First Time Founders: Has Substack Changed Media For Good?

22:48Scott Galloway:It's how you're spending your days. It's who you're becoming. And so if there's a way that you could spend that on something that you value more and that helps you become who you want to become more, that has newly become incredibly valuable. And if there's an economic engine and a social contract and a set of technology that can unlock you to spend your limited time on this earth, you know, paying attention to things that you actually value and becoming who you want to become. And for a creative person, if you can do the work you actually believe in, if you can make something that you think is great and make money from it, that's the real underlying value.

23:27Scott Galloway:And that story is true and important. And the fact that, you know, the COVID sort of accelerated and threw some gas on it for a while, it wasn't something that only started to work because of that. And it wasn't something that stopped working once that ended. We'll be right back.

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25:27Ed Elson:We're back with First Time Founders. After COVID, by around 2022, you start to incorporate other features beyond just writing. You start experimenting with video. You start experimenting with microblogging. You call it notes, and people generally understand these as tweets or posts. So it almost becomes a form of social media. And it seems that it is kind of trending in that direction. Do you think of Substack as social media?

26:05Scott Galloway:I think it's fair to describe it that way. I think of it as what should come after social media. But I think that we are making that thing. And the notes and the Substack app, the reason this matters is because we sort of realized at a certain point, hey, Substack is giving you as a writer or creator these tools to connect directly with your audience and to make money and to do the thing. and that if you're somebody who already has a huge following, you can kind of, you know, pull that audience and bring it to your Substack and that's really good. And now you're set up in this wonderful way. But if you are somebody who aspires to do that, the most important thing is how do you grow?

26:48Scott Galloway:How do you find an audience? How do people get a chance to fall in love with you in the first place so that they realize they might want to pay? This is why like the paywall is like the last thing. A lot of people who are very successful on Substack paywall very little. It's really about, hey, am I making something that actually reaches people that they find deeply valuable. And the way that it was working was that the way that writers and creators on Substack would grow is they had to go to all the other social media platforms. And that's a problem for two reasons. One is because now you're still downstream from the incentives on those platforms.

27:20Scott Galloway:But if we're saying, hey, we want to create an alternative to the attention economy, but if you want to participate in it, you still have to be really, really good at Twitter. There's a contradiction there. And the other thing is that, you know, those other platforms don't necessarily want you to be able to connect directly with your audience and take them with you. Right. If, you know, we got in a big spat with Elon around the launch of notes and he briefly banned mentioning the word Substack and crushed the links. But other like even, you know, Mark Zuckerberg spent five years mad about the sort of fallout from the Cambridge Analytica thing and sort of, you know, turned heavily turned down the dial of politics on Facebook.

28:00Scott Galloway:And that's, you know, that's a fair thing to do. But if you're a political journalist who wants to grow on Facebook, that's really tough for you. And so there's all of these other networks that creators, writers depend on. We want them to be able to use them to their maximum. But unless there's one place that actually shares their interest and makes money when they make money and believes in their success and thinks that they should own their connection to their audience. Like if we could create a place like that, that would add so much value. That would, you know, and that would start to become this place on the internet where you could go and choose to take back your mind, choose to, you know, spend your time on the stuff that you actually value and find interesting rather than just the things that distract you.

28:45Scott Galloway:I would say it's an obviously valuable thing to do and a really hard thing to do. And it actually took us a few years to get it going. And there was a lot of, you know, we built this app and we experimented with all the stuff and we kind of eventually got it to the place now where it's, you know, it's the right balance of there's short form, you know, discussion stuff flying around. There's long form stuff in there. Those two things like feed off and drive each other. And it's a really good experience.

29:10Ed Elson:It's such an interesting paradox of media, what you're describing there, where we prefer the incentives of the paywall and the subscription process because it seems to just lean in favor of quality. It's like, if you like what this person is putting out, then you'll pay for it. And it incentivizes the creator and the writer to put good stuff out there that people want to pay for. then social media comes along or i guess and i mean this has existed for longer than just social media but social media really turbocharged the ad model which basically said it's not really about the quality of the work you put out it's about how much it can attract attention so can you be extremely rage-baity can you make people feel something aggressive can you say something with a really catchy and provocative headline.

30:07Ed Elson:Are you willing to put sexual content out there? Are you willing to sell sex as much as we're seeing on Twitter and other platforms? All of these things that grab attention, but are not optimized for quality, which is why social media has become the hellscape that I believe it is. And we'll get into whether you agree with that too. But you run into the problem as a creator where, and you're experiencing this with Substack, putting things behind a paywall does not get the message out there. It makes it harder to grow your audience. And so you are now facing that, hence why you are implementing these more social media minded tools such as video, such as notes, which is very similar to Twitter.

30:55Ed Elson:and there's a sense in which Substack is kind of becoming the thing that maybe it wasn't supposed to be. How do you think about that?

31:04Scott Galloway:I would separate video, by the way. I mean, this is, we're on video right now. This is an interesting long-form conversation. You know, maybe there will be clips of it that are part of a short-form feed. Yeah, we're going to clip you up saying very different things. Yeah, make me say something embarrassing. I can do that on my own, actually. The Elon part, we'll clip that. Here's how I would think of this is what you actually want is a balance, right? You know, I think of some of the short form stuff, some of the jokes, some of the whatever. Some of that stuff is, I think of it as, you can think of it as fun, right?

31:41Scott Galloway:And if you take a social media machine and you're kind of like dial the fun up to 10 million at the expense of everything else. Yeah, you can get something that's distorted. You can get something that kind of becomes this drug, this hellscape. That is a real thing that can happen. But the solution to that is not to become anti-fun, right? We don't want Substack to be the eat your vegetables platform, right? If I said, hey, you know, and it's not even a paywall thing, actually. The paywall is a different question. And, you know, even for people who are paywalling stuff, we say, take your most accessible stuff, put it outside the paywall.

32:16Scott Galloway:That's how you grow. But even just, you know, if the only thing I ever do is write 10 ,000 word treatises, that if you really get into it, it's the most valuable thing in your life. But it's sort of hard to get into. That's a hard thing to kind of like get people into because how do they find out about it? How do they, you know, people aren't always looking to dive into something deep. You want to give something to people that actually can be fun, can be light, but then is helping you get into something that you deeply value and helping you discover something you deeply value. Those things have to work together.

32:52Scott Galloway:This is why Twitter in its heyday was so great, was you did have this light, fun, quick discussion, quick, interesting, fresh stuff. But then people would be talking about real things. You'd have long-form articles. You'd have things that were happening in the world. And I think you can create something much more powerful if you put those things together and keep them in balance. So it's not a question of you can never have something that's fun or engaging or sensational, but that's one part of the mix. Like if you're cooking food, you don't want to say, hey, make the most bland, purely healthy, you know, keep you alive, subsistence slop.

33:30Scott Galloway:And you don't want to say, just sit there and eat cotton candy by the handful. It's like you want a balanced meal. You want something that's solid and healthy, but tastes good. Like that's how I think about it.

33:40Ed Elson:Yeah, earlier you were mentioning, I mean, when you started Kik and then going on to Substack, you were talking about how you learned about setting the rules of the game. You learned about human behavior, you learned about how social networks develop and how people interact, and that it's all about setting the rules of the game. and you said that setting those rules is the difference between heaven and hell. And I think that that's probably quite true. We've seen platforms where the rules of the game have been set up such that they do turn into hell in a lot of ways. And hell might be very profitable, but few people would disagree with that statement when it comes to probably, I mean, certainly we'd say 4chan maybe, maybe you'd say X, maybe you'd say Instagram.

34:30Ed Elson:It certainly has some hellish qualities to it. I guess the question with Substack, because Substack, I think I would agree with you, is more of a heavenly space in the sense that it's operating on a higher level of quality. It's more civil. It's more respectful. There's a level of fun that is being had. but it's not it doesn't feel like the hellscape rage bait center that I think a lot of other other social media platforms are thank you that means a lot I'm glad and I guess the question being is that because the people on sub stack are different or is it because of the rules of the game because they seem to be two different things the people who are on sub stack are generally writers, people who are interested in putting thoughtful content out there.

35:22Ed Elson:But maybe there's something about the way you built the product and the way you set the rules that facilitated that.

35:29Scott Galloway:Those things are related, by the way. Yeah. Like these things that, you know, these things develop a culture and a momentum of their own. People are not immutable. They, you know, they in culture to us, to a space they're in. And when I say the rules, what I'm, I'm talking, I'm not talking about like, what's the moderation policy or what's the terms of service or something. I'm talking about something a little bit deeper. I'm talking about the underlying game, the underlying economic incentives. If you're a social media platform who makes all of your money from a super efficient platform level ad exchange.

36:12Scott Galloway:And your business model is essentially aggregating attention and then selling it as a commodity to the highest bidder. You've built a system where you can, you know, if I'm that platform, I can value your time, but I can't really value what you value. Or at least that's not part of my economic equation. And so if I go then build a, let's say, a feed algorithm and I'm running experiments and I'm trying to say, hey, what's, you know, how do I want this to work? What's going to be good? What's going to be bad? You know, how do I make my business successful? I'm going to optimize for how can I get as much of your time as possible, kind of regardless of how much you value it.

37:00Scott Galloway:Like I might say, hey, I want you not to regret the time you spent. But in terms of raw economic reality, It's your time that matters. When you take that equation and you kind of like do the things that actually optimize that business, you end up pulling in these directions that create these, you know, hellish is probably the extreme way to put it. But these, you know, these traps, these negative sort of spirals as a consequence of the underlying business model and the economic incentive. It's not because the people are bad. And, you know, you might even put in rules or you might even put in systems to try to, like, mitigate that.

37:40Scott Galloway:You might say, oh, I want to dial down some of this problem or I want to do this thing to make people feel better. But you've got this underlying problem where the economic incentive that drives your business is pulling in a way that is at odds with the human beings who are using the platform you make. And so the approach we've tried to take at Substack, once you're in that position, it's impossible either way, I think, right? Like if you say, hey, making a great product, you know, great in this developed multiplayer way or be a successful business, there's no good choice there because, you know, even if you choose to make a great product at the expense of being a successful business, now you're not going to like – you're not going to matter.

38:20Scott Galloway:You're not going to be able to grow and make the thing. And so the underlying theory of Substack is, look, let's try to align these things better. We're going to set up a situation where people are only going to pay for stuff on Substack if they actually care about it and value it. And then we as a platform are only going to make money when the writers and creators make money. This is why we take a percentage fee because it's like for every dollar Substack makes, the creators make nine. We can literally only succeed as a business if we are helping people make money, do the work they believe in.

38:54Scott Galloway:And then those people can only make money if they're making something that's really good enough that, you know, people are choosing to pay for it. And so, you know, when we, you know, we still have a short form content. We still have a feed with an algorithm. But when we run an experiment and we're asking, like, how do we make this algorithm better? If we run a test that says, hey, we got people to spend more time and scroll more and see more things such that if you were serving ads, they would have seen more of them. but they read less or they spent less time watching a long form thing. For us, that's a loser because we know that finding you something that you deeply value is the way to get you to fall in love with it that you might pay.

39:41Scott Galloway:And so the underlying economic incentive that we've created to pull this platform forward pulls us in the direction we want to go and makes us, kind of yokes us to having to serve the actual people who are using it. Another thing we do that's like this is, you know, letting people export their audiences, right? The fact that a subscription on Substack is an email subscription. You get the email address. You can bring your subscribers from somewhere else. You can take your subscribers with you when you leave. At the surface level, you might say, oh, that's bad because you're not locking in your customers and they can, you know, you're giving them the option to leave.

40:15Scott Galloway:But what it actually does is it means that because you know you can leave, you can trust Substack. You can come here and you know that the only reason you're going to stay is that we're giving you enough value and are making something that's actually good. We're not trying to lock you in. And that sort of counterintuitively means that people can invest and trust the platform.

40:36Ed Elson:I asked you earlier, is Substack a social media platform? And you said, yes, but it's the thing after social media. is the ultimate goal of Substack, would you say in your mind, if all things go to plan, does it replace Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and the large social media platforms?

40:59Scott Galloway:I don't know if it wholesale replaces it. You know, I think there are things about each of the platforms that are valuable and there are things that we're not trying to replicate. You know, something I tell the team is like, you know, we're not going to out TikTok TikTok talk and we shouldn't try, right? Like we're not, we're trying to do something that's fundamentally different than that. Um, and so I wouldn't say that we're, you know, if, if Substack is maximally successful, therefore there's no Instagram anymore, or therefore there's no X anymore or anything like that. The way that I think of it is, I don't know if you've ever, there's, there's, there's this woman, Catherine D who writes on Substack, who talks about the, the internet as fairyland or the internet as the astral plane, the internet as this kind of otherworldly place that people can go and that, you know, that, that touches real life, but it's not quite the same and that you can risk bringing bad things back from there's sort of a, it's a, it's a, it's kind of a place.

42:00Scott Galloway:It's a place where people are spending more and more of their life and they're leading more and more of their life. They're, they're having the, you know, it's the world of ideas. It's the world of media. I kind of think of it as, you know, it used to be that the internet was not real life. Then the internet, the internet became real life. The third step is real life is the internet. What happens on the internet starts to reach back out and reshape our world. And I think of Substack as like a place on the internet. Substack is like a city in the astral plane of the internet. And it has these properties, right?

42:37Scott Galloway:It's a place where you can, you can be free and independent, right? You can own your plot of land. You can start your business. You can have your, you know, your own space in this great city and you can do it as you, you know, do with it as you see fit. You can have creative freedom. You can do the work you really believe in. You know, you can make this culture. And then there's sort of like a, you know, the more and more time people are like putting their time and energy and money and creative efforts and attention into this this kind of city that works in a different way it's creating culture it's creating a real alternative to some of the other ways that people feel online where a lot of the places people spend their time online i think just feel like you know a slot machine or feel like going to a casino or feel like kind of plugging into a drug and and just sort of stepping away from their life.

43:33Ed Elson:If you're not going to, sorry, if you're not going to out TikTok, TikTok though, are you essentially yielding that, and we can go with the city analogy too, that TikTok will always be a larger city than Substack because for all of its vices, it's the most addictive?

43:50Scott Galloway:I mean, larger in what way? I mean, there's - In population, in users. Maybe in population, maybe in time spent in economic value. I don't know about that. um you know i i wrote this piece called the two futures of media where i think and i think this ties into kind of like the ai world where one view of media is to view it as a as a drug basically it's like hey media the point of media is how i feel in the moment when i use it right it's an escape it's a it's a it's a thing that i do to just like change my current feeling or mental state and I think that that thing is very real it's a real purpose it's something that people really want and there is like a there is kind of a natural conclusion of that that pulls towards you know if you took tiktok and then you said okay well it's all going to be ai generated so it's even more compelling and then it's going to be you know you sort of like naturally pulls towards wireheading you know the science fiction concept of wireheading it's basically like what if you could have a technology that just directly stimulates the pleasure center of your brain.

44:59Scott Galloway:It's kind of like a, you know, like a technological drug that you just kind of like press and makes you feel happy. That's going to be real. Like that's, there's going to be, there already is a big segment of the world that wants that thing and is using that thing. And there's money to be made in creating that thing. And we are not going to replace that thing. We're not going to play the same game as that thing. What I think we can do is we can give people a real alternative. And we can say there is a different, you know, you can take back your mind. The point of media is not only to get what you want, it's to learn what to want.

45:36Scott Galloway:It's to participate in culture with other people. It's to act back on the world. I think ultimately that thing is, is can be in the moment less compelling, but in the long run is much more compelling. And I think there's a flywheel effect where as more people choose that, as you can kind of see what happens when people choose that, and as those people get sort of richer and better lives, you can create a real alternative. And I don't think that it will be necessarily economically smaller than the bad version. We'll be right back.

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47:19Ed Elson:We're back with First Time Founders. I like describing Substack as a city in a world of places because it does feel that that is the way the internet is evolving. And I, as someone who creates content, I find that each place, each platform has different characteristics, different rules, different kinds of people, and different kinds of stuff that resonates. And I find that I tailor and I switch my language between each platform on LinkedIn. It's more cordial, more corporate. So grateful for this opportunity. On Twitter, it's a little bit more rage-baity. On Twitter, look at this asshole. Can you believe that anybody actually thinks this?

48:01Ed Elson:Exactly. And we're all kind of having to learn how to navigate these languages and how to tailor our messages based on which platform or place you are in. What are the characteristics of Substack? If Substack is a city, who are the people? What are the qualities of that city? What kind of language do they speak?

48:26Scott Galloway:So I think it's intensely cosmopolitan. we have this you know there's i think of substack sometimes as like a an index fund of culture right there's this there's this space for everyone and whoever you are your tribe is kind of there and there's like the good version of your you know your subculture your artistic community your ideology, your people. And so your thing is there, there's a home for you there, and there's this richness of 10 ,000 other tribes, other cultures, other literal geographies, other topics, other kinds of people. It's this, you know, you can have this massive diversity, intellectual diversity, cultural, you know, subcultural diversity, and it can coexist in peace.

49:20Scott Galloway:And people can have their, you know, experience these different parts of themselves and different parts of culture in a way that kind of fits together and doesn't get sort of homogenized into one great slurry. There's sort of neighborhoods to substack with different feels and different vibes. I would say I aspire for it to be sort of the intellectual and cultural capital of the internet. I think it'll be, I think one day it will be at a scale, I don't know if it's literally bigger than the biggest networks, but I think there's no reason it can't become into that echelon in terms of sort of raw population.

49:56But I think long before that happens, and even today, there's sort of a sense of, you know, if you think about where the journalists, where the writers, where the musicians, where the artists, where the statesmen, where the poets, like all

50:11Scott Galloway:of these kind of like the intellectual and cultural elite can kind of like create the best versions of their ideas and thoughts. Increasingly, that is happening on Substack, where you see something really good somewhere else on the internet, you kind of flip it over and it says, you know, made in Substack on the bottom. And it becomes this place where it's like, if you want to go to like the real world of ideas, this is like the home for it. And that's when I think of, we're not trying to out TikTok, TikTok. We're trying to like out Substack. That's the sort of the core of it.

50:44Ed Elson:It makes sense to me that that's where you land on it. That's what it is to me. There are different places on the internet. And if you want to go to the intellectual place, that place turns out to be Substack, which opens up so many different opportunities, I feel like, for your business. Because the big question for advertisers is they're all just trying to figure out what kinds of people are where. And that, to me, is a big deal. And it goes beyond just advertising. It's like, if we're trying to figure out what is the economy of the internet, we need to figure out what are the different neighborhoods and what are they actually looking for.

51:18Ed Elson:And if you can identify that there is a giant population of people who identify as intellectuals, that's value. That's an audience, that's a group of people that you can kind of understand, and then you can start to sell products and services to. Which to me opens up so many different opportunities for Substack, which is why it's interesting how you guys have developed all these new tools, like podcasting, video, notes, like it's more of a social media app now. Now, one thing that you guys are investing in, which I think is a great move, because I've been bullish on this for a while, is live streaming.

51:59Ed Elson:Tell us about why you're getting into live streaming.

52:01Scott Galloway:Okay, the reason we're getting into video in general is because I think that this medium is very important. And there's, you know, a sense in which video has become the lingua franca of large parts of the internet. And especially, you know, this thing we're doing now where you have sort of a long form, the part that fits really well with Substack is where you have sort of a long form thoughtful conversation where there is like a, you know, I think of a long podcast as in some ways the same kind of thing as like a long essay, right? It's something that takes a bit of, it takes a bit of investment.

52:34Scott Galloway:It can be a bit challenging. It can be more deeply, you know, it's literally long form. You can go deep on ideas. Because that thing can be this deeply valuable intellectual thing or cultural thing or, you know, thing that's fun and elevated in other ways. And then there's like this, you know, there's the clip as the kind of fundamental unit that helps that thing spread. That's like, here's how we can like, you know, here's how you can take this thing and reach out and grow and like show it to people and have them discover it and give them like a little hook to go deeper. It's an important medium on the internet.

53:10Scott Galloway:It's something that a lot of, you know, podcasting and video is something a lot of writers want to do. A lot of people who want to express themselves in that medium that even aren't necessarily writers, it's important. And then live is kind of this very magical way to do that thing in a really direct and authentic way. I think there's kind of going to be this interesting barbell effect with a lot of the AI stuff that's happening where it's kind of like you could make something that's sort of like maximally self-consciously unreal. Or you want to make something that's like the most real it could possibly be, the most human it could possibly be.

53:51Scott Galloway:And both of those poles are going to be really good. And then everything in between is going to be less and less good. So something that's kind of like, you know, sort of human, but sort of fake. And just having a live conversation with somebody is this really honest, earnest thing. It's not polished. It's not perfect. It's not even edited yet. If you're literally watching it live, it becomes this very direct thing that people can make. And then we're investing in, you know, the set of tools. This is the other property of the city. It's kind of like technologically advanced. It's giving people those tools that are indistinguishable from magic.

54:29Scott Galloway:You know, the same way that for a writer on Substack, you would come and type into this box. And if the thing you type is actually great, which is really hard, but if you can actually write something that's worth caring about and worth reading, that's so valuable, you shouldn't have to think about anything else. Right? Come and type into this box. And if the thing you type is great, you're going to get rich and famous. That's kind of like the, that's sort of the core thing I want to be able to deliver for people. You shouldn't have to be a nerd or hire a team of nerds. You shouldn't have to figure out all these other things.

55:01Scott Galloway:You should be able to just create the thing you believe in. And if you can focus all of your energy on making it great, then it can, you know, the technology can handle the rest. I think we're going to be there with video very quickly. And so part of Substack Live is literally you're doing a live stream. But part of it is we have this automatic production stuff that's cutting it into a usable YouTube video, a usable podcast, long form podcast thing, a usable set of, you know, well chosen, highly like well edited clips. And so if you're somebody that has something to say, you can kind of show up on Substack and say it.

55:37Scott Galloway:People can tune in live and it turns into this sequence of media that can work. It's sort of like doing the grunt work of taking your magical creation and turning it and translating it into all the usable forms. Maybe even literally translating it, by the way. We're in a world where Star Trek translation, it can just be in you in every language as suddenly possible. And so we're kind of pulling the thread on this vision, and I'm very excited about it.

56:02Ed Elson:One of my beliefs about media and the way things are trending right now is that I feel that most trends can be kind of reverse engineered to the fact that Americans and the global population are just unprecedentedly lonely right now because of technology. The fact that we're spending 70 % less time in the past decade with friends, the value of 1 in 10 Americans, say they have zero close friends at all. And what I have found is that the internet has become sort of the most visceral reflection of our craving and our desire to simply interact with other people. And it seems to me that the most successful forms of media are the forms of media that are offering that interaction up.

56:47Ed Elson:So if you're watching CNN, sure, you get to watch some people talk on the TV, but you don't get to talk with them. And you don't get to talk with anyone else about what they're saying. whereas if you go on YouTube you get to interact with people in the comments and talk about what they said what was stupid what was funny what was interesting and then if you're doing a live stream you get to interact watching it live and then comment on it with other people at the same time and it basically feels as though the way media is headed is just whatever platform can most realistically replicate the experience of just living, just interacting with other people, just being actually in a conversation.

57:30Ed Elson:And if you can replicate that on a digital platform, then you have a win.

57:35Scott Galloway:Do you think that's right? There's a big core of truth there. I think people are lonely. I think the way that you get to interact with others, the way that you get to be a part of and act back on the community, the world of ideas is very important. I think, yeah, places, the aspiration I would have for Substack is twofold here. The first is what you're saying. Yes. I think the, you know, there's these communities when you have these, like within the city, you have like the space, each Substack has its own world. There's its own kind of community with walls. It has its own identity, its own world.

58:07Scott Galloway:And that like comment section, people make friends there. People get to know each other. You know, people become friends in real life because of somebody they met in the blog comments. Like that's a thing that increasingly happens. And so I think, you know, part of it is, yeah, creating the part of the digital world that actually lets you live and interact in a human way and doesn't reduce you to a passive consumer, but lets you be part of a community and act back. That's really important. I also think, you know, that third phase, like the internet becomes real life, right? I've been to meetups that sub stackers have and you'll have somebody that's that's a you know a blogger and they show up at a bar in san francisco and there's a hundred people there treating them like a fucking rock star and you have this like this real set of people that have formed around this shared idea or interest or community you know the the places where the internet can then spill back into actual real life, where it's not only a substitute for seeing people in person, but can cause you to see people in person, I think that's really important and valuable too.

59:16Ed Elson:People, specifically young people, are reading less than ever before. No one really reads, among Gen Z at least. And actually, young people are getting stupider. So So math scores are in decline, basically, since we put computers in our pockets. Literacy rates are going down. Young people are literally getting stupid from the amount of time that they're spending on TikTok, watching YouTube, watching Reels, etc. Like, our brains are actually atrophying. Do you think that Substack could help offer a solution to this problem?

59:57Scott Galloway:I do. And I do think the problem is real. I think it's easy to overstate it. I think there's sort of a sense in which every, you know, every generation turns around and says, kids these days are failing in these ways and they're rotting their brains. And, you know, I think you could have said that about TV for my generation and the generation before. And it was probably true to some extent. You know, the way I look at it is we're not going to turn back the clock on these things. We're not going to put the toothpaste back in the tube and not have the internet anymore, not have phones anymore, not have networks that connect everyone anymore.

1:00:32Scott Galloway:I think even if you could do that, you shouldn't want to. And the question becomes, you know, what's the version of using this stuff that's actually good? What's the version of it that's not just compelling in the moment, but is actually helping me live the life I want to lead, become the person I want to become, you know, help create the community and the society I want? And I think that hunger is there. I think young people want that as much as ever. and one of the things that you can do to help to help is to create a real alternative and to say like you know I'm not saying stop scrolling TikTok but sometimes try this other thing sometimes come watch this long form thing or be part of this comment section that's going deep on something or you know read a short blog post I do think people are hungry for that stuff and if you bring it in a way that's good and new and authentic it works

1:01:26Ed Elson:Chris Best is the CEO and co-founder of Substack. Chris, really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

1:01:38Ed Elson:This episode was produced by Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research associates are Dan Shalana and Chris Nodonoghue. And our senior producer is Claire Miller. Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from Prof. G Media. We will see you next month with another founder story.

1:01:57Thank you.