Azeem Azhar

Very responsive.

They make mistakes.

They learn from their, their mistakes.

they have had an inflection point.

You know, they had about a million paying subscribers across the board a year or so ago.

They're up at 5 million now.

And the model is that they take 10% of the revenue from each subscription.

One of the things that struck me, and this does connect in a sense to our questions of trust and business models, is that

You know, Substack-funded pundits like me are being paid to be believed, right?

It's about my reputation.

It is moving from a world of selling attention to advertisers to selling conviction to subscribers.

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.