The Paul Wells Show - Introducing CANADALAND: Substack’s founder on news, money, and Musk

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

Happy holidays. We're on a break, but we thought you might enjoy this episode from our friends at CANADALAND. It's a conversation about Substack's role in the future of journalism, featuring Paul Wells, The Line's Jen Gerson and Substack founder Chris Best. If you like this episode, you can subscribe to CANADALAND for more like it. CANADALAND credits: Host & Publisher: Jesse Brown Senior Producer: Bruce Thorson Audio Editor & Technical Producer: Tristan Capacchione Production Manager: max collins   We'll be back with a new episode of the Paul Wells Show next week.

Hi, everybody. I hope you're enjoying your holiday. I'm going to let you in on a secret of podcast craft. Sometimes podcasts like to exchange episodes, catch a break, spread word about the work they're doing to new audiences, and give their audiences something new to hear. Jesse Brown and his crew over at Canada Land are going to be sharing an episode of the podcast of this show that you've already heard. And in return, we get this episode of Canada Land, which happens to feature me and some other folks talking about Substack. I hope you enjoy it. Happy holidays. Canada Land, funded by you. I'm Jesse Brown, and today we're talking about Substack, where journalism is growing. And Elon Musk is not happy about it.

Elon flipped out. He saw Substack as sort of like the number one competitor to X at the time. He banned discussion of the word Substack. And to this day, there's a lot of people who, when they want to talk about sub stack on Twitter, they write like S star star B, like, like Revolver Mort or something. Like you can't say the name sub stack, which I think makes us sound super bad-ass. Wait for that. If you're like me, you get a lot of spam in your email inbox, a lot of unsolicited emails from strangers. I got this one years ago, 2017. Hi, Jesse. I'm starting a new company with the mission of making it dead simple to start a subscription-based writing business. I'm a supporter of Canada

Land and some of the stuff you talk about has helped inspire what we're doing. We think creating quality content for a small, invested, paying readership will play a huge role in the future of media, and we want to make it easier for any independent journalist. I would really like to pick your brain about the industry, the model, and the product we're building. Would you be willing to grab a coffee? One thing that grinds my gears is the pick your brain thing. Like who wants to have their brain picked? And people who want to pick your brain, you know, they rarely just want your thoughts.

Like often they want a job or they want you to invest in their app or something. I was really hesitant to write back to this guy. But he was a Canada Land supporter. I try to be generous. I gave the guy 15 minutes and I met him for a coffee downstairs. He was a nice kid and he was very starry-eyed, very idealistic. It was what you heard in the email. He pitched me on this idea that journalists could actually get people to pay for blog posts.

I let him down as easy as I could. Like, if you want to read blog posts on the internet, you're drowning in free stuff. Getting people to pay for it, that just sounded ridiculous to me. So we parted ways, and I did not give this guy another thought until the headlines started popping up.

Is Substack the future of news? If you're somebody who writes, you should be on Substack. How many people do you think on Substack are making over a million dollars? It's certainly people making very healthy in the millions of dollars a year. I have amassed over 16,000 subscribers on Substack. Like, here's a question. Substack is like, how many people do you have on it right now? Oh my God, I became a Substack bestseller.

That guy's name was Chris Best. And that app was, yes, Substack, which is now valued at $650 million. And just as he dreamed, it has in fact made it a lot easier for journalists to make money off of their journalism. In fact, entire thriving news companies have grown on this platform, Substack. Barry Weiss's Free Press and Andrew Sullivan took the weekly dish there.

Others blocked and reported. Here in Canada, a lot of names that Canada Land listeners may be familiar with are thriving on Substack. names that Canada Land listeners may be familiar with are thriving on Substack. Terry Glavin, Sam Cooper, Justin Ling, Jen Gerson has the line. Paul Wells is doing great stuff on Substack. It goes on and on. And it is a way in which journalists are getting paid. Some of them are getting paid more than they've ever gotten paid before to do journalism. Substack is being described as the number one threat to Twitter. It is a rare sign of hope and innovation and working revenue model

in a very desolate media landscape. And all of that has come with the usual share of controversies. Substack has a Nazi problem. That was a headline that went around when it was revealed that there were, yes, Nazi substacks charging money and the parent company apparently taking their cut of those profits. All of these controversies, though worth discussing, are the predictable outcome of success.

And Substack is a big success. And Chris's dream, it has been realized. And now I'm the one chasing him to pick his brain. Chris was not available to meet me again at the coffee shop downstairs, but he's going to join us in a minute from San Francisco, where Substack's offices are headquartered. And he's going to be joined by leading Canadian Substackers, Jen Gerson of The Line and Paul Wells. And we're going to talk about some of these controversies and issues and the promise of Substack. And we're going to talk about some of these controversies and issues

and the promise of Substack. And we're going to get into all of this stuff. We're going to get into the business mechanics of what it means to grow a journalism business on Substack. We're going to talk Musk. We're going to talk Nazis. And we're going to talk about how he got it so very right and I had it so wrong. Wait for it. My name is Paul Wells. I have a sub stack, paulwells.substack.com. I was at big news organizations for 30 years before that, but it ended badly. Jen? Hi, I'm Jen Gerson.

I also have a Substack. I also have worked in major media outlets for many, many years, and it also ended badly. And Chris? I'm Chris Best. I also have a Substack at cb.substack.com, but I'm mostly the co-founder and CEO of Substack, the company, Canadian by birth, but living in San Francisco now. Chris, let me start with you. We've met once in person. I got an email from you in 2017 asking me to have a coffee with you to talk about some app that you wanted to launch. Yes.

You're obviously a fairly intelligent person who's had some success in technology, but I think that thinking that you would get any insights from me was particularly dumb. I don't think I left you with any. And I don't think I got it at all. But just revisiting that conversation, I got the sense that the gears that were turning in your brain towards this thing you wanted to start had something to do with the Canadian media and the collapse of the Canadian media and what you were watching happen. Is there anything to that? I think it was the Canadian media and maybe just the media more broadly. Part of my thesis when we started Substack was, hey, the internet came along and smashed a lot of the existing business models for media. Craigslist took over the classifieds, Facebook and Google

took over the internet advertising industry. And so a lot of the business models that used to underpin written culture and the media were crumbling and were not on track to be adequately replaced in my estimation. I remember that you told me something like you were watching what was happening with Canada Land and our ability to get people to pay for podcasts. And you were wondering if something like that could work for a written journalism. And I thought like, no, why would anyone pay for blogs? You let me down so gently, which I found very, very charming of you. But it was a little bit surprising to me because a lot of people at that point didn't think

that Substack was going to go anywhere. Jen was also another person who let me down very gently and said, you starry eyeyed idiot, this is never going to work. But CanTheLand was already doing the exact thing in my mind. You were one of these kind of pirate radio upstart media things that were making a go of it, making something genuinely interesting and different that people valued enough to pay for and care about. And so I was like, if anybody in Canada is going to understand this thing, it's going to be Jesse Brown. And you didn't quite see it then. Well, you vastly overestimated my insight.

But one thing that I did tell you that was valuable, though you may have arrived at it independently, you said, well, is there any journalist I should talk to who might be interested and might see value in this? And I said, I don't know. You should probably talk to Jen Gerson. Yeah, which is really, really funny because I remember very distinctly having this great conversation with Chris where I hung up the phone from him and being like, that's going nowhere.

I don't think it was totally a waste of Chris's time. But, yeah, I definitely had the same impression that Jesse had was, yes, Canadian media is collapsing. Yes, everything's kind of going to shit. But at this point, I was still working in a mainstream media outlet for, you know, reasonable wage. I knew things were kind of going pear-shaped, but I didn't think I was going to get fired imminently. I did not predict that I was going to rage quit, which was a different conversation. This is an experience I have somewhat frequently, by the way. Yeah, exactly. But I didn't expect that it would make sense for me to, at that point, throw in the towel, quit my job, and go put my chips on this app that may or may not work behind a person I didn't know anything about to create a new business model that was highly experimental

at that particular moment in history. So when journalists are laid off or they rage quit, they can either come on Canada land and vent about it, or they could go talk to Chris. Or both. Ideally both. I mean, you know, do a whole tour of it. They should do both. So that's Jen's origin story. It's interesting that it wasn't like, that's a great idea. I'm leaving my job and doing this. Paul, this is what you wrote on your sub stack. I launched this newsletter with no plan following a sudden decision to quit a job I used to love. It was an experiment. It quickly became an ideal job, freedom of topic and form working for an attentive and opinionated audience. Now I want to make it clear in concrete ways that I'm here for the long haul. That's quite an optimistic statement for someone who should be just a completely jaded crank at this point in your career.

Yeah. I kind of thought that my experience with journalism in general would be that as Michael Cook, who was the editor of the Star, said, we're going to ride this horse until it drops. the editor of the Star said, we're going to ride this horse until it drops. We're just going to keep doing journalism with progressively more constrained options and possibilities and finances until something approaching retirement age hit. I did not expect a late career renaissance. I sometimes think of it a fucking late career renaissance. I was driven by spite. I wanted to show my old bosses at the organization I quit that I wasn't done yet. And then I reconsidered some advice I'd gotten. The day I quit, Colby Koch said, Substack.

And I thought, this is why Colby is never going anywhere. And my wife had read a piece, I think in the report on Business Magazine, about how Jen Gerson was making a go of it on Substack. And my wife said, man, the Substack looks good. Finally, I thought I'd try it. I set a very low target for income. I hit that income target on the second day. The growth curve flattened out after that,

but continued to grow. And pretty soon I was able to make a living doing this. I think that the central issue to tackle here is the issue of echo chamber slash audience capture. I read both of your sub stacks, but I was much more aware of Paul Wells in the Canadian discourse before your sub stack. I was much more aware of what Jen Gerson just wrote and how people are responding to it and how it plays and who's being held accountable and who thinks that it's ridiculous when you were with a newspaper and on Twitter. You have gone into your communities. You're a

much less public facing in the open discourse. Is that fair? I think so. Yeah, I think that's fair. Yeah. I also don't really care to be blunt. I mean, there are some people who are highly motivated by profile and fame when they get into journalism. I never was. I would be perfectly happy being an unbilined writer. I would never, I never cared about that sort of thing. The basic proposition that I was more part of the culture a decade ago than I am now, I think is fair.

I have a much more intense relationship with my readers and an emotional relationship of kind of companionship and community than I used to have. And also, by the way, can I say the psychological benefits of not being in that milieu are high? Yeah. Like, I mean, you know, respectfully, when I was doing stuff in oppo and forcibly being exposed to people who with radically different political outlooks than me, and having to deal with the blowback on that, I mean, whatever, I kind of just ignored it. But, you know, that stuff does have chips away at your at your mental health. So having a, an environment where,

you know, it's, it's a supportive environment of people who are like-minded has some downsides and has some risks. Absolutely. And I think we're going to get into that, but I'd rather be happy, fed and healthy, you know, then, then, then making basically the same amount of money, if not less and more famous. Right. I bring it up not so much about fame as much as it is you two were able to establish profiles and followings, readerships, the most endangered thing of all is a readership, and build your Substack presence. How do people find out about Jen Gerson's Substack or the line? How do people find out about Paul Wells? You did have careers, and you could make that transition. Nobody coming up now is going to

have that option. Chris, how do people find new Substacks to pay? Is this not like a Spotify model where you have people who kind of are being grandfathered in because they were famous in a different medium and that's like 90% of the actual paid business. And then you've got a long tail of thousands and thousands of other people screaming into the void and nobody even knows they're there. So there's basically two big ways you can grow on Substack. One is on the internet at large. You have a Twitter, you have an Instagram, you have a TikTok, you have a LinkedIn, you have a YouTube, you have some following on the open internet. You build the following the way that anybody does.

People decide that they value the thing you're making. Often the feeling that works there is like, hey, this is actually good. I value this beyond occasionally seeing a slice of this in my feed. I kind of want to follow this person. I want to contribute. I want to be a part of the thing. The other thing that's growing is the Substack network itself. And so we have both peer to peer recommendations on Substack. You can recommend other Substacks that you want to put your readers onto and say, this is good. And there are discovery

surfaces. So if somebody comes to, as a reader comes to Substack.com and says, show me what's here, you can come and find stuff. And between those things right now, about half of new free subscriptions and a third of paid subscriptions that happen on Substack come from within Substack discovery. Really? Between the peer-to-peer and the app, yeah. It's totally interesting and unsurprising to me because there's a very clear parallel in podcasting where we realized that this question for years of how do you get more people to listen to podcasts is talk about them on other people's podcasts. And in the early stages of that, having promotions or feed drops or doing guest spots on other people's podcasts was incredibly effective at telling somebody else has built a podcast audience. You go on their podcast and some percentage of those people will come listen to yours. It got less and less effective as the years went on because we're all just sharing from the same pool of listeners. If half of the new

sub stacks people read are coming from people who are already on sub stack, there's a limited amount of sub stacks that anyone could read in a day. And there's a limited amount that people are going to pay for. Are you not just going to, this is a question for all three of you, like it's going to run out, right? The answer is yes. Subscription saturation is a problem and we're hitting it. The thing that I would just say is I would agree with you on a couple of points, but I would also make some notes as well, is that both Paul and I did come up through mainstream media. I mean, I came up through a very conventional pedigreed path through mainstream media. But the thing that I would point out there is that the path that I came up through is now gone, right? Like I came up through,

you know, the Toronto Stars radio room, which is now gone. I came up through internship programs that are now gone. I, you know, I came in through, you know, jobs that now largely no longer exist. I came in through a very mainstream media path that has been totally obliterated. No one coming up today could replicate my path through mainstream media. So I don't know what the future holds for someone who's 21 and into journalism today. And I don't know how they're going to navigate a path because that whole system has internally collapsed. In some ways, I think it might be easier for the 21-year-old because they're going to be native to a particular kind of ecosystem that Paul and I had to learn. Maybe in some ways it's going to be harder. I think that the whole mentorship system by which

we transmit journalistic values has been severely disrupted. I don't know how to replicate that with this model. Paul, what would your advice be to somebody who wants to be the next Paul Wells on Substack? What would be what a young journalist should do to make a name for themselves and build an audience? I mean, it's an interesting question because I do mentor younger journalists. And every time I get approached, the first thing I do is I do a gut check. Do I want to encourage 20-year-olds to start being journalists? Leave. That's my advice.

Run. Yeah, absolutely. What I usually say is there'll be somebody doing roughly what I do in 25 years. There'll be somebody explaining to a broad Canadian public what's happening at the center of federal legislative power. I don't know how that person is going to get there from where they are now. But that person is going to have some technique. They're going to know how to write a story. They're going to know how to do an interview. They're going to know what the legislative process is. And so you can work on your technique and then seize opportunity as it comes and find your own path. But the technique, which is the last thing anyone talks about in journalism these days,

is the thing that's going to be non-negotiable. You're going to have to be good at your shit. And so that stuff you can work on and most people won't bother to. Yeah, how do they like it when you give them that advice? When they're asking for like, which platform should I go on? And then you tell them, go learn your craft. How do they take that advice? I'll tell you, if they come out of a Canadian journalism school, it's like they've been wandering through the desert, they finally found water.

Because most of what they get told to talk about at a journalism school ain't that. I don't know if they're getting the practical tools either, but I'm not sure what they're getting. This is it. Chris, you've had your issues with Twitter. Substack got in the crosshairs of Elon Musk with, I guess, what he saw was a competing product. Maybe you could just remind us of that little episode in your corporate history. Yeah, we launched the Substack Notes product, which is you can post short form in the Substack app. It sort of looks a little bit like a tweet.

It's a similar niche. So we built this thing. We launched the very first version of it. Just in the Substack app, you can see people can have a short post. Elon flipped out. I think it came out in one of the biographies of him later that he saw Substack as sort of like the number one competitor to X at the time. He banned discussion of the word Substack. You couldn't say the word substack or

you got blocked. There was a whole series of crazy anti-substack specific things that happened on X. Was that good for you, by the way? I mean, a lot of people hadn't heard of substack. Did your star rise when all that went down? There was definitely a Streisand effect there. And to this day, there's a lot of people who, when they want to talk about Substack on Twitter, they write like S star star B, like, like Revoldemort or something. Like you can't say the name Substack, which I think makes us sound super badass. But anyway, there was a big outcry. It was obviously an insane overreaction. People say the free speech platform can't censor discussion of some other thing. You rolled a lot of that stuff back. And then the thing that's happened in the intervening period, to be honest,

is that every link on X now gets approximately the same treatment that Substack links does, which is to say it's not great. It's really hard to link people out of X. It had already been for us a declining share of how people are bringing subscribers in. You can still do it. If you build up a big X following, you have your link in your bio, people will still find it. But the idea of, hey, I'm going to write a piece, a long form piece,

and that piece is going to kind of like make the rounds and go viral and drive me a bunch of subscribers, that got a lot harder. And that's actually, it's not just the story of X. Like we see this with people from every platform. Instagram and threads right now, there's an increasing sort of feeling that people who've built up audiences on Instagram, that that thing's getting kind of like whittled away. The platform's shifting under me. I don't

know if these things that I have are even going to like work anymore. Meta has taken a strong stance to kind of like opt out of political discussion to the point where like C-SPAN links are getting blocked. Nobody wants us. Nobody wants news. It's because we're cranky people who yell at each other and make people yell. And, you know, Twitter used to be like the journalist's platform. And Twitter used to say we're the free speech wing of the free speech party. And Elon made noises about that. But in practice, you know, there's a general shitification happening on platforms, but there's a very specific and targeted anti-journalistic, anti-political, anti-debate vibe out there or hyper-partisan. You know, it's funny because Elon's suspicion that you were his biggest competitor, in a certain sense, that's true because the only platform that seems to be still making noise is that we want journalists. That this is a platform for journalists, and this

is a free speech platform, and we're going to return to that in a little bit, is Substack. So he might've been right, Chris. So the other thing I would add to Chris's comment here is that our ability to go viral collapsed once Elon Musk first engaged in those anti-Substack measures. I think also thanks to just, as you said, the insidifications of the platforms combined with C18 has never really recovered. And I think that that's very specific to Canadian outlets, you know, just talking to other independent outlets, you know, the ability to grow, especially since C18 has come into form, has really just collapsed in on itself. The only reason why the line is continuing to be healthy

is because we own our lists. Yeah. We own our email lists. And we can reach out directly to our list to do that. And that also might go, Jesse, to what you were saying about the fact that Paul and I increasingly seem absent from the public conversation. Well, look, we did the math on X,

and the amount of time that I was spending on there wasn't providing ROI. I'm not getting enough from the time that I'm spending on there to justify posting the links anymore. It's not providing enough traffic to be worth my time anymore. What you're saying is so incredibly reasonable. And yet it also strikes me as somebody saying like, you know, I was addicted to crack, but I ran the numbers on it. Did the numbers on the crack addiction. Hey, I haven't been on Twitter in months, man.

I've been clean. I've been clean. No, it's true. But I mean, I think it's something like 96% of our traffic now is coming direct either from our website, readtheline.ca, or from our lists. Our ability to grow on social media has effectively collapsed. I saved this for last, not because I wanted to make sure that nobody like left in anger when I asked these questions. More so, I saved the moderation question for last because I've heard it hashed over so many times, and not just with Substack, but this is the question of online publishing, whether the platforms are responsible for what they publish or whether they are

kind of neutral platforms, free speech. And Substack got into a large controversy when The Atlantic ran a piece revealing that there were a number of explicitly Nazified swastika-bearing Substacks out there, out of the thousands of Substacks. And there was an open letter from Substackers saying, you've got to censor this, you've got to kick this off because I don't want to publish here if you're publishing Nazis. What I saw play out, Chris, in interviews you gave and your co-founder gave, was maybe the most staunch refusal to do what pretty much every platform has done, has done, which is agree that, okay, fine, we didn't want to be censors and we didn't want to even be editors, but we'll do it. They have taken on the role of saying we're going to kick this kind of thing off and not that kind of thing.

There are things that Substack won't publish from the start, like a lot of sex stuff. A few of those Nazi sites did get kicked off. And I think that the rationale given was that they were explicitly calling for violence. So we're in a legal territory where you could maintain the position that you're not making content judgments, you're just following the law. But Substack seems unique to me in adhering to a neutral role that I think virtually every other online publishing platform has abandoned, whether explicitly or otherwise. And what we're seeing, you know, is that the bifurcation of Twitter into like dozens of little mini Twitters, some of which basically they become editorially slanted publishers who

say this is the place to come if you want to be super racist, and this is the place where people who really don't want to see that kind of content ever can have a safe space, and a crying of uncle. And I guess what I'm curious about is, if I've described that accurately, how Substack has avoided the concession that pretty much everybody else has made. To the extent that we're enabling people to start their own thing and have their own list and have their own editorial viewpoint, having a strong stance in favor of freedom of the press is fundamental and crucial to that goal. And so Substack as a platform has a content policy that is deliberately designed to be extremely narrow in its prohibitions and leave space for lots of things that we find bad and abhorrent because I don't want to appoint myself the arbiter of what's good or what's true. But then you do want to have a space where when I go to the comment sections of the line,

But then you do want to have a space where when I go to the comment sections of the line, that doesn't mean it's an anarchy. It means that Jen Gerson is in control, not Chris Best. And the farther that we can push that principle, where the people who are using the platform get to set the rules of it, where you can have different spaces that people are, you know, I can opt into being part of that comment section or not. I think that principle actually has more legs than the other one that everybody kind of independently discovered where you kind of let things run rampant until eventually it becomes untenable and then you're forced to do a thing.

But then that thing that you're forced to do isn't even good. I think one lesson I take from the past 10 years of every platform going through this arc is it hasn't worked. It hasn't fixed the culture. It hasn't gotten rid of the things they're trying to censor out of existence. So I do think there's a new and better way that we're pursuing. I want to make sure I understand, Chris, because if I'm hearing you correctly, what you're saying is that outside of some very specifically and narrowly defined prohibitions, no porn, no threats, basically what law would prohibit being on the line? Like I don't know if – you can correct me if Substack goes much beyond that. The platform itself does not inhibit anything.

But the publisher of each individual sub stack has the control. So if somebody wants to have a racist sub stack and they're okay with racist comments on their racist sub stack, as long as there's no explicit threats against people. I saw an interview where somebody said to you, you need to answer, there's a correct answer to this question. You were asked, is it okay to say racist things on suback? And you wouldn't really answer. And the interviewer said, there's a correct answer to that. And the answer is no. And I kind of want, like, I'm aware of the principle, whether I agree with it or not, of like, yes, if we're going to have free speech, then yes. Yes, people will say racist things. And that is the price that we pay

because for, you know, a tech co-founder to be the person determining what is racist or not is not the path that I think you chose. A subject to which there's much debate, by the way. So is that an accurate description that barring that narrowly defined, really legally defined area of prohibitions, it's up to Jen and Paul as to what gets omitted, censored, removed from their sub stacks? Is that true? Mostly. I would say we're inspired by the sort of First Amendment jurisprudence, but we don't – it's not an exact match. There are things that are prohibited by sub-stack that are legal, but it's sort of like – it's

a small set of things. Yeah. I would say I can't speak to sub-stack in their chosen content moderation policies. I think there was an open letter signed by about 100 sub-stackers that said, you know, you guys have to ban the Nazis or we're out. We didn't sign that letter. And I can tell you why we didn't sign that letter. The reason why is not because we support Nazis. The reason why is because, frankly, start with the Atlantic article that kicked this all off had some pretty significant misrepresentations and inaccuracies. inaccuracies. Firstly. Secondly, is that we felt that it was a bad faith, disingenuous effort to try and create a guilt by association narrative. So if you're on this free speech platform in an era where free speech had been co-opted by people to mean supportive of highly intolerant viewpoints like Nazism, that you were therefore somehow tainted by association. This was also happening

in a moment where there was a high degree of an attempt to try and get all platforms to come into line with a particular view about what is acceptable or what isn't acceptable speech. And one of the things that Substack offered me, and I think a lot of other writers from right across the political spectrum, left and right, was an environment where that kind of intimidation and bullying was not going to be tolerated or accepted. The other thing I would just point out is I think when people did an actual analysis of the Nazis on Substack, they found that it was like a handful of Nazis with a few hundred subscribers, maybe pulling in a few hundred dollars. There was no evidence that there

was some kind of disproportionately high number of Nazis on Substack compared to other social media platforms. So the idea that Substack had more Nazis on it than Twitter, for example, is completely nonsense. And yet we don't engage in some game where we play guilt by association, everyone on Twitter is a Nazi. So this always struck us as extremely, extremely bad faith. And then I would also point out that there was a huge business incentive for a lot of the people who went on the Substack has a Nazi problem crusade. There was an attempt by the people who left Substack in the midst of that to try and maximize on their particular personal branding in order to build their own individual audiences. So it was, I'm not like these, I have major issues with Substack's content moderation policies. Look at me, I don't support the Nazis. I'm going to these. I have major issues with sub-stats content moderation policies. Look at me.

I don't support the Nazis. I'm going to be Hive. And this was – it was a branding thing, right? Rage quitting is a business tactic. Well, completely. Absolutely. It was rage quitting as a business tactic. And as someone who's rage quit, I respect that.

I respected it as a business tactic. You weren't thinking ahead when you rage quit. You just rage quit. That's fair. But, like, look, I respect rage quitting as a business tactic. And as a business tactic, I was like, fair play to you, Substacker, now Beehiver or whatever platform or service provider you're using with. Oftentimes the service providers they went to, by the way, had less content moderation than Substack did to prove how disingenuous this whole shenanigans was.

But like, I respected it as a purely Machiavellian play for profile and branding, but I couldn't take it seriously as a criticism of Substack or its content moderation policies. I disagreed with Chris and Hamish about the Nazi thing. I thought kicking Nazis off should have been pretty easy call. And I complained about it, including on Substack Notes. The aftermath of that Atlantic Monthly piece about this whole mess was the first time I downloaded my subscriber lists because I thought it might be time to walk. But like Jen, I looked at the other platforms. They didn't have super woke moderation policies either.

And Substack did flush one guy who had the word Reich in his publication title. It was like Jimmy's Reich or whatever. And I watched what happened. And as soon as he was chased away from Substack, he had set himself up on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and some of these lookalike platforms. None of which seemed to generate any Atlantic articles, I will point out.

One just tiny point on the content moderation, free speech universe. One trend I've seen in the past six months is people coming to Substack because we have had a consistent defense of this principle from the left. It used to be that I think the idea of free speech was a very right coded thing. And people thought that's the natural direction those things flow. There are more and more people, I think particularly, you talk about Israel-Palestine, that from the left also have legitimate worries of, am I going to be the subject of a censorship campaign? And I think it's a principle that we will rediscover, I think, as valuable to all sides.

I think that anybody who's been alive for longer than, say, 25 years should be able to remember that free speech isn't a right-coded thing at all, nor is it a left-coded thing. It's a fundamental tenet. It's a fundamental virtue of living in any kind of liberal democracy. And without it, basically all this is reduced to is stupid will-to-power nonsense. All this is reduced to is stupid, will-to-power nonsense. Chris, just in closing, to loop back to our 2017 coffee here at 401 Richmond at the Dark Horse Coffee Shop. Upon further reflection in this conversation, if you're looking for investors at – I got a $5,000 check, some startup capital, if you're still serious about pursuing this idea.

If whatever terms were available back then can be extended to me. Oh, that's a pretty big catch. No, those terms are long gone, I'm afraid. That horse has left the barn. Chris, Jen, Paul, this has been really interesting. Thank you very much. That's your Canada Land. Today's episode was brought to you by Yogesh Gupta, William Marks, and Jesse Pakin.

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