Talk Therapy

Nathan and Dan reflect on their first week spent using Discord instead of Slack, and lay out their reasoning for making the jump to begin with. The answer has a lot to do with building a community to last and grow, and it leads them to think about where value—internal and external—comes from.

Dan and Nathan peel back the curtain on the editing process they've cultivated (and are still cultivating!) for the collective. Shifting between their experiences in both writer and editor positions, they explain why editing is a privilege and a responsibility, how they fill the role for each other—and why doing more of it has given them new shades of empathy for writers.

With the news that Twitter has acquired the podcasting company Breaker, Nathan walks Dan through his latest Divinations article on the state of podcasts over the past decade—or at least 2016, when he wrote an article in search of a platform dedicated to podcast discovery via social connections. After discussing the piece's three hypotheses, they both agree: we have yet to get a social network exclusively and effectively dedicated to content discovery...but podcasts are continuing to trend upwards, so there's still hope.

Taking to Clubhouse for their first-ever live episode of Talk Therapy, Dan and Nathan attempt to answer a question they've gotten a lot since the launch: why did they go after VC backers for Every? In bucking tradition, they've taught themselves a lot about the difference between media and software products, and the unique experience of making decisions about and seeking funding as a team.

Dan brings Nathan in on a problem he's having with the inherent contradictions in much of the theory-based nonfiction writing out there––and the fact that the writers don't always seem to be interested in engaging with other ideas. To Nathan, the answer lies in the weeds of granular differences and deep research––which is not a place everyone's willing to go. The answers go deeper, and end up having a suprising amount to do with their freshly-launched writer collective.

With the long-awaited, semi-prolonged launch and rebrand of Every behind them, Nathan and Dan take a collective breath. Only a quick one, though, because then they're back to it: tracing the history of their collaboration and its evolution into a writer collective, they consider the benefits of building your own platform, why Substack isn't actually on the edge of a mass exodus, and why their main goal for the next year involves sharing their collaborative success with a larger group of writers.

Dan and Nathan welcome Andre Plaut, creator of The Prediction Game—a competition to predict the events of the coming year for a tantalizing prize—which Everything will be hosting next year. Giving the details on the game’s more intimate origins and the wild year it had in 2020, Andre reveals how he built the game, how it works as a time capsule, and some of the predictions made by this year’s frontrunner. When you’re done listening, make sure you sign up for the Prediction Game!

Nathan takes Dan behind his latest Divinations essay, “Why Content is King,” from the writing process—which included drafting the piece in longhand—to why some of its claims aren’t heard very often. One of those claims? That network effects, most commonly associated with software, belong in the conversation about why media businesses hold as much power as they do today.

Dan and Nathan address the news that’s been dominating the Everything Slack all day: Substack’s long-awaited reader, which collects your newsletters in one place and points you to new ones. The guys aren’t totally euphoric on it just yet…but of course, there’s time. Listen for what the reader is missing right now, what functions future versions might add, and the lessons Dan and Nathan have learned about feeds from the Bundle Digest.

After giving Nathan proper credit for getting him to finally listen to—and enjoy—podcasts, Dan takes a pressing question from a recent one to the air: Why are are humans uniquely good at stressing out? The conversation is honest, hopeful, and includes Dan’s dream to get on the phone with the biggest anxiety researchers out there.