Linda Lebrun, Writer Recruitment at Substack - Online content masterclass - The Michael Girdley Show Episode 47

Hey, Michael here. Welcome to another episode of the Michael Girdley Show. Uh, today I spent a bit over an hour, um, talking about newsletters and paid newsletters, uh, delivered by email, um, with my friend Linda LeBrun, who is from Substack. So she works there and her job is to focus on, uh, emerging creators in the finance space. So we talked about a bunch of different stuff, uh, power law distribution, who makes money doing what, uh, in paid newsletters. Uh, we talked about what's smart and not smart if if you're doing paid content. We talked about paid newsletters as a consumption vehicle versus other things like YouTube, TikTok, all that kind of stuff. And then really she gave a lot of great advice about being contrarian in terms of how you produce content and how it could be useful to you in your day-to-day life. And also the future of the Substack platform, which is one of my favorites and where I have a newsletter as well. So hope you enjoy this episode. I learned a lot, broadened my horizons in terms of thinking about the media platform and email in general. And we'll get into it right after a quick word from the sponsor for today's episode. Hey, Michael here. Uh, sponsor for today's show is actually a product that I'm a part of called DMBridge. And what DMBridge is, uh, is a service that we built to solve the problem that Twitter's direct messaging functionality is a total mess. So we built DMBridge to help you fix that. A lot of the other solutions do things like requiring you to install a whole nother inbox. We didn't want another inbox, so we created DMBridge. And what it does is it takes all of your Twitter DMs and has them appear inside of your email inbox. So you can reply to them just like it's a regular email. You see them just like it's a regular email. You can search them later like it's one of your regular emails, all just by using DMBridge. So we're currently live with the product. Would love for you to sign up and become a customer. And check it out. So you can find that at dmbridge.app, uh, and go on there, put in your name, uh, and be either part of the beta or join us as part of the live use of the product. And again, check it out, dmbridge.app. Uh, Linda, thanks for being here. I'm so glad to visit with you.

Thank you so much for having me, Michael. This is awesome.

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, well, we're gonna dig into hopefully a bunch of stuff that I know you're really passionate about and I'm really passionate about, so that usually is a sign it's going to be a great episode. But, um, maybe before we go there, you know, I know you pretty well, having got to know you over Twitter, but my audience does not. So I'd love to give you a minute or two to kind of introduce yourself and what you do. I know you work at Substack.

Yeah.

So they definitely need to hear about that.

For sure. So I'm Linda LeBrun and I work at Substack on the writer partnerships team. And Substack is a platform where anybody can come and publish online, have an email newsletter, have a blog, and you can do it for free. You can be paid via subscriptions. And my work, my team, what we do basically on the writer partnerships team is We're trying to reach out to people who, they publish their writing maybe elsewhere on the internet, maybe they're a journalist, maybe they're a blogger, maybe they're on Twitter, and to try to tell them about Substack and what it can offer and how it can work for them and how it can really help them as a writer or content creator to build financial independence for themselves. So I am really tasked with being an evangelist of Substack and to explain what it is because it's a relatively new model. And yeah, I've been doing that for about a year and it's just been a phenomenal opportunity to meet some of the most talented people who I really admire.

Yeah, dig it. So what— I mean, what kind of stuff seems to work well in the paid newsletter category? And I just— I saw for sale, because I'm always looking at business for sale, somebody was selling a newsletter that I think it just reported board of director changes at public companies, um, you know, and another one that was kind of reporting insider sales. There's just a newsletter that showed up every day of just that kind of data. So I mean, there's all those kind of long-tail newsletters. Then I guess the end of the spectrum, you have like the super popular folks who are, you know, the more general purpose kind of timely kind of writers as well, and the commentators. Matt, Matt Iglesias comes to mind, and I don't recall if he's on Substack or not, but, um, he does that for politics. So just kind of, how do you think about kind of the stuff that works and what doesn't work in terms of the way these people are putting together kind of paid Substacks and also free ones?

It's a really massive spectrum of the different things that people are doing, and there are people who are doing a deep dive into a vertical and that works for them, and there are others that are more, I'm going to do the general politics scene, and if they have built up enough of a brand and their content is interesting and fascinating enough and they have enough of a cult following, that works for them too. I would say often people will ask me when they're thinking about what's possible for them as a writing business? What is successful now on Substack? And I usually say, well, really, this model is probably only in its first or second inning. And if you have an idea of something you want to do where you're thinking, well, what if I were to make a Substack that is just for— oriented towards something that I have expertise in and I feel like I have an edge in, even if nobody is doing that, that's actually potentially a positive indicator that you can go and do that and be a category creator in it. What I'd say has been successful so far, you know, I'll, I always like to give an example from a writer on Substack because that's really who we learn from and they know best. So Casey Newton writes a Substack called Platformer, and he talked to some of us internally. We had the chance to ask him questions, and I asked him, because writers ask me all the time, is it better to try to have a bigger addressable market for what you are doing, or is it better to niche down and try to go deep in a narrow market? And you know, you can guess he's probably going to say niche down because that usually tends to be standard advice. But the way that he put it really stuck with me. He said, you should niche down. If you want to have a newsletter that is about electric vehicles, don't just make it about electric vehicles in general. Make it about electric vehicles in Arizona, because that is where they are tested, and everybody within that milieu will subscribe. Then you can build out from there. So I guess when you're asking about what makes things successful, in the example of somebody focusing on board changes, uh, uh, focusing on insider trading. They are trying to say, how can I have something that's a niche, maybe a place where others aren't? And then I think the other major key is you do well, particularly in the audience of people who would be listening to this podcast, if you're giving people information they can use to make money, use at work, that's actionable advice in some way. We've often seen where that gels as a paid information product versus something where it's me giving my perspectives on the world or a personal essay, which can be very high-value content, but it may not translate as much into a business as quickly.

Yeah. And so, I mean, for the people that are making a living writing paid newsletters, just looking from afar, it looks like kind of a power law star system, you know, um, kind of the same type of outcomes you see in VC or You know, who's, you know, Brad Pitt makes $50 million a year and the guy who is number 9 most handsome in the world makes $100,000 a year, uh, kind of that, that type of power law distribution. Is that, is that kind of how it's working or are you seeing like, is it the curve kind of flatter than what I'm describing?

So there certainly is a power law shape distribution and it's funny because often writers, again, when they're trying to shape strategy, they'd like to have some insight into what's working for others and they ask questions in the form of what's the average price that people charge for a finance or a business Substack, or what's the average amount of money people are making after a year? And I always say, you know, we're not in average land, we're in Extremistan. It's the thinking of a bell curve is not really going to serve you because it truly is a power law. The one of the statistics that Substack has been public with is the fact that the top 10 by revenue Substacks have gross annual revenue of $20 million. So we're talking about the— it's impressive, We're also talking about the very top end of a curve, which is extreme. It's the same description as if I said, well, Ariana Grande, who's the most listened to artist on Spotify, what the amount of listens that she has, how many of the lowest do you think have to be combined to sum to hers? It's an extreme power law. So I think within content marketplaces, if I can put it in a really sort of MBA style way of putting it, they are always going to be shaped that way. The thing for people to keep in mind though, sometimes people get very intimidated by this and say, well, I'm never going to be Matt Iglesias, he has 20 years at it and I'm just starting out. But the thing to keep in mind is there's a lot to be said for just keeping— number one, keeping at it. Number two, figuring— being businesslike in terms of figuring out what your niche is. You know, I just— I was reading where in terms of podcasting, Jack Butcher had a tweet about this and he said 90% of podcasts don't get beyond episode 3. And to be in the top 1% in terms of persistence with, with podcasts, you have to publish 21 episodes. So by the time you get to like your 20th and 21st episode of your podcast, it's the same thing with publishing a Substack. By the time you keep at it for a while, you're no longer competing against millions of people, you're competing against maybe tens of thousands of people. So I think that when you think about that power law, you— the, the useful way to think about it might be, if I want to get to the part of that power law distribution where I'm actually making money? What do I have to do to distinguish myself? And the, the bar to do that might be lower than people think because there are so many that, that, uh, begin but do not persist.

Yeah. It's interesting how that pattern of like, it's much longer to become like an overnight success. Like it really surprises me that, you know, that happened, you know, I understood that happened with startups. I understood that that happens with companies. You know, that, you know, it's— you got to have 10-year visions and 20-year visions to— for some of the stuff to be super meaningful. But like, you know, we're on episode 47 of this podcast, and like our Acquisitions Anonymous podcast just got to 100. And I think the advice we got for Acquisitions Anonymous is you just like keep going, right? And, and, and you keep iterating and making it 1% better all the time. And eventually like something just pops and like that flywheel happens. Um, so anyway, yeah, I, I totally agree with you. That's also kind of daunting, like, if you're thinking about if I'm going to try to make a career or a sideline out of writing on Substack, like, man, kind of scary. So, so I don't know, what's your— do you have advice for people about kind of that scariness?

I, I think my advice, the advice that I have always thought of in my own career when I have to do something that intimidates me, is feel the fear and do it anyway. You know, just try it. I think the biggest thing where people feel the fear and don't do it is not so much the disappointment with oneself, but other people will see me and they'll see me do this and they'll see that I didn't get any likes and I didn't get any subscribes and it's embarrassing. But, you know, one thing that I would point people to is look at the early products of the people that you see who are successful now. So if you— I mean, a great one is if you go back and look at the first episode of the Joe Rogan podcast, he spends the first 10 minutes trying to figure out if it's actually recording and the mic is on. And it's lovely. It's charming to watch because then this guy went on— you are watching it now— he went on to become the biggest one ever. So often, if you look back to what people did at the beginning who later became successful, they're willing to put up the YouTube video and have it have 12 views. They're willing to put up a Substack, have it have no likes because— here's a statistic for you. I spoke to someone who's on Substack the other day, and he said now a good week for him is getting 100 new subscribers. And when he started, it took him 5 months to get his first 100 subscribers. So now he's adding more in some weeks than he added in the first 5 months. So there is— I hesitate to use the word compounding because that makes it sound like it's some kind of law of nature, like lilies doubling on the pond. But there is something where it, you know, the first billion is the hardest principle. There is something where it gets easier as you go. So my advice to people is always just start in the most lightweight, cheapest way that you can. And stuff— Substack is free, so it's ideal to just start in a very low investment way.

So what are the— I mean, one of the trends I'm seeing, and here's kind of my situation, so thank you for— thank you in advance for the coaching— is like, there's, there's three— there's, as we think about kind of producing content, right, it's like there's content generation, there's content distribution, and then there's like, how do you like fund all the production and stuff like that? So kind of financing for it. And like What I'm discovering, and I didn't really expect it to be this way, is like content generation. I thought it would be 70% of the work, right? And it turns out it's really like 30% of the work, but like distribution and how you package stuff to be the same ideas or the same insights on Substack versus Twitter versus LinkedIn versus Reels and all that kind of stuff. Like those, you know, that's almost overwhelming. And even with me and Mirko having like a staff of now 3, I think, contractors working with us, like we're still way behind. I'm producing it much faster than we're distributing it, which maybe is a Michael problem. But anyway, the reason I'm asking and kind of thinking about this is I'm seeing that distribution trend keeps trending towards shorter and like more clickbaity, like, like everybody seems to start with a podcast and the next thing you know, they're doing reels on Instagram with like emojis, you know, or like they start with a podcast or tweets and next thing you know, they're like reading them on TikTok. And same thing with YouTube videos. And I just am curious how you think about like the mass audience for this kind of long-form content. By the way, I suck at making long-form content. I think I've read so much stuff, I'm like, this is really bad. And I, when I read the good, the really good people, and Matt Yglesias is one, and you know, the guy from Bloomberg that's a really good finance writer, I believe, like on his name, Smith, I bet. Oh no, no opinion. Yeah, he's pretty good too. He's also, he's better in long form than he is on Twitter. But anyway, he's, no opinions, Good to you. Um, sorry, I call people by their Twitter handle. Anyway, I just, you know, it's to some extent like if I start to devote a bunch of time towards writing long-form content, like, you know, is there a headwind there? I mean, it seems like attention spans are getting smaller and smaller for stuff.

So I think that part of the issue is that the platforms, when you go to Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, It shapes you to try to make you, encourage you to create what kind of content is going to work well to serve them. So if it's Twitter, they want you to do a short funny tweet that goes in between a couple of advertisements. They don't really care about helping you develop an audience, and they don't really care about helping you make money except as a potential side interest to their own advertising dollars. This is why Substack started from the idea that it was the advertising-based economy of the internet that was potentially a problem for directing attention to the wrong things. So if you're on TikTok, they— what they will do is try to make you feel like a celebrity because you get a lot of followers for the type of content, very short form, very bite-sized, potentially clickbait, potentially quality, but it's certainly not long-form writing and it's certainly not an involved, sophisticated argument that is going to teach anybody anything complex. They're trying to get you to do that and they'll give you crumbs, which is not any payment but is a follower or a like. So this is a bit of a seduction, and the way to snap out of that is to realize that in business you don't have a business until you get $1 from one person for one product or service, right? So on Substack, sometimes people, oh, you know, should I do something to increase my open rate? Maybe I should get rid of people on my list who haven't opened it in a while so that I can increase my open rate. But it's sort of like, well, we'll reframe for a second. Why? Open rate clearly is some kind of indication that should look at and care about because it indicates to some extent how people are engaging. But what really matters is a paying subscriber. If something is important and meaningful to them that they will pay, now you start to have a business. Now you start to have a recurring income that comes every month that you can count on is going to change your lifestyle. So circling back to your question about short attention spans, I think if attention spans really were deteriorating to the extent that we fear most, Substack wouldn't even exist at all. It would just be the whole world taken over by TikTok. But what we've seen is Substack has unleashed a lot of people who were trapped on blogs without any good way to monetize except a PayPal tip jar, which is, is not highly effective. And when they came on Substack, they were actually able to make enough money to, you know, in some cases I've seen people be able to, to quit their jobs and focus on it completely, especially if they have some kind of a brand, some kind of a following that they bring. But in a lot of cases, they've been able to build it, and that's with long form. So I, I think what people have to step back and say is the platform— what is success? Is what this platform is rewarding me for, is it in and of itself good enough? Or should I focus on making TikTok, Twitter, etc. my free real estate where I bring people to my newsletter, my course, my other thing where I can really assess success in terms of the business success of the thing?

Yeah, I totally dig it. Um, So I'm curious, um, one of the things that seems like just such a lost opportunity that Substack has kind of gotten into is what happened to Medium. Um, and I, I know you like work at a company, so you can't really poop on another company, but like, as I look at it, like, remember when everything was on Medium? Like, that was like 2 years, 3 years ago. Like, everything was on Medium, and then like, they have somehow like managed to make themselves totally uncool. So again, I'm not Mr. Long Form, like I'm the guy doing memes on Twitter. So, but just curious what you think about like that business. Like they've just become so relevant to totally irrelevant now. Like I rarely see anybody be like, here's my Medium post, check it out. Like it just, it's gone.

Well, I mean, I guess the first thing I would say is if you work at a company where things are working, it would be graceless to say, oh, you know, look at that other company that, that, uh, Piketon isn't doing so well because we all have to be cautious that we have to keep running fast every day in order to stay first. It's never— in a competitive environment, the, the center of it is to serve the creator. The star is not Substack. The star is the, the creator or the writer, whatever word that people like. It is the person who's able to do the thing. And all we, all we are all trying to do is having technology that is going to enable that person to capture more value for him or herself. So that's what, you know, that's the idea of Medium, the idea of Gumroad, the idea of Substack, idea of others, and there, there are others to come. So if Substack is trying to do the same thing, what was the innovation of Substack that, that might be leading to more people to, to choose Substack? I think the key thing is the ownership of the audience. So other precursor sites, other systems, it was the promises: if you come here, we will give you a place to put your writing, and we will give you some kind of distribution. But the missing piece was you never actually get a one-to-one— this is just like Twitter, you never get a one-to-one relationship with the follower. The day that you are, uh, banned or there's some problem with your account, you can't log in, like you, you don't have any direct relationship with them. So with the three founders of Substack, which is Hamish Jairaj and Chris Best, they had the idea, we want to from day one be able to give people direct relationship with their reader, their subscriber, their, their listener. And that was through email. So the death of email has been declared many times, but email is, is— it's, it's not a venture-backed startup, it's not a platform, it's a protocol. And it has, it has seemed to persist very, very well. So if you have somebody's email address, it doesn't matter what happens to Substack, you have a direct relationship. So that's the piece that I think from now on, any platform that comes that says Come onto our platform, use your creative energy, build a following, but you're not gonna have the emails. Just keep coming on our same platform and we'll share this relationship. I, I, I think that's going to resonate less than if you actually do what Substack has done, which I've had people say to me, you're shooting yourselves in the foot by making it so easy for people to leave. Well, unless the exit door is clearly marked, nobody will come in the first place these days. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think the counterpoint there is like, um, you know, the newest trend on Twitter is everybody's taking and repurposing their Twitter content and putting it on LinkedIn. Um, and then TikTok is doing really well, and you, you definitely don't own your audience there. But I think this is what the point you're making is like the, the first kind of concern I had when you were like, you should move to Substack. You DM me and I was like, why would I do that? You guys keep my— you're like, no, no, we don't. Like, you own your audience. And you know, and I think that's a great point. Like the second Elon made an offer for Twitter, I was like, oh, this could all blow up like really quickly. And like I reorganized everything on my thing. I was like, put your email address in here if you wanna make sure you hear from me. And I think that's precipitated some of this LinkedIn migration as well. Plus, you know, it's Twitter. So people on there are like bragging, like look at all these hits I'm getting on LinkedIn. I'm like, Yeah, it's LinkedIn though. Have you been over there? It's not great. Um, but I, yeah, so I don't, I, I love that Substack's doing it. I wonder about the thesis that that's the future, you know, because so far the last couple, yeah, I, I hear what you're saying.

I would say it's not everybody wants to go and make their own platform and charge money. So some people, if, if people want to just go, Twitter is a social network. And if you want to go and tweet and have fun and have that be it and not have it be a business, that's completely fine. I mean, you and I are old enough to remember Friendster, okay? Like precursor of Facebook. And when we had Friendster, we went on and interacted and then something new, Facebook. With the platforms to go and have fun, you don't have to own the audience in that situation. It only becomes critical to own the audience is if you are staking your life on it. So what is happening on YouTube, for example, YouTube, you know, phenomenal iconic platform where many multimillion dollar fortunes have been built. But I also have talked to people who do crypto content on YouTube and they have a lot of issues with strikes and being temporarily banned. And it's just like you said about when you start to wonder about, oh, I'm very tied to this. I'm very dependent upon this. And I don't really have, you know, what do we do in investing? We diversify. You don't have your whole portfolio in one thing. So you would want to. Number one, be exposed to maybe a couple of different, uh, places and streams of attention. And number two, the closer you can be and the more intimate you can be and the more direct your link can be with the audience, the better. So it's not that people will abandon going on a platform, because the platforms, if they're well structured, you can have a lot of fun with them. It's just a matter of how businesslike are you going to be about it. And just— and you know, you mentioned about LinkedIn. I have been definitely, uh, been pushed back upon because I have sometimes said to people, you know, LinkedIn is a good place to go and promote your Substack. And everybody who is very into Twitter finds LinkedIn to be totally cringe. But I'll tell you, there are a lot of people on LinkedIn where LinkedIn is the— all they do is work and go on LinkedIn, and they don't know any other social network. So I think that's why a lot of the people we know who are influencers who are on Twitter are going over and getting more into LinkedIn, because it's, it's like trying to fish where the fish are, not as crowded.

Yeah, well, the other thing is, I think you make a great point, and this is so beyond LinkedIn. If you're at your desk and your boss walks by and you're on LinkedIn, your boss is like, oh, look at you, you— are you trying to find some referrals to refer to our company? And then, um, you know, I think the second part is that if you're on Twitter and like you can't control, like, it's going to send you a lot of stuff you're interested in personally, and your boss walks by and sees, you know, NBA coverage or whatever that guy from Barstool Sports is doing today with pizza, like, you know, you're gonna be in big trouble. So that's the other thing I like about LinkedIn as just a platform. Plus, you know, just pretty easy, just copy and paste stuff over, like, whatever. It's like same ideas, different place. But I think that, I mean, the thesis of Substack, which I think is so smart, is the founders have realized, like, like what you're talking about, like discovery is actually the big challenge that most emerging creators have. And it's something that like, if you have to kind of rank it, like Twitter is pretty good at it. I think YouTube is much better at it of anything. Like getting discovered on YouTube feels like it's easier than getting discovered on Twitter. But like podcasts being like absolutely terrible. Like it's, that's what I'm discovering. Like podcast discovery is so hard. And maybe you disagree with all that stuff, but, you know, I thought that was the smart thing about Substack when I was like, oh, like you just show people where the exit door is. But then when they get in, they discover that the discovery aspect of it is so powerful that they want the top of funnel that comes from being part of the platform. So anyway, I don't know if that was a question. It was just like a series of random observations that I've had while walking around my backyard. Right.

So I'd like to know, for podcasting, what do you use to discover podcasts? Like, is there a a place or a function? I mean, I like going on Listen Notes. I find Listen Notes good if I'm looking for podcasts on a topic or a theme, but that's not really the same as Twitter where you are relying on people you follow and trust to recommend things to you. What are the discovery, uh, platforms for, for podcasts today?

Uh, it's generally been like I hear about them on Twitter. That's how I heard about Invest Like the Best. And I would put that like, there's the tier— if you're asking about me personally, I have kind of 3 tiers of podcasts. Tier 1 is stuff that I listen to pretty much every week, and sometimes my own podcast is in that list and sometimes it's not. But I do try to listen to all of our episodes because I feel like, okay, when I hear stuff, I'm like, I could do better on that next time. Um, and but then there's like, uh, that, and then there's a couple of like, um, I'm kind of weird, I use podcasts to go to sleep. It's part of my routine. I listen to podcasts, I put in an earbud and I'm asleep in like 4 minutes. And there's 3 podcasts I used to— it's amazing. It's amazing. There is a politics pod, 2 politics podcasts I do that with. One is FiveThirtyEight, and then I mostly listen to— so those are the ones I'll listen to every week because I know I'm going to get through them because I listen to them that way. Tier 2 is, you know, stuff where I may be catching every other episode. My First Million's in that bucket. I like their podcast a lot, but those have all— Invest Like the Best— those have all kind of come from Twitter. And then really, I think I'm like a typical person where I have 5 to 7 podcasts that I get through that are in that tier 1 and tier 2, and then everything else is in tier 3. I just never listen to it unless somebody's like, hey, here's this really, really good podcast episode. You need to go dive in and listen to this one. And then I'll do that only on recommendation, but it's mostly all Twitter. And then sometimes it'll come through YouTube when I'm just pulling it up and it'll say, watch this cycling podcast or whatever. So I don't know, how do you do it? You do listen notes?

I'll look at listen notes. I'll see somebody mention it on Twitter. I'll— verbal recommendation from a friend. A lot of the people who work at Substack are very into online culture and content. They always have good recommendations, but it's very ad hoc. I mean, I'm sure that there are people working on this right now. There's probably a few Y Combinator-funded startups to try to address address this, but I think it is a, um, maybe it's, it's something where it's the broader discovery challenge for how do I find stuff that is going to be relevant to my interests and useful to me and fascinating to me, uh, and then the other side of it is if I'm a person making a podcast, I'm a person writing a newsletter, how do I magnetize those people and how do I let them discover me and We are trying to, on Substack, create ways for people to do that. We just shipped about a month ago a feature called Recommendations that has really worked very well for a lot of Substacks. And all it is, is it's the— it's, it's really two concepts: overlapping interests and reciprocity. So you can— if you have a Substack, you can recommend one or two or five other Substacks. And when people go through the flow of signing up for yours, when they're done signing up for yours, They'll see a screen and say, the writer of the Substack you just signed up for recommends these 5 publications, and they can choose to subscribe to some or all of them with one click. And as you can imagine, this— it's powerful because if I'm signing up for, say, a finance Substack that's about stock picking and he recommends 3 other Substacks that are about the same thing, I'm probably going to be interested in them too. Then I start to experience that person's content and I might eventually pay. So the, the writers have been very excited about this because they have been— as long as I've worked at Substack and before, they been asking for, give me ways for people to, to find me. They don't want to be pushed in some algorithmic fashion because the minute you do that, you have that same old fire hose that's being determined by somebody else. What they want to do is something organic that they can control that's not going to give them junky traffic but is going to give them an audience that actually cares about what they have to say.

So how do you think about— okay, so there's this concept I've been thinking about which is like the aperture of consumption. So maybe that's a really, really fancy way of just talking about this idea of depending upon the type of content and the format at which it's thrown at you, like there is a certain type of a certain amount that you're going to consume, right? So, you know, like the typical— so say middle 50% aperture of consumption for podcasts is what I just described to you. I'm at 4 to 6 podcasts and I keep up with most of them, but I generally am not— I don't have enough time to go to podcast 7 and 8. You know, and it's either time or energy, but like the aperture of consumption that I have for, for Twitter is, you know, I follow 2,200 people and there's about 150 people that I have on a list where I'm like, I want to see everything they have. And then YouTube is even bigger where it's like, okay, like here are the 10 things I'm really interested in and they've learned what those things are. And I see every single like cycling, uh, race update in Europe and every single sumo match. By the way, those are the sports I'm into. Not interested in any American sports, they're boring. But anyway, so like, that's the idea I've kind of thought about. And it, you know, with long form, I hear stories where people are like, yeah, I subscribe to 50 newsletters and I read exactly zero of them, you know. So like, I think there's that, that challenge that I worry about. Or they only read Strategery. So, so anyway, I mean, Do you think that's an off-base way of looking at different stuff? Or, I mean, how do you think about that in the world of kind of long-form content?

If people have a certain aperture for what they're able to consume, whether it's— even using the word consume is like so MBA, like talking about consume and content and stuff like that makes it, it's, it sound like we're eating the Soylent or something when really we're talking about cultural creations, right? And we're talking about what helps you engage politically to understand and be a citizen, or what helps you be creative, or what helps you, you know, run your own investments better so you can achieve your financial goals. Like, this is really important stuff, but none of us has 24/7 to do it. So I think our, our Substack's idea is the balance of people's information diet may shift if they are able to find better things and focus on those better things. Like, I'll give an example, you know, 10 years ago I was I was watching a lot of TV on Netflix, and I would watch like all of a series, like, you know, watch a TV series in its entirety, all these different episodes. You're staying up until 1 AM watching all these episodes of episodic television. And I don't watch TV anymore, and it's not because of some kind of intellectual choice. I will sit there on YouTube and watch YouTube videos of people, you know, moving beehives and things like that. It's not that it's intellectual, it's that YouTube YouTube for me totally replaced watching television, right? And my husband watches television because he watches sports, and that's the best way to, to watch live sports. But I moved to what was better and serves me better, which is video content on the internet. So how does that relate to, to Substack, or to somebody publishing content and worrying about, oh my gosh, people already have, uh, you know, newsletter overload? I think it's that people are looking for the best stuff, and they will replace reading their local newspaper if it's not relevant to them with reading a local writer who writes on Substack if that person is— has a keen value proposition and is more focused on and more attuned to what they care about and like and want to read. I mean, another example would be 20 years ago, I would buy Vogue magazine. I would buy— we would buy physical magazines on the newsstand. It's completely gone. And I can tell you, I don't go to Vogue.com. Who I go and look at is a bunch of fashion bloggers because they're the ones who have, uh, they are on the creative edge now. So I think that there can be replacements in people's information diets and it will be very diverse. The individual people writing Substack publications have the opportunity to be part of that. Doesn't mean that because I read a Substack that's the, you know, and the guy is awesome at, uh, macro calls or an awesome stock picker that I'm not going to read, but I'm still going to read Barron's. But it will— it— the, the proportion of hours I spend may change.

Yeah, well, I mean, so how— and maybe you can't disclose this, but what is the average Substack user— what's the average number of things that they open in a given week? I, and I asked that because it's probably not correlated to exactly— I'm curious just what the aperture is. You could say no, I can't tell you, but I was just curious. Is it 3? Is it 5?

I don't have— I don't even have that. I'm not being coy. I don't even have that specific information. I guess what I could tell you directionally is that if I were to go out on the street right now and ask 100 people here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, do you even know what Substack is? I'd actually love to see the results. It'd probably be very few, right? So people who are very, you know, read the New York Times and are very familiar with what's going on culturally know about Substack. And, you know, oh yes, Matt Iglesias, that's a familiar name. But there, there is a whole lot of people where the technical advancement that has allowed individuals to, to do online publishing and make money at it hasn't really potentially gotten to them yet. So we— this is kind of like an addressable market dodge. I'm saying that there's a long way to go. So it— I don't think that fatigue is the word people use. I don't think fatigue is an issue when there's, there's still so much longer to go for Substack and for others in giving people ways to, to get their stuff out to the public. Because the— and you know, what is it like 10,000 new people coming on the internet every day. It's probably 100,000. It's, it's really, we're just at the foot of that curve.

Yeah, okay, I'm with you. So one of the, one of the things I've been observing, and I think is an interesting kind of thing, is the unbundling of local news, um, especially local print news. Um, you know, so just to give you a little context, I live in a Hearst newspaper city run by the San Antonio Express-News. And the latest, the latest amazing thing that they did was move the entire, like, majority of the news organization to Houston. So like, our editorial, our editorial guy for a 3 million person city is sitting in Houston writing editorials for San Antonio. It's like, this is freaking great, guys, well done. Um, but you're starting to see, especially in smaller communities or communities that are newspaperless, you're starting to see kind of the unbundling of what those things used to do, right? You'd have the Metro and the Style section and life section and then the front page. You know, you're starting to see those get unbundled oftentimes into either free email-based or paid email-based local newsletter. And I'm just curious what your perspective is on the viability of that, that business. Um, and then kind of, are, are you starting to see Substack as a platform where people are putting, putting those kind of things there? You know, the Topeka Whatever, um, run by a husband-wife team who are covering local news and events? Is that kind of stuff starting to happen? Because as I've looked through Substack, I don't see it so much. So I'm just curious your thoughts on that trend.

It is certainly starting to happen. And I think that's another one where we're just on the cusp of seeing more of it. I think the local media has been so devastated and decimated by trends that have occurred in the past two decades. I'm from outside journalism. And now that I'm in this role, I'm talking to a lot of journalists. And their industry has just been savaged. And it's many things. Sometimes the blame gets put on, oh, private equity people came into this newspaper and they hollowed it out and they cut costs down to the bone. But if it's that in one direction, the other direction is the internet coming and first Craigslist took away your classified ads and then Facebook forced you to fit its constraints and then changed the rules on you. They've had a million slings and arrows. So they are, in, uh, sort of a mode of, uh, figuring out— well, if you were a big legacy publication, you have certain ways of doing things that it, you know, it's the old crossing the chasm. It might be very hard for you to think about how do we make it in, in the new world where we have to really do things with a much lower cost base. So often the people who have thrived doing local publications on Substack— we— if you Google Substack Local, we did a program about a year ago called Substack Local where it was an application a location-based program, and people were invited from all over the world to come and make an application where Substack would give them some help and some guidance and a modest grant, and they could come and try to build a local publication or build up their existing local publication on Substack. And we had people— Americans, people from Africa, there's somebody from Manchester in the UK, somebody from New Zealand— and all of them The uniting factor is if you come on Substack, you do not have to hire a bunch of people to build a WordPress site from scratch for you. You do not have to figure out, okay, how do I integrate a membership site and how do I build in comments here? You don't have to, to concern yourself about building the entire backend and hiring customer service people. All of that foundational stuff is done and you can just worry about the two pieces that are gonna make or break the business. One, the content, and the other, the marketing and promotion side. Both very important. It also frees you if you say this is going to be wholly subscription-based, no advertising. Then your call to action is to the reader is extremely clear. As you can see, reader, there are no ads here, and the only way that this is going to exist is if you help by becoming a member of the team and paying for a subscription. So if you'd like this to continue to exist, We hope you will do so. So that's, that's kind of the Substack offering for people who want to come and do something local. And we're definitely starting to see people come and do it and starting to see it gel. If somebody wants to, to start something as a local publication, I would say Substack is an ideal way to begin because you have nothing but optionality in the future. If you want to do it on Substack for a few years and then say, okay, now I've been doing it 3 years and now I'm ready to, to, you know, go and build my whole WordPress site, you could. But what we've seen is people do tend to stay on Substack because because they're not interested in, you know, if they were interested in doing all the tech backend, that's what they'd be specializing in. What they're really more interested in is getting their content out and providing some kind of local coverage, which I'll tell you, in my city of Toronto, when I was growing up, there were always 2 or 3 different independent publications that were just the free weeklies that told you what's going on in the city. They're gone. They're gone. So there's an opportunity for somebody to come and do the, you know, Toronto Weekly Events Substack. If anybody's listening and wants to do that, reach out to me on Twitter and, you know, I'll give you some advice. Because it's something I'd like to see.

Yeah, well, Nathan, um, and I'm, I'm such like the worst friend ever, I'm blanking on Nathan's last name, but he runs ConvertKit and he was on the podcast.

Nathan Barry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you, thank you. Uh, Nathan, I'm sorry, I hope we're still friends. Um, uh, I'm not— I'm kidding, he doesn't listen. No, anyway, I'm sure he listens. Anyway, we won't go there, uh, or we did, but we'll come back from it. Okay, so anyway, so, you know, he did the same for Boise and he and his, he and his wife have set up like basically they've recreated the lifestyle, the Sunday Life section. I don't know if it's called that in every paper as a local business. And, and I believe they did it all on ConvertKit, of course, because, you know, he's kind of, kind of got something going on over there. But I thought that was just super interesting. And then you're seeing like the Tiny Capital guys have built a little incubator company, I think of 6 or 7 little local e-newspapers, um, of a variety of brands, which is very interesting. Um, everything from kind of Vancouver Island to like a bunch of just random cities in little towns in, in Canada that I've never heard of. Um, no offense to Canada, but like little small 100,000-person towns without a newspaper. So it's just, it's really interesting to kind of see that pattern. Um, you know, and see people making a go of that business. Um, but the other thing is, so I've pitched— okay, so here's, here's the, uh, in, in story on all this. I've pitched this idea to several friends who are like good writers and stuff like that, and the more I've talked to folks who would be good at producing this content, the more, uh, I realize there is no group of people on average wired worse to be entrepreneurs than reporters. Like, I don't mean to insult reporters, but like when I describe like the entrepreneurial journey to these people, they look at me like I'm an alien. They're like, whoa, whoa, My job is to write about the things happening. I'm not here to like create them. I don't want to be the news. So it's really fascinating. And I think super— I'll tie all that together. I think, you know, what y'all are doing to try to give people like a business in a box for some of these folks is just like hugely powerful to be able to say, you know, you don't have to be Matt Taibbi to come on and like be able to do this. Like you could be just like a normal schmo and pick a niche that you're going to cover and build a business and life around it if you're willing to be a little bit of entrepreneurial, and we'll give you the support for it. Like, I think it, I think it's super smart. Um, anyway, I'll pause there, but then I have a follow-up question for you about what, what you said.

Well, what you mentioned about reporters not being entrepreneurial, I mean, this is where it can make sense to do a partnership where you have one person who's going to think about the, the promotion and marketing side and how do we get our message out and how do we, you know, use social media as our free real estate to publicize it, and then the other person working on the actual content. So this is a variability that I see very often when I'm talking to people if they are currently at some kind of a perch within an institution or organization. I, I guess I, I like to try to find the person who is in that situation, but they're in the, the place and time in their life where they have the scope to try something independent and they have a desire in their heart to do something independent. Sometimes the issue is a creative one where they have— if somebody works at a newspaper or a magazine, they can't just write about whatever they want. They're very much, uh, the, the editor is shaping the, you know, the, the culture and what comes out of that newspaper magazine. So in some people's cases, what What Substack does is it asks them to do something entrepreneurial, but it's worth it to them because it frees them to just be able to write and create and do whatever they wish. And then they can see if the audience comes along. So I think that you are doing something like that. You could be the entrepreneurial one and they can be the one who is good with the writing part. So I think we're just going to see more and more teams of people doing online publications.

You have me confused with somebody that does actual work.

All right, you're a little busy anyway. I think you have like half a dozen jobs already.

It's all good, it's all good.

Time in your week.

So how did the— you know, I see some of the publications that came through on the Substack Local program. You know, there's some bigger kind of— well, I guess a guy covering Indiana, uh, politics. That's pretty exciting. Um, did— are they all kind of North America, or did you guys end up taking some people overseas as well?

Yes, the Manchester Mill is from the UK. There was at least one that was in Africa. So, and you know, and even beyond what you see on the list there of people who were in that program, there are others that I noticed popping up all the time who are— anybody can use— I guess get this question sometimes, can I use Substack and can I set up as paid on Substack if I'm outside the US? Yes, absolutely. The gating factor of whether you can set up paid on Substack is whether there's Stripe Stripe in your country. And Stripe is in most countries of the world. So as long— wherever you are in the world, as long as you can set up a Stripe account and connect it to your bank account, you can have a paid publication on Substack. So that, you know, anybody who's listening to this and, and you want to have a Substack in a foreign language, there's lots of that going on.

Yeah, dig it. Okay, uh, cool. So we made some notes before we're going to talk of some stuff, and you, you gave a couple of things that were, uh, were quotes. So I want to dig into these because they're vague, so I definitely want to dig into stuff that's vague. It's awesome. But the quote you wrote here in our notes was, juicy stuff on building media businesses.

I think Mirko might have written that.

It showed up on the sheet.

What, what can I say that's juicy? That— because that sounds, that sounds like— I, I don't, I don't think that I wrote that. Now I have to live up to it.

Did you write that, Mirko?

Oh, so I did say it. Oh my gosh, I once again I've talked myself into something. Uh, I guess here's, here's something, here's something juicy, here's something spicy. Uh, people often when they start an online publication, whether it's Substack or they start on YouTube, everybody will want to give you advice, including me, right? In the course of this conversation, I've given whatever advice. And, you know, we'll say it's sort of— there's a Substack playbook that says post 2 to 3 times a week and all of these other rules. Make sure you post some content free and some content paid. Be— I would say to everybody who's thinking about doing this, just be thoughtful and cautious about what advice you take. Has the person giving the advice actually done the thing? And also keep in mind that whatever advice you hear, there is something that has— somebody who has done done the opposite and has been very successful and made hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I guess what I'd— and I can't really— I'm thinking of specific examples, but I don't want to really pick on anybody. But what I'd say is there are people who've done the opposite of whatever is the conventional advice, and they've done— I'll give an example. So an example is if somebody were to come to me and say, I want to start a Substack and I want to make it anonymous, I would say, well, okay, you know, if you want to be taken seriously online, you really need to have your— it helps to have your, your picture, it helps to have your real name, you want to have your bio. I think you should tell them that, you know, you went to school at Wharton, because all of that is going to make— provide social proof, and it's going to make people believe what you have to say. But there are lots of people who have come on Substack. Like, if you look at the top, I think out of the, the top 6 on the leaderboard finance Substacks, I, I believe 4 of them published anonymously. So That just goes to show that people will give you advice, including some of the people you think should be closest to what helps you be successful, but you really have to do what fits your life and what works for you. That goes for frequency too. You know, generally speaking, on the internet, we know that having content out there more often makes people feel like you're delivering massive value, makes people feel closer to you, makes people pay for you more. But there are people on Substack who publish once a month and have a business doing that. That. Now, I'm not encouraging anybody to think that when you're starting from zero that it's going to work to just publish something once a month. That, that might be somebody who's been at it for 20 years. But it's, it's more to the point of look at what others are doing that's working, and do try to, in your own way, imitate what's working. But don't feel like you have to take every little bit of advice that has, uh, has worked for others. I guess that's— I don't know how juicy that is, but it's something that I'd want people to keep in mind, because it's almost like even if I tweet something and it's like, you know, here's how to be successful on Substack. Don't take any of it too seriously. Also because the rules of online content change all the time. Like on Twitter right now, posting threads works really, really well. 6 months from now, they might change it all up and that might not be working so well. So what's, you know, what works now may not work in 6 months. So always be ready to update and be ready to experiment.

Yeah. Well, the kind of mental model that I've had with advice, which I think has worked really well which is like for principles, like principles are timeless and you can, you can by default trust them when somebody gives you principle-based advice. Tactics-based advice, you default distrust it because what you're saying, like, like people can give you advice like, oh, here's how I built my business with this B2B sales model or this Facebook advertising way. But, you know, ultimately the nature of the jungle The laws of the jungle are that over time, opportunities and things that work get crowded and then they stop working. And so tactics, like, by and large, if it worked for somebody, there's odds are it's not going to work for you. So it doesn't mean it won't, but like, you should doubt it and maybe even consider the opposite just because of that nature of stuff. So that's the mental model I have around advice. And so that's why you'll hear me give— when I give tactical advice to people, I'm like, okay, well, this works. Like, for me, like, go try it and see what happens for you. It may or may not work in your situation. But principles, like, I'll tell principles, like, yeah, that's gospel. Like, don't lie to people. That's a principle. Be honest. That's a principle. But like, writing threads, I don't know. It seems to work for me. Yeah, it'll stop working someday.

Yeah, like you said, for sure. And another thing that I'd say, and keeping on the theme of something like writing threads, or something like looking at what's working right now and doing it is I often encourage people, don't, don't not do it if it seems to be working for others just because you feel like, oh well, everybody's doing that, so I don't, I don't want to try that. Like, I don't want to write threads, or I don't want to try TikTok because TikTok is cringe, or I don't want to go on LinkedIn. The best entrepreneurs, and whether that's online writing media entrepreneur building their own one-person empire or any kind of entrepreneurship, I think that they have a very experimental attitude, and they iterate. They try different things and they see what gels. And this goes all the way back to like sort of Gary Vaynerchuk in 2014, the first guy who said to all of us, take your content and put the same thing on different platforms. I mean, he was, he was encouraging that a long time ago when everybody was using hashtags to promote their stuff. It still remains true. Try it and see where people are responding to you and respond back to them. This, this is another thing where sometimes people feel like They want to ape the practices of traditional media. Traditional media is that the, the person making the content is up here. And if I'm down in the comment section, he's probably not even going to read it because the comment section is so toxic. With something like Substack, it's very different. On Substack, writers are posting their work and the comment section is vibrant and interesting because they can make their own rules. They can delete comments that break the rules that they make, and they can ban commenters if they break the rules too many times. So So, and the comment section becomes a pleasant place for the, the creator to interact. And what happens next? They're replying to the commenters. Have you ever seen somebody who works at a newspaper reply in the comments? They never would because it's, it's just not the environment for them to do that. But if you can create something where people are having an interaction with the reader, and if you as the creator can make people feel like, I notice you and I appreciate you following me and reading me, that just makes a really special bond.

Yeah, totally dig it. Um, yeah, it's really interesting when you allow the creator of the original post or the original content to manage the responses. I, I like that. I mean, and Twitter started to allow you to do that. Um, and of course the, the block hammer where you can block people and they, uh, they don't have to bother you ever again. That's part of that as well. And, and I love that extending over to Substack. Um, I mean, do you think that video becomes part of what Substack's doing? I mean, I know there's, there's blogging that's on there, um, as the original kind of email-based stuff, and then podcasting has made an emergence there as well. I mean, and I hate to draw this parallel, but like OnlyFans is like— OnlyFans is to some extent like a little bit ahead of Substack, but also like a different audience. Um, you know, in terms of helping people scale and monetize social media relationships, I mean, at its core, that's That's what they're doing. Just there, it's adult content, and here it's more intellectual. Do you see the Substack platform kind of heading in that direction, or how do you think about where things are going to be in the next few years?

Well, I think what unites all of these platforms is we follow the creator, and the creator is the important person, and nothing happens without the creator. And that's true whether it's Twitter, it's Substack, it's OnlyFans. It's all saying, how can we make a better deal? And it's unbundling. And it's also, you no longer have a gatekeeper who's going to decide whether you can do it or not. I remember somebody said to me about Substack, he said, it really seems like you have a lot of really great people on Substack. And I'm not sure why that is because it seems like anybody can join. And I said, that's, that's so true. What has happened is the people who have been, I mentioned being trapped on a blog or somebody who is at a publication and they are someone who is of so much value that people would travel along with them to wherever they go, those people are waking up to their value and they can come on any kind of creator platform, but Substack is the best for writing, and be unleashed. And they can capture far more of the value of what they're doing rather than sharing it. You know, this is the— it's empowering them to just be able to capture more of the value of the blood, sweat, toil, and tears that they put in. You asked about video. Video, we have a video beta. And video is going to have to be part of the future, just like text, audio, video, whatever way that— and getting back to serving that creator, whatever way that creator wants to connect with their audience, we want to be there and allow them to do it. And if the difference with Substack is always that we facilitate the direct relationship because you're in the person's inbox, then that equally helps if we can give you the ability to have native hosted video on Substack. Now, I would say even today there are video creators who, they're on YouTube or they're using Vimeo. And those, uh, if you have a link to a YouTube or a Vimeo video and you just put the URL in your Substack, it embeds and it makes a nice thumbnail. So a lot of people, they'll take their YouTube video and they'll put it in their Substack, and that gives— now we have an email connection to our fan or our audience or our listener, and you can send out the email and they know that you have produced something new. Or you can, uh, when it comes to, to podcasting, it's great because rather than being sort of lost in the delay of the platforms or waiting for the algo on the platform to surface you, you can cultivate the email list and you can send people the show notes and even whatever links, whatever else is relevant as part of the email. So I'd say, you know, video is really cool and is, is definitely a way— I guess it's finance, the audience that I talk to, or the, the writer prospects and existing Substack writers who I talk to who are in finance and investing, they have— in many cases they are very text-focused and graph-focused, uh, but more and more there are people who, like, they, they start on TikTok and then they, they realize, oh, I want to capture this audience a little bit more. And that, for that kind of person, video is going to be very, very relevant.

Yeah, super cool. Well, awesome. Well, thanks for doing this with me. Like, this is, you know, this whole creator journey for me is really like an interesting one, and exploring kind of the long-form platform with you has been really educational. So hopefully I didn't ask too many dumb questions as I tried to think about how to think about long-form stuff.

Well, your questions were fantastic. It's really great, and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to your audience. I mean, this is like what all creators want to try to do, talk to a group of new people who— there are plenty of people listening to this who this is the first time they've heard the name of Substack. So if anybody is is listening and would like to do something with Substack, would like to talk about it more, you can come find me on Twitter @SubstackLinda. Or if you go to substack.com, we have a lot of resources there that tell you how to get started. And yeah, it's very easy to get started. It takes like 2 minutes to set up and it's free. So that's the best pitch I can make to try to put one toe into trying it. Yeah.

And I'm a customer. Well, not really a customer.

Yes.

I guess I'm the product. That's the way to think about it. I think about myself as the product. Uh, I have a lot of subscribers now.

What is, what is your subscriber list up to for your Substack, Michael?

3,550.

Very impressive.

Were you gonna say that if I said 3?

No, I would probably just smile with you.

Oh, you have 3 currently? That's really nice. Uh, actually, I wrote, you know, I wrote my growth hack. Well, first of all, I think I'm still trying to figure out what the hell my, uh, my newsletter is about, but I'll get there. I, I would love to—

but it's about businesses. It's cool businesses for sale, which is—

yeah, that's pretty much it.

This is a cool theme.

But the, uh, the thing I was most excited about in the last one, you know, I shared this chain of aquarium and nature centers. Like, it's surprisingly a really good business, you know, once you get past kind of their fixed costs. But I have 3,600 subscribers, but the newsletter itself got 4,500 opens. So like people were like sending it to each other, like, check out this ridiculous thing. Like, that was super cool. So I was like, oh, like, yeah, just I got to run across more interesting stuff.

Have you ever had—

that's all I know.

Have you ever had somebody reply to one of your newsletter emails and say, want to go in on this with me? I'm interested. It, or do you get any interesting in general replies?

Uh, yeah, I mean, I think, um, it's— I definitely get interesting replies from online friends and stuff and colleagues that subscribe to it. This one, I think I got 5 or 7 people were like, hey, this is really interesting. And I was like, yeah, if you want to have a bunch of sharks, like, let me go ahead. Like, sounds good. But, um, no, I mean, there's been some interesting stuff. Like a guy, one of the ones I shared on here was a wine competition business. So basically it worked, you know, like people get wine awards, like the people that run those wine awards. It was a business that does that based out of Hong Kong, and it was like a $3 million a year business. And the business model was super interesting where they basically would talk to the wineries and say, do you want to enter our contest? And they would charge them to do that, and then they make the wineries send the wine to their judges who all work for free. Wow. Drinking the wine and rating it. And then basically, so this person worked about a day a week on the business, was making about $1 million a year. And basically all they did was like manage these wine competitions at zero, zero cost, basically no cost of goods sold because they get the wine donated. And so the business was for sale. And then a guy contacted me and he wanted to buy the business. And, uh, he's like, he's like, I want to put in an offer. I was like, okay, like, I'll help.

That's great.

So I helped him. Wow. Yeah, I helped him. He didn't buy it.

He didn't. He didn't.

They said no.

They said no. Wow.

Uh, it's— it had some— it had some hair on the deal, and the seller was being pretty unreasonable with— they wanted a perfect price for it, but they weren't willing to, like, bend on anything.

An entrepreneur was being unreasonable about what his business was worth? I've never heard of that happening before.

Well, in this case, in this case, the seller. Yeah, so, you know, this is equal opportunity podcast for people to be crazy.

That's just classic entrepreneur though. That's, it's, it's, you know, how dare you say my baby is worth 6 times EBITDA or whatever.

Uh, yeah, it was a lot. And then, um, you know, and then the business is in Hong Kong, so you can't do it as an SBA deal. So it, you know, and then she wasn't willing to give people any time to put together the financing. I think she was insisting that he demonstrate having all the funds for the business in a bank account. And, you know, the tough thing is, is like people that have $3 million cash sitting in a bank account or $4 million cash sitting in a bank account aren't that, you know, aren't that interested in a tiny little business that throws off, you know, relatively small amount of cash and requires you to go take a job in Hong Kong. Like, it's like you're painting yourself into a corner. So it was a fascinating study in psychology and also delusion.

I mean, you should write a Substack post about all this, everything you just told us about this. This is a story that people would like to read. It's this, and this is, this is business.

Yeah, yeah. Or I'll talk about it on a podcast.

Or you talk about it on a podcast, repurpose the same stories.

I take the podcast and I put it on Substack. It'd be perfect. But yeah, That's— you're, you're coming, you're coming back to my distribution problem. I got content for days. It's how do I, uh, how do I actually package it up in ways that would be interesting? So, um, yeah, you're seeing Girdley personality problems. I think that's what it all comes down to. Well, awesome. Well, thanks for doing this. It's substack.com, and, you know, we'll put links to your, your social media profile and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, you're super funny on Twitter, which to me is always a sign somebody's really smart and thoughtful about stuff, and today you were exactly what I expected.

So that's awesome.

Thanks for doing it.

Thank you so much. I had a lot of fun, guys, so I really appreciate it. And, uh, yeah, just like to have the opportunity to, to talk about what we do. So much appreciated.

Yeah, right on.