000Well, we could probably just get like hours per day.
01:04:42.000The amount of hours per day that YouTube...
01:04:45.000And obviously there's multiple languages and so you get into that and like good luck.
01:04:51.000Because, you know, how many translators are you going to have in all these different countries that are going to read all these or watch, read transcripts or watch videos?
01:05:00.000As of July 3rd, there is 500 hours of videos uploaded per minute.
01:05:35.000I read ones that get recommended to me.
01:05:37.000Generally it's by clinical physicians or doctors or people reporting on life extension stuff and health things and things along those lines.
01:05:50.000It's great for me because I really feel like I'm getting the perspective of the writer, which I really enjoy, because that's what I really love about podcasts as well, is that I'm getting a clear...
01:06:03.000I like when I know that it's coming from the person, that I'm getting this individual's mind translated into words.
01:06:28.000It's an interesting form of art because it's an art that focuses on thought process and all of this person's life experiences and education and And how it translates in them trying to broadcast this to people.
01:06:47.000I think Substack is one of the most important things that's ever happened to journalism in my lifetime because it's a free portal, a new method of distributing content that just is very exciting.
01:06:59.000When I first found out about it, and then when Barry left the New York Times and went over there, I was like, ooh.
01:07:06.000And one thing that's new about it, I think, is everybody thinks of the people, they think of Barry Weiss, like famous journalist that I know that left X and came to Substack, and that's the idea that people have in their mind of who's on Substack.
01:07:19.000But there's a growing set of people that I think is much larger over time of people who weren't writers, right, who had something to give the world as a writer, as a thinker, But didn't see a path to doing that in what existed before.
01:07:37.000But for Substack would have gone to law school like their parents wanted them to or whatever.
01:07:41.000And so you're starting to see people on Substack who become professional writers on the platform.
01:07:46.000And you start to get perspectives that otherwise never would have existed.
01:07:50.000I mean, you see this with some of the doctors that are very interesting.
01:07:54.000And there's just people growing up that Like, have something to give the world and would not have been able to, like, write if they didn't have this.
01:08:04.000Yeah, that's the parallel to podcasting.
01:08:36.000The barrier for entry is much lower, so you're going to have a lot more nonsense content and bullshit content.
01:08:44.000But you're also going to have people that maybe have something to offer and didn't really think that it was possible for them before, which is me.
01:08:53.000I mean, that's how I became a podcaster.
01:08:55.000I never thought anybody was going to give me a fucking radio show.
01:08:58.000If I had to try to To pitch the model of what the JRE is to some company.
01:09:06.000They would have kicked me out of the office a long time ago.
01:09:25.000I've seen it with comedians, for sure.
01:09:27.000I've seen it with various people that are Whether they're commentators or opinion makers, whatever they are, they seem to find there's a thing where it gets them the most amount of juice,
01:09:43.000the most amount of traction, and they lean into that.
01:09:55.000Fox News has said more positive things about me than any left-wing company.
01:10:02.000And I think that could be a problem for people is they do switch their ideology because they find they're getting a certain amount of love from one direction or the other.
01:10:14.000I was reading a good Substack piece about this yesterday.
01:10:18.000The example he used was this YouTuber who was this kind of normal kid.
01:10:26.000And he has a picture at the start of this skinny guy that made these videos and found a niche like eating dinner and talking to the camera and people started to watch it.
01:10:36.000And over time, the end picture is, like, years later, he's this famous guy who's got millions of subscribers, making all this money, but he's, like, just destroyed.
01:10:45.000He's, like, this huge, morbidly obese, terrible health problems thing.
01:10:51.000And this post makes this convincing argument that the way he got there was this process of capture, and it wasn't...
01:11:01.000It wasn't like this guy was like, I know, I'm going to become this horrible train wreck in order to make money and be famous, and that's a good idea, so I'm going to do it.
01:11:09.000But it's the thing that happens where you get these subtle cues.
01:11:13.000It's kind of the same way that you become the average of the people you hang out with.
01:11:17.000And so you've got to choose who you hang out with intelligently because you can't resist that.
01:11:22.000And when you're on a platform, even if you don't want to, you get these signals of like, what's working?
01:12:10.000He does so much for charitable organizations, but yet he's 100%...
01:12:19.000Driven in his in his idea that I want to make a video that reaches the most amount of people possible So what can I do in terms of like editing?
01:12:30.000What can I do in terms of the caption?
01:12:32.000What can I do in terms of the image that I use and he's very Meticulous about that, but yet is not in fact he's become more charitable more nice more friendly more happy and It's almost like there's a good version and a bad version of it.
01:13:10.000Silly, he's fun, and he's figured out a way to be successful and still maintain who he is.
01:13:17.000That's where it gets tricky with people, because some people don't have a rigid foundation.
01:13:22.000They don't have a strict set of ethics and morals and a code that they live by, and so then anything that's successful, they gravitate towards that like metal filings towards a magnet.
01:13:38.000And the irony of that, no pun intended, is that you're probably less successful in the long run.
01:13:43.000If you have the principles and you know what you're doing, ultimately that's the thing that people, if that thing is right, that's the thing that people will follow you for.
01:13:51.000That's the thing that people care about.
01:13:52.000It depends on how you define success, right?
01:13:53.000If you define success in terms of popularity, there's a lot of terrible people that are popular.
01:13:58.000You know, because they're popular for talking shit or being mean.
01:14:02.000Or they're popular for, you know, causing fights and creating drama.
01:14:06.000And there's a real currency in drama, unfortunately.
01:14:09.000There's a lot of people that that's their main thing is just being shitty.
01:14:17.000So there's a bunch of different ways you could go.
01:14:23.000And I try very hard to make sure that I don't get sucked into any of that.
01:14:31.000That's why you only go on Twitter twice a day.
01:14:33.000Yeah, I mean, if I go on, I go on for a couple seconds, really.
01:14:38.000I go on every now and then to check stuff and see what's happening, what's trending, and then I go, ugh, let me get out of here before I read something about me.
01:14:49.000I just think that human beings are very malleable.
01:14:54.000We're very easily influenced whether we like it or not.
01:14:58.000You just got to be meticulous about the way you think about things and also you have to spend a lot of time alone thinking.
01:15:06.000Like genuinely alone, no electronics, thinking about how you view life, how you view yourself, how you view all the various projects you have that you're doing and what are you doing with them?
01:16:14.000Some of them, they have a large amount of people that hate them, but there's enough people that pay attention that it pays the bills and they keep going.
01:16:25.000I'm sure you have that on Substack too, right?
01:16:28.000It's an index fund of the whole internet.
01:16:31.000We wouldn't be successful if there wasn't something for every niche.
01:16:36.000Why did you ask about audience capture?
01:16:38.000It was something I read yesterday that was really interesting and something I think about a lot.
01:16:43.000There's a lot of things about the Substack model that I think are magical and good.
01:16:47.000The fact that your readers are the ones hiring and firing you, the fact that you can actually make money from subscriptions, the fact that a relatively small number of people that really like you can make you a living or even a fortune from subscriptions.
01:17:46.000So it's a question of how do you harness them for something positive?
01:17:52.000Yeah, or how do you avoid changing in a way you don't want to change?
01:17:59.000Like what is it about audience capture that's so compelling?
01:18:03.000I guess people want acceptance and they want love and when they find it's generally going in this certain direction and they get positive responses, they tend to lean into it.
01:18:17.000I think the best writers are often Quite disagreeable.
01:18:22.000Best writers, best journalists are often the people who kind of, like, poop in the punch bowl in social settings sometimes, who are willing to, like, have the strongest natural personality that goes against those urges.
01:19:20.000Didn't know that this is what I wanted to do until I started doing it and then when I started doing I was like oh and then the more I do it the more I feel like I'm just sort of showing up and and and just Turning on the antenna and letting it happen and then bringing in all these people that I find interesting and And then all these other people that listen also find those people interesting and then they have this hunger for it.
01:19:47.000And then that sort of, that excites me.
01:19:51.000And then I hear from so many people that got inspired to do different things with their life, to maybe start exercising and eating well and also recognizing the effect that that has on their mental state and just Seeing the way I interact with my friends and I'm very fortunate that I have a really good group of friends.
01:20:16.000Everyone's really fun and smart and supportive and we laugh a lot and that also encourages people to seek that out in their own lives and to have that kind of interactions or those kind of interactions with other people that they care about and it inspires similar kinds of conversations and also similar podcasts.
01:20:34.000There's a lot of Podcasts that were inspired because of this.
01:21:53.000But doesn't that always happen in the world, though?
01:21:55.000I mean, that's one of the things about human beings, is that human beings, they encounter a dilemma, and then a solution to that dilemma becomes inescapable.
01:22:07.000Do you think if you got hit by a bus the day that you died somehow, the day that you were going to start the show, that someone else would have made something similar to this?
01:22:15.000Or do you think history would be totally different?
01:23:39.000Yeah, that's very easier said than done sometimes.
01:23:41.000Because there's also a lot of pressure that comes with things and pressure makes people, you know, act and behave in shitty ways sometimes because they're just overwhelmed.
01:23:51.000Does any of the flack you take discourage you?
01:23:54.000There's like people are mad on the internet, people are mad at Spotify or whatever place.
01:26:17.000See, I'm a cage-fighting commentator who's also a stand-up comedian.
01:26:23.000There's a lot of built-in escape valves.
01:26:29.000If we wanted to make Substack better for the interesting version of this, for people that are doing the things that you can't predict, like if you are the king of Substack, what do you think we should do?
01:26:42.000I don't envy the choices that you have to make and the decisions and the complications that must come about through it, but having that steadfast ethic of No censorship,
01:27:02.000letting people express themselves, and don't have some sort of a tricky algorithm, don't be compelled by advertisers.
01:27:14.000That's the recipe for success, for what you're doing.
01:27:18.000What you're doing is a disruptive Journalism outlet where people, you know, like guys like Glenn Greenwald who get kicked out of the very newspaper that he fucking founded, you know, because he wanted to report on the Hunter Biden laptop case,
01:27:43.000And it's wilder than we even thought it was because more stuff's coming out and there's pretty clear evidence of corruption.
01:27:52.000And this would have been a consideration when people were voting.
01:27:57.000And they were so terrified that Trump was going to win again and he just...
01:28:03.000He represented in many people's eyes this ultimate enemy, this ultimate evil.
01:28:10.000And they wanted him out by all means necessary, by any means necessary.
01:28:14.000And so they were willing to censor legitimate information from one of the oldest newspapers in the country, the New York Post, which was writing about it, which is pretty fucking crazy and scary to me.
01:28:26.000Because this is all, in my eyes, this is a gradual process.
01:28:31.000And if you'll accept that, you'll accept more.
01:28:33.000And if you'll accept that kind of censorship...
01:28:35.000Yeah, you get used to it and then the next thing and the next thing.
01:28:37.000Especially if you can demonize the person that you're censoring against.
01:28:40.000If this is all ultimately to get Trump out of office, well, who the fuck didn't want that?
01:28:55.000And so those sort of decisions that people make, although they think they're doing the right thing, that's where you have to have these steadfast ethics.
01:29:05.000You have to have these rock-solid foundational ethics where you are not Going to give in to any sort of peer pressure or any irrational people that seem to think that he's some sort of a threat to humanity and a threat to democracy.
01:29:23.000And no matter what, you have to make sure that that doesn't happen.
01:29:27.000And we could work all the rest out later.
01:29:29.000The problem is, once you agree to that, that's a slippery slope.
01:29:33.000It's like, that was the thing about the Patriot Act, where they were talking about indefinite detention of people.
01:29:42.000And Obama was like, you know, I would never use that.
01:29:49.000And it turns out the next guy was Trump.
01:29:51.000And we were scared of him using something like that.
01:29:54.000And we're scared about someone who's worse than Trump.
01:29:57.000If we can't come up with some sort of a common ground, a middle ground in this country, and agree that we're all a part of a community, that's what we're supposed to be.
01:30:05.000We're supposed to be the community of the United States of America.
01:30:19.000We can't look at it that way and we keep looking at it like there's people that are going to ruin the GOP. I'm the sworn enemy of the GOP. We've got to get them out of office and these fucking liberals are ruined and want to turn everyone into a Marxist and your kids are all going to be trans.
01:30:35.000If we don't find some sort of a rational common ground in this country, We're going to continue to feed into this.
01:30:46.000I'm really worried that cooler heads have not prevailed.
01:30:51.000And there's not enough voices that say what I just said.
01:30:55.000Not enough voices that say, like, we're supposed to be all together.
01:30:58.000And ultimately, the whole world is supposed to be all together.
01:31:01.000One of the more beautiful things about the Internet is the Internet...
01:31:04.000Allows you first of all you can translate things into a million different languages and they you have access to all this information all around the world and more people around the world Should be able to realize that we all share common interests.
01:31:16.000We all want to have a good life We all want to be able to do whatever we want.
01:31:21.000We all want to be able to express ourselves honestly We want all want happiness for our families and our loved ones and we all want to be Living in a world that's not fucking polluted and on fire There seem to be pretty common,
01:31:36.000very important, bedrock foundational ideas that we all agree on worldwide.
01:31:41.000And then we have people that are making insane amounts of money by sort of hijacking these individual ideas and individual issues that we all seem to find important.
01:31:55.000Some of it's they're making money and some of it...
01:31:57.000I think the thing that fascinates me is a lot of the time I think it's good people trying to do their best.
01:33:07.000Are good or want good things, you can make the wrong call.
01:33:12.000And you can do that if you just lose the broader historical perspective.
01:33:17.000The solution to a lot of this stuff is not unknown, right?
01:33:20.000We inherited a lot of really good ideas, like maybe we should have free speech, maybe we should have the rule of law, maybe we should have rights.
01:33:28.000Other generations learned this stuff the hard way and gave it to us.
01:33:32.000And then a lot of the time we just forget.
01:33:35.000And I think we got to do better at that.
01:33:38.000I mean, one of the things that we did, I told you, we wrote this stuff down.
01:33:41.000We wrote this stuff down when we were not in the heat of it.
01:33:49.000And when you do that, it makes it easier not to screw up in that way.
01:33:54.000Not to get lost in the plot and it's like, oh, the current moment is everything and we have to do something, something, something and lose yourself.
01:34:05.000Where do you think, do you have an idea of where the country's going?
01:34:11.000That's an open-ended question, isn't it?
01:34:50.000That's a little bit of, like, why I wanted to work on Substack in the first place.
01:34:53.000I was like, it feels like there are wheels in motion that are pulling in that direction.
01:34:58.000And the thing that you hope is that the pendulum swings, right?
01:35:01.000That it's like, we go crazy, we lose the plot a little bit, we experience a bunch of the bad stuff, and then we remember Why these values were important, what the right way to do this is, and the fever breaks.
01:40:03.000One of the concerns that I have in this country is that...
01:40:07.000When you see what's happening in China, I'm worried about centralized digital currency and I'm worried about some sort of a system, like an app that gives you a credit score,
01:40:25.000I'm really worried about someone implementing something like that over here.
01:40:29.000Because I think that could have disastrous results in terms of the amount of control that people have over your ability to do certain things and express yourself.
01:40:38.000If you centralize that much power, it's only a matter of time.
01:40:43.000I mean, wasn't Maxine Waters or someone like that was doing some speech recently where she was talking about how we need to institute digital currency to compete with China?
01:41:07.000Is that digital currency is the only way to do this?
01:41:11.000I think the world of crypto is really interesting for this.
01:41:14.000I'm kind of a skeptic of a lot of the hype, but I do think that the fundamental thing of here's a thing that can function as a currency, as money, in some sense, that is outside of the scope of government and kind of,
01:41:32.000in some important way, uncontrollable, is a very radical idea that we haven't seen the end of.
01:41:39.000You know, I think that Bitcoin and all the various cryptocurrencies and the like, I think they're under attack for very good reasons, because people are terrified of decentralized money.
01:41:52.000They're terrified of not being able to control money.
01:41:56.000And if that does become our primary source of currency, That's a really radical change in how people buy and sell things.
01:42:08.000And that alone could be one of the most disruptive things the world has ever seen.
01:42:13.000But the problem is, it's under attack.
01:42:15.000And also, people don't have full confidence in it.
01:42:18.000And this most recent crash sort of highlights their fears.
01:42:43.000From the beginning, it was worth nothing.
01:42:45.000When you talk about centralized platforms like Twitter and Facebook having the power to censor stuff, the credit card companies are scary for this.
01:42:55.000Just the amount of power that MasterCard and these other companies have over what people can spend their money on is a pretty interesting hole in the system.
01:43:08.000Well, that's what I found fascinating about when Canada cracked down on the trucker kind of way.
01:43:15.000They went after people, I saw stories of going after people that donated a small amount, just to the cause, not knowing what was happening, just like, I'm some random person living somewhere throwing some money to GoFundMe and their accounts get closed.
01:43:54.000The idea that someone would want to do that, that someone would want to close the bank account of someone who contributed to something that you disagree with.
01:44:04.000And it's crazy that it didn't get more pushback.
01:44:06.000And I think it's damaged him politically, but I don't...
01:44:10.000I mean, I guess people in Canada still think he's...
01:44:13.000There's a certain amount that still think he's all right.
01:44:16.000That was a weird moment for me because I would...
01:44:19.000Just comparing what people were talking about those protests and then calling my family back home and hearing them, like what they were hearing about it, what they were thinking about it.
01:44:29.000I was talking to someone in my family that was like, I heard that they're bringing their kids as hostages so they can't get kicked out of the thing.
01:44:40.000You think they're bringing their own children as hostages so they can stay?
01:44:46.000You can see from the outside that people are in one of these moments where they've been whipped up into a frenzy about this legitimately scary thing and you lose perspective.
01:44:59.000You lose the ability to empathize with people who are your fellow human beings that are I think they're protesting something they care about.
01:45:06.000Whether they're right or wrong, they're just people.
01:46:44.000The fact that there's people that can dissent, that can call things crazy, that can criticize this stuff and keep saying it and just exist, I think matters a lot.
01:46:57.000I think that's why all this stuff on Substack has really motivated me.
01:47:01.000I just think those things existing are part of the answer, are part of the way to unwind the insanity.
01:47:11.000And I think that having a mainstream platform, which is Substack is becoming a mainstream platform, that does have that foundation of not only attracting these people that have these ideas and giving them this large platform to express themselves on,
01:47:34.000It's going to bring more people into those ideas.
01:47:37.000More people are going to express those ideas and think about these things and then recognize that, oh, there are pressures to get people to censor themselves and pressures that get people to not discuss certain topics.
01:47:50.000And there is a solution and there's a portal that you can gravitate towards that will allow free expression and And people you disagree with and agree with, and you can also pen those disagreements.
01:48:25.000One of the things you have the option, you can turn the comments on for anybody or you can turn the comments on only for paying subscribers if you're the writer.
01:48:32.000And once you're limited to paying subscribers, it's amazing how much more civil and interesting it gets when it's like the people that are here for this thing and care about this thing.
01:48:41.000Our stance on it is like, look, this is the author's house.
01:49:02.000As a writer, that's kind of your domain.
01:49:04.000And that works really well because it means as a reader you have a choice of different, like, you can go be a part of a community that's really strict or go be a part of a community that's really permissive.
01:49:13.000And you, like, either of those can work.
01:49:15.000And different people want different things from it.
01:49:18.000The thing that I love to see the most is when somebody launches their paid thing and I go in the comments and people are in there being like, I disagree with you about almost everything.
01:49:39.000I think it's important to absorb people's perspectives that you don't agree with.
01:49:44.000There's a lot of people that I either listen to their podcast or watch their YouTube videos and read their stuff, and I don't agree with them.
01:49:51.000But I want to know how that mindset works.
01:49:54.000You know, particularly, I found that during Roe v.
01:50:04.000I'm very interested in the people that think that this is a good thing, that when limiting abortion rights is a good thing, and I want to hear their perspective.
01:50:14.000It's often religious, and it's often that they share this idea that life begins at conception, the very moment of conception.
01:50:23.000And then some of those people are actually against contraceptives, which is wild.
01:50:45.000It also helps you formulate your arguments against that.
01:50:48.000Because so many people that are commenting on things that do exist in an echo chamber, you see the short-sighted nature of the way they formulate their perspectives.
01:50:57.000They think that everyone agrees with them.
01:51:00.000You know, and this is one of the things that I think a lot of the people in the blue states encountered when Trump was running for president.
01:51:06.000They thought there's no fucking way that guy's going to win.
01:51:39.000And you become blind, as you say, to even the reality on the ground of, like, the fact that there are people that feel something different than what I feel.
01:51:46.000Yeah, and I'm also interested in perspectives of people that are fucking totally wrong and out of their mind.
01:51:53.000Like, that's why I was so closely following all this QAnon stuff.
01:51:57.000You know, did you watch Into the Storm, the HBO documentary on QAnon?
01:52:18.000He did a fantastic job with it because it was a multiple part series and you got to see what was happening like years in advance and then leading up to January 6th.
01:52:29.000It's like the thing played out the best possible way it could have played out to make that documentary.
01:52:34.000Because he got these people at the very beginning stages of this whole QAnon thing.
01:52:40.000Oh, like while they were not that crazy?
01:52:42.000Well, he got it where the people were writing it.
01:52:44.000He isolated the original writer, who was the original person pretending to be Q, and then the new people that took over and how it was impossible that anybody else could even be posting.
01:52:59.000It was this guy that was running 4chan at the time.
01:53:05.000But it's interesting to see how people, they find in these narratives and these things, these ideologies, they find community and they find purpose.
01:53:20.000And then they feel like they have a good fight.
01:53:23.000And I think that's a big part of human nature, is that people...
01:53:29.000always believe that there's something to fight against and when there's some obscure information or some hidden information it becomes insanely compelling and people that don't have A very rigid thought process in terms of like objectively analyzing their own motivations and their own thoughts and what is the source of this information that they're basing their opinions on.
01:53:55.000Those people like get sucked into these things very easily and you see it become their whole identity.
01:54:03.000And that's a really fascinating part of this documentary series, is you get to see the people that realize at the end they've been duped.
01:54:10.000And that they've wasted years and years of their life on fucking nonsense.
01:54:22.000And if you don't have those things, if you're in a place where you have no community, where you have no purpose, I think it's kind of easy to see why that's seductive, why you might just push down your doubts and find a way to believe to be on the inside.
01:54:38.000Maybe even at the start, you're just like, I don't know about this, but I wish I had friends to hang out with.
01:54:43.000Well, it's a similar influence of audience capture, right?
01:54:47.000They're similar in a way, is that we all are influenced by the people around us.
01:54:53.000We're not, I mean, we are individuals, sure, but we are all tied in.
01:54:58.000We are all a part of a group of other human beings.
01:55:01.000And that's a critical aspect of human nature, is that we do need the love and support of other people.
01:55:08.000And if we can get it from one way or get it from another, I mean, that's like Stockholm Syndrome.
01:55:12.000People get it from their fucking captors.
01:55:14.000Do you think the people that start these things do it cynically?
01:55:54.000And then next thing you know, you're at a fucking rally holding up a sign.
01:56:02.000If only they subscribed to enough substacks, they would break out of this and scales would fall from their eyes.
01:56:07.000Ultimately, I think, this is going to sound very bizarre, but I think the solution is going to be some sort of a technological intervention that allows us to read minds.
01:57:07.000I mean, it would radically eliminate all the grifters.
01:57:11.000It would radically eliminate all the people that are just playing people and trying to make money.
01:57:17.000And we would get to see what is the process of the mind, like what is going on in your head that's making you say the things you're saying, do the things you're doing.
01:57:27.000What are your real motivations versus what you're espousing?
01:57:31.000I think that's what's going to happen.
01:57:33.000And I think that's going to happen soon.
01:57:35.000I think that's going to happen inside of 30 years.
01:57:37.000Inside of 30 years is going to be some sort of a radical breakthrough technology that allows people to truly communicate without words.
01:57:46.000And that's Elon's goal for one of the goals for Neuralink.
01:58:23.000Maybe it's going to work good because you're going to be able to clearly see what all the dictators are up to.
01:58:28.000All the dictators are going to be able to see what they're up to.
01:58:31.000All the people that work for them are going to be able to see they despise them secretly and are terrified that they're going to take over and are plotting against these people.
01:58:38.000But probably they don't have to use it or they have some other version that can fake it or something.
01:58:44.000My hope is that it's going to be like the internet, is that they're going to release it, not knowing what kind of a radical change it's going to bring about, and then before they do, it's too late.
01:58:56.000If the government knew in 1980-whatever what the internet was going to be in 2022, for sure they would have shut it down.
01:59:06.000They would have said, let's limit this to universities so that they can exchange data and scientific studies and things along those lines, but let's not have this for the general public.
01:59:25.000She said her friend at school was mad at me because her mom watched a video of me reading the terms of service for TikTok.
01:59:33.000And then she made him delete TikTok off his phone.
01:59:37.000Because TikTok, I don't know if you know this, but not only does it have access to all your keystrokes, it has access to your microphone, has access to all computers that you use, even if you don't have TikTok on them.
01:59:49.000So if you are using TikTok on your phone, and you're also using a laptop, but you don't have TikTok, TikTok can access your laptop.
02:00:34.000They figured out what's the best way to suck people in, make the most addictive app, and also have the most thievery, the most data-stealing.
02:00:45.000That's the scariest part about it though.
02:01:08.000And the end game, like the thing that TikTok is the perfect realization of that everything's been leading up to and the other social media companies are having to follow along, is kind of like getting inside of that loop.
02:01:20.000It's taking away every choice you make until it's kind of just like...
02:01:45.000But the scary thing is they're using that mind control to steal data.
02:01:49.000And they're not just controlling your mind by keeping you occupied, but they're also stealing intellectual property.
02:01:56.000Like if you're at home writing software on a computer and you have TikTok on your phone and you're accessing both things, they, at least theoretically, have access to all that data, all that stuff that you're writing.
02:02:10.000The terms of service might say that, but there's something wrong if your laptop is sending them your data.
02:02:15.000Yeah, but that doesn't mean they're not doing it.
02:02:17.000Like, one of the reasons why they got rid of Huawei is they found that there was a third-party access and that they're selling routers and network components that will literally open up a door to people to siphon off information.
02:02:33.000Like, why wouldn't they do that with everything if they could?
02:02:37.000If it says that in terms of service, and if there is some sort of way that that can be acquired, that they can, like it said, they have access to the data that's not on the fucking phone.
02:02:51.000If you're using a different computer and the same person's using it, they have access to that.
02:03:00.000But I mean, that's also the reason why people are not calling for Twitter to be removed, but they are all calling for TikTok to be removed, because they are concerned about this.
02:03:11.000My thing about mind reading and about mind reading technology is the hope is that whatever groundbreaking technological intervention gets introduced that they don't realize what the ultimate potential that it carries and they let it in and then it runs rampant like the internet is done.
02:03:36.000But this changes the way people interface with ideas and changes our understanding of other people and their thoughts and highlights the value of honesty and integrity and meaning what you say and saying what you mean and doing things that are ultimately beneficial.
02:03:58.000Like beneficial in terms of like people read your work because it's beneficial to them.
02:04:29.000I mean, I think it's all going in a general direction whether you like it or not.
02:04:32.000It's going into this direction where access to information becomes easier and easier and more prevalent and more people know more about you now than have ever known about you before.
02:04:44.000And that doesn't seem to be slowing down.
02:04:45.000That seems to be a general direction that all this technology moves to.
02:04:50.000It moves to easier access to information.
02:05:27.000That's the stuff that I would bet on as, like, the biggest technological advance that's happening in my lifetime right now that winds up 10 years from now.
02:06:23.000It will have no motivation in terms of emotions, no motivation in terms of the general human reward systems that we have for our desire to accumulate resources and love for the community and all that.
02:06:35.000That's not going to have any of those.
02:06:36.000There'll be no audience capture with AI. It'll be dependent entirely upon how it's programmed, but then if you give it the ability to be sentient, then it has the ability to reprogram itself.
02:06:48.000Then it has the ability to write better programs, and it has the ability to create far more sophisticated AI, and then physical manifestations of that AI, meaning artificial beings that are sentient.
02:07:01.000And I think the only way to mitigate that, well, I don't know the only way, but one of the ways to mitigate that is to become cyborgs.
02:07:12.000And this is what I'm saying with mind reading software or mind reading technology and Neuralink where you're going to radically increase your access to information and your ability to access information.
02:07:27.000It's going in this sort of general direction and my concern is that we're obsolete.
02:07:34.000My concern is that the physical body of the human monkey body that we all enjoy and that creates such beautiful poetry and art and music and all these different things because of our emotions and our feelings and all that stuff is going to be obsolete.
02:07:50.000But then what's the purpose of living?
02:08:57.000I mean, there's a lot of things that we all agree are better because they've helped people live lives without limitations that normally would have had them.
02:09:10.000And then there's going to come a point in time where that integration means something that enhances the way your brain interfaces with other people.
02:09:17.000If we're going to live in a world, so imagine if we're in a world where you had a brain chip and Jamie had a brain chip and everyone out in the office had a brain chip, but I didn't.
02:09:28.000Because I'm like, I don't even need an email, bro.
02:09:30.000I don't even watch TV. I just fucking chop wood.
02:09:33.000We'd be talking trash about you and you'd have no idea.
02:09:36.000Yeah, you'd be going back and forth about what a monkey I am, that I'm like still trapped in this stupid, you know, cellularly reproducing body.
02:09:53.000It could be good if you think of some ultimately sophisticated civilization that eliminates war and no longer does anything that pollutes the environment and everything it does,
02:10:09.000it does with a greater comprehensive understanding of all the effects that could happen to those things.
02:10:18.000You know, I think we have so much pride and so much attachment to being a biological human being that anything that takes us away from that, we're going to think of as being a negative.
02:10:33.000But there's a solution to that now, which is that we die.
02:10:38.000And so if you and I don't want to become cyborgs, but we figured out how to make cyborgs before we figured out how to extend people's lives, it won't matter.
02:10:50.000The old generation will decide they don't need email, and then they'll die off, and there'll be a new generation that thinks some other way.
02:10:58.000Yeah, but that, I mean, talk about, like, longing for the old days.
02:11:02.000Once you get the first chips in your brain, and you read everyone's mind, you just go, man, wasn't it great when there's no access to people's minds?
02:11:25.000We definitely should look at the pitfalls, definitely look at the traps.
02:11:30.000But I think, objectively, we have to look at it in terms of What are the human animals up to?
02:11:38.000Well, what the human animals are up to is creating better and better technology every fucking year, without doubt.
02:11:45.000They might make mistakes, they might do this, they might pollute the environment, they might cause war, they might do terrible things to each other.
02:11:53.000But they're ultimately, collectively, over the seven plus billion people, they're making better and better technology every year.
02:12:01.000And that seems to be the most radical thing that they do.
02:12:04.000If you looked at the human organism, if you looked at us as a completely alien thing, if you existed on another planet with a completely different way of life, and you said, what are those fucking monkeys up to?
02:12:20.000They constantly are making technology, and I think that even capitalism, materialism rather, I think even materialism, it seems to be baked into us, right?
02:12:30.000People love things, and they love better things, and they're obsessed with better.
02:12:58.000Whether we're aware of it overall, when you want, you know, look at my new car, look at my this thing, my house is all solar now, and all these different things, this desire to keep up with the Joneses, and materialism is like, I mean, it exists in most cultures,
02:13:15.000in most people, and that seems to be a driving instinct.
02:13:20.000That helps fuel technology, because there's a market for it, so people create it because they want more stuff.
02:13:26.000So they create better stuff so that they make sure that their products are valuable and desirable, and in doing so, it fuels innovation.
02:13:36.000And ultimately, I think that's lost on a lot of people, is that this is what our, as a human organism, we seem to be creating New technology without stop.
02:14:45.000I don't think there's anything that's going to get people to stop creating better technology.
02:14:49.000So all you can do then is hope to bend it the right way.
02:14:53.000Hope to bend it the right way or have...
02:14:58.000The ability to understand and just let it happen, that this is a part of a process that's beyond all of us and may be the purpose of human beings in the first place.
02:15:10.000I've always equated us to the electronic caterpillar.
02:15:16.000That is creating the cocoon and doesn't even know why it's doing it to build a butterfly.
02:15:23.000And then one day this new life form emerges from it.
02:15:26.000But that is a natural course of progression.
02:15:28.000And that has been improgrammed or that's been...
02:15:33.000If you had a chance to see the end result...
02:15:36.000And see, go all the way back from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms to the ultimate form of whatever biological cyborg we're going to be.
02:15:49.000And this is how it works on other planets as well.
02:15:51.000This is how it works whenever you have a long period of time without cataclysmic disasters or wars and you do allow these thinking creatures to develop better and better things.
02:17:17.000And you really think about where, you know, ancient cultures and ancient civilizations, the way they distributed knowledge, the way they held discussions, it's sort of similar to what we would do if we didn't have all this stuff.
02:17:32.000Like the physical body is very, it's very similar to the physical body of humans that lived thousands of years ago.
02:18:11.000The things we choose to make then shape who we are.
02:18:18.000Which again, you know, my obsession is like the way that we use that technology to shape the culture, shape what we think, shape who we are, just matters a lot.
02:18:29.000Yes, technology is increasing very quickly.
02:18:31.000It's unstoppable, but I don't think it's predetermined.
02:18:35.000I don't think there's one version of the future that is destined to come about no matter what we do.
02:18:41.000I think there's a wide range of what's possible, all the way from extinction or things you can imagine that are worse than extinction, all the way to things that we can't conceive of that are some version of your butterfly.
02:18:56.000And which of those things we end up at depends.
02:19:00.000I think sometimes it could depend on individuals.
02:19:29.000It is wild and I think that's one of the the reasons why I think that free speech platforms like Substack are so important because it changes the access to perspectives and Ultimately, that's what a lot of us are is like a sponge for perspectives We we we get a better understanding of of our own thought process by examining other people's thought processes and we get a better understanding of
02:20:00.000the world around us by seeing how other people view it and analyze it and they have to be able to do that freely they have to be able to do that honestly they have to be able to do that without any sort of oversight or any sort of you know any any people that don't want certain perspectives Because those perspectives would somehow or another hinder what their ideology is or change what they're trying to accomplish.
02:20:31.000Yeah, I think the freedom is a key ingredient.
02:20:34.000And then the other thing we've been talking about is like the way that the games you play shape who you become, right?
02:20:41.000The audience capture positive or negative, the way that the, you know, the The way that the technology works shapes what your perspective becomes.
02:20:52.000It shapes what helps you win, helps you become the best version of yourself.
02:20:56.000And so it's not just about preventing the negative.
02:20:59.000It's not just about preventing the evil of Censorship that can shut things down, but it's about enabling the good thing, right?
02:21:07.000It's not just the matter of, like, turn out censorship and great things will happen.
02:21:12.000You need to, like, create some positive force.
02:21:15.000You need to create a way for the energy of good things to make it into the world.
02:21:21.000And, you know, even just simple things like, I get an email newsletter and I pay you money for it, and then a bunch of people like it, and then that thing lets me quit my job.
02:21:29.000And now I can focus on doing this thing that shapes the culture instead of worrying about how I'm going to put food on the table tomorrow.
02:21:38.000Or, you know, it's making me rich and I can say what I want.
02:21:58.000And if we give them the tools, if we give them the power in the right way, that can have profound, positive, cascading consequences, even if we don't know exactly what those are.
02:22:10.000Yeah, and I think you're also encouraging other people to think.
02:22:13.000By giving people a platform where they're not censored, the censorship is not the issue.
02:22:20.000The issue is the ability to distribute information honestly and accurately.
02:22:27.000Now, the censorship is the problem because it comes in and it stops that from happening.
02:22:35.000The beautiful thing is how those interact with other people's ideas.
02:22:38.000And how people who are reading some of these articles on Substack, people who are listening to some of these people talk, it influences them and maybe makes them create something.
02:22:48.000Maybe inspires them to have thoughts that perhaps they wouldn't have had without reading these things and interacting with these ideas.
02:22:56.000And that's the history of human beings.
02:22:59.000We get better by understanding each other better, by communicating with each other better, by having these discussions, by reading, by interacting with ideas.
02:23:12.000And those ideas help us form our view of the world.
02:23:15.000And as soon as you put a halt to that, you put a wall up there, it fucks the whole process up.
02:23:21.000Our view of the world and our view of the future.
02:23:24.000It's amazing how much of the technology we build is shaped by the science fiction that people read and watched as a kid, of the shared dreams that we had of what the future could be like and which of those resonated, which of those inspired,
02:23:40.000which of those caused somebody to want to make that real.
02:23:43.000We make this stuff in art sometimes and in writing and in fiction and in thought.
02:24:47.000And one of the good things about that is that people recognize it.
02:24:50.000Intelligent people like yourself and other people that have joined your platform and other people that are just very dismayed at what's going on in the world with this idea that censorship for the greater good.
02:25:03.000You know, that this is somehow or another the answer to this, which has never been the answer to that.
02:26:01.000I worry about centralized power in terms of like one entity that has the ability to disseminate information but decides what is good and what's bad information.
02:26:12.000Because it just, it limits our understanding.
02:26:30.000And as soon as a movement or an intellectual idea or a school of thought loses the ability to hear its critics, to have critics and to hear criticism, as soon as you get to any idea, any religion, any school of thought or ideology,
02:26:45.000no matter how good, if it loses its ability to be open to criticism...
02:26:50.000It inevitably becomes evil, I think, because it loses its rudder.
02:26:56.000There's nothing tying it to what's true or what's good, and those dynamics of everybody's vying for attention and power within the thing can take over unchecked.
02:27:09.000These projects, even if you believe in them, you should welcome Debate.
02:28:31.000But you want to have something that's like an alternative.
02:28:33.000You want to have something that an alternate way for me to spend my time in my life.
02:28:40.000That I can choose, that's compelling enough, that's got enough exciting, interesting stuff there that I'm not, you know, it's not like the eat your vegetables only platform.
02:28:49.000But if I want to, like, take back control of my mind, of who I'm trusting, how I'm spending my attention, this is this place, this alternate universe on the internet with different laws of physics, where different kind of stuff wins, and where when you go there, it's not trying to grab as much of your life as possible.
02:29:08.000You know, cynically, it's trying to grab as much of your money as possible.
02:29:11.000But the way that it does that is by finding things that you actually value and making you make the choice as a better version of yourself.
02:29:19.000I'm going to spend some of my life by subscribing to this person.
02:29:22.000I'm going to spend some of my money supporting the creation of this piece of culture that matters to me.
02:29:29.000And I think if we can, like, we sort of have that now, and it's this small thing.
02:29:33.000There's like a million, million and a half subscribers, but it's like the energy of it is growing, and it's creating things that otherwise couldn't have existed.
02:29:42.000It's letting people do work that they believe in that otherwise couldn't have existed.
02:29:46.000I think that thing could actually get quite big.
02:29:49.000I think it could get big to the point where it rivals or eclipses the size of the other things that are vying for our attention just because it's better.
02:29:57.000Because the life that I'll lead if I take my mind back is more rewarding than the life that I'll lead if I... I spend all my time every day on TikTok.
02:30:08.000I think people see this with their parents, where they get Facebook-brained, and you just look at it, and you're like, I don't want to be that.
02:30:16.000If we can create this alternate universe, and so it's for writing.
02:30:19.000I think writing is a lot of the center of intellectual culture.
02:30:22.000It's where a lot of ideas come from, where a lot of these things get hashed out.
02:30:25.000We've been adding podcasting, we've been adding video, we're adding community features, we'll add some live stuff.
02:30:32.000We want to let people have their own personal media empire and then have this exist in this network of people that are in conversation with each other, that control their own piece of it and that help each other out, that talk to each other, and that ends up funding a lot of great writing,
02:30:48.000a lot of great thinking, a lot of great culture that otherwise could not have existed.
02:30:53.000I also think that the subscription-based model where people are paying for people's stuff, and it's also optional.
02:30:59.000Some people have their Substack open for free.
02:31:48.000It's a year later, that guy's still reading.
02:31:51.000There's something here that's worth sticking around for.
02:31:53.000Well, that's the thing about a lot of the things that people consume is that even if they hate it, there's something about it that's compelling.
02:32:11.000I want to know how they think about all sorts of different things.
02:32:16.000I think that having a place where you absolutely can know, even if you don't know exactly what they think, you know what they're writing, what's coming out of their mind.
02:32:30.000You get a better understanding and that's ultimately what we're all trying to do.
02:32:35.000There's no fucking all-knowing human being.
02:32:38.000We're trying to get a better understanding.
02:32:40.000And the only way to do that is to allow people unfettered, completely free ability to express themselves.