Azeem Azhar

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.

I mean, it is institutional grade scale.

And on the other hand, you have Barry Weiss, who left the New York Times, built something called the Free Press, which is an aggregator built on Substack.

And it looks like a webzine, to use an old word.

And it is exactly that.

You get your single subscription, you get podcasts, you get essays, guest essays, on-staff essays.

And somehow she's parlayed the

the low entry cost of being able to set up a media business on Substack into something that looks more traditional in terms of its organizational structure and its tempo and its cadence.

And Substack has been able to support both of those.

And in some sense, that means there's nothing new under the sun in a way.