Azeem Azhar

And that is a different way, I think, of thinking about the relationship between an expert and the people in their network and in their community.

And what always struck me, you know, in the distant past, I was a journalist, is that there was a very...

There were different types of journalists.

And there were those who, like Derek Thompson and like Anne Affelbaum or Tom Nichols, who I love, these are all Atlantic or former Atlantic writers, who had that angle, that axis around which they would have conviction that would be of interest to an audience.

And there were a lot of journalists who were very, very important in the ecosystem, but really they were

almost mechanistic in the work that they were doing.

You must look at that across your talent and see what's happened with Substack.

I mean, what is the kernel of how you think about it today differently to how you thought about it three years ago?

Well, you know, there are a few other things that one gets.

There is a sense of freedom.

There is a sense of

just being able to say what you want to say when you want to say it, being able to go really deep if you want to, being able to be very personally disclosed the way you're thinking, and also just being quite short and here's a paragraph of something.

And I think that degree of freedom is really quite revealing and it's something that I felt a great deal.

And I think there's just one other thing, which is that I...

Obviously, every writer benefits from editing.

And I will say, of course, you know, Exponential View and my essays and my books are no different from that.

They've benefited from editing.

But there is something about the freedom and being able to bring three decades of expertise out on the page for people that I really struggle when I've written op-eds for the New York Times or the Financial Times or other outlets.

You know, Substack in its own microcosm is a little bit like that.

So the two most successful Substackers are Heather Cox Richardson, who is an American academic, a historian, who had a big Facebook following and then went on to Substack and has an enormous subscription base.