As we kick off the Substack category tour, we asked Kate Lindsay, co-author of Embedded, to share some writer-to-writer advice about creating trust with your readers. Co-founded with Nick Catucci, Embedded is a twice-weekly guide to new internet creators including trends and weekly interviews with “very online” people. Read on for her advice, or listen to her read it aloud above.​

Dear writer,

How do you approach reading, as a writer? How does the lens of your own audience impact how and what you read?

Dear writer,

I’ll admit, there was a period of time when I was too jaded from working in the digital media industry to read any online content. At my first writing job, I wrote seven stories a day, sometimes waking up as early as 6 a.m. to fit it all in. By the time I’d worked at a few different publications, I could tell when an article was actually an SEO grab masquerading as a legitimate piece of writing, or a piece of clickbait meant to make people mad, and I wasn’t interested in feeding the machine with my own reading habits.

While I’d like to think this particular era of digital media is on its way out, you still see shades of it when the latest viral moment prompts every outlet to scramble for its own unique take. So many websites are writing the same thing. This can be helpful: When Yellowjackets was airing, I was so deep in the show and its fan theories that I read every perspective I could find in hopes of getting all the crumbs. But this strategy doesn’t work universally. For instance, I similarly consumed Covid-19 content in the first year of the pandemic, but I realized that this wasn’t actually reading—it was anxiety-spiraling.

All this is to say, I’m somewhat precious with what I consume, and definitely read a lot less than perhaps you’d think for someone who calls themselves “chronically online.” I like pieces that work to clarify a moment with reason rather than drum up anxiety for clicks, and I have a natural aversion to reading whatever piece has my Twitter timeline in an uproar—because it was probably designed to do just that. 

“I like pieces that work to clarify a moment with reason rather than drum up anxiety for clicks.”

This was one of the first things I noticed about writing Embedded: I no longer have to cater to SEO, or try to get someone’s attention on a timeline. We’re writing for readers who, by nature of signing up, already want to read us. So our coverage can be more thoughtfully catered to them in a way that feels helpful, not exploitative. 

Our best-performing pieces for Embedded are often the ones that seek to make the reader feel understood. Our newsletter is about the internet, but rather than highlight what’s dystopian about this time, I always try to focus on the things about it that are uniquely human, or voice something we all experience that hasn’t been formally put to paper. Similarly, the pieces I love and share with others aren’t ones that are particularly spicy or that make me want to get up and go do something, but that reflect back to me a thought or experience that makes me feel seen.

This isn’t to say you need to try to broadly appeal to your readers. Curating our My Internet series has taught me that the internet may be getting bigger, but people still find and occupy their own particular corners of it. The 2020 National Book Award nominee Rumaan Alam follows Mary-Kate and Ashley fan accounts. Former New York Times columnist Ben Smith is on Geocaching reddit. Writer Taylor Lorenz loves bird TikTok. Investing in a niche may not reach the most readers, but the people you are writing for will be real and engaged and appreciative, which is, ostensibly, why we all started doing this. 

“Investing in a niche may not reach the most readers, but the people you are writing for will be real and engaged and appreciative, which is, ostensibly, why we all started doing this.” 

I’ve also learned that people will pay for writing, and we should continue to normalize that. For My Internet, we always ask people what they pay for online, and some have named publications from the New York Times to Insider to Study Hall to, of course, their favorite Substacks. But when you step back and look at social media as a whole, everyday people in the replies and comments are routinely astonished when something is paywalled. Sure, running into a paywall is annoying, but the fact that you’re annoyed you can’t read something is the reason to pay for it! If you want to read good stuff, then you have to free writers from the advertising model that forces quantity over quality, and that means people with the means to give their money, doing so. 

If all else fails, I’ll leave you with these two pieces of advice: Trust recommendations from humans, not algorithms, and treat your clicks like currency—give them to the kind of content you want to see more of, not less. 

Sincerely,Kate

This is the third in a recurring series of longform writer-to-writer advice, following Mason Currey’s advice column on creative growth and Anna Codrea-Rado of Lance on learning to celebrate just how far you’ve come.

Could you use some advice or inspiration from a fellow writer about creativity, motivation, and the writing life? Submit your question for consideration for a future advice column by leaving it in the comments below, or entering it (with the option to remain anonymous) using this form.

Bonus: Reading Room

Reading Room is a new mini series with writers like Anne Helen Petersen sharing their favorite publications to read on Substack. Kate is a thoughtful reader and researcher, both of her peers and of the online spaces that she covers. We asked Kate to share what she is reading.

Kate Lindsay’s recommended reads:

* Substack I’m most excited to open ASAP: Today in Tabs—it breaks down the exact discourse I recommend against reading, but now I can still know what people are talking about. 

* Substack most likely to make me think: ¡Hola Papi!—I keep rereading this post about stepping back from social media. I’m like, did I black out and send this letter? 

* First Substack I subscribed to: That’s gotta be Garbage Day, and I still open every single one! I recently cited this one, about how social media is digesting the crisis in Ukraine, in my own writing. 

* Substack I subscribed to most recently: After School—one of the only places to report on Gen Z that isn’t patronizing. I think this Gen Z gift guide is a perfect example of how hard its author, Casey Lewis, works to be accurate and comprehensive. 

* Substack I recommend to friends most often: Rachel Karten’s Link in Bio is essential for understanding the professional social media space. I love this one about the personal social media accounts of people who run brand accounts. 

Visit Kate’s profile page to see more from her current reading list. Subscribe to Kate and Nick’s publication on Substack, Embedded, and you can also find them on Twitter here and here.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

As the year draws to a close, we asked Anna Codrea-Rado to share a piece of writer-to-writer advice about taking stock of one’s creative accomplishments. Anna writes Lance, a publication all about building a freelance career without burning out. Read on for her advice, or listen to her read it aloud above.

Dear writer,

How do you stop to recognize what you've accomplished? And how do you refocus and refresh when starting a new chapter?

Dear writer,

On the eve of a breakup, a past boyfriend said to me that I’d never be happy because I’m always looking for something else.

Over a decade later and the memory of that remark still stings. Not because I regret dumping him, but because he’d touched on something that I was (and still am) prone to doing: ambitiously going after something but not stopping to appreciate its fruits. 

I share this relic from my relationship graveyard to confess that I too struggle to recognize my accomplishments. And before I can attempt to answer what you can do about that, first I want to ask: why can’t you recognize what you’ve accomplished? 

Earlier this year, I wrote my first book and while I knew it was a huge milestone, I couldn’t feel it. So much so, that I felt uncomfortable whenever other people told me how proud I must be of myself. I started calling this inability to see my own success "productivity dysmorphia.” The pursuit of productivity spurs us to do more while at the same time robbing us of the ability to savor any success we might encounter along the way. As for why it happens, personally, I think the biggest culprit is our toxic work culture which not only moves the goal posts, but then tells us that if we miss, that’s our personal failing. 

The pursuit of productivity spurs us to do more while at the same time robbing us of the ability to savor any success we might encounter along the way.

There’s a badly wrapped gift to be had here: This stuff isn’t your fault! This partly explains why I’ve only ever had mixed results in my attempts to do something about it. Because believe me, I’ve tried all the hacks for recognizing my achievements. The big one is writing down your wins at the end of each day. Seems like a no-brainer for a writer, right? Make yourself feel better about your writing by writing about it? And indeed, scribbling “Wrote 1,000 words today” in my bullet journal does make me feel smug. 

When I’m fretting about my newsletter, a game I like to play is zooming in and out of the graph in the “Subscriber” tab. There, I can see my growth over the last 30 days, 90 days, and all time. My 30-day chart looks like a rollercoaster; a rickety track of dizzying climbs preceded by stomach-flipping descents. Then I toggle to the 90-day view and things look a little gentler. At the “all-time” setting, all the bumps are smoothed out into a healthy line that clearly points upwards. At that distance, I have an uninterrupted view of how much further along I am now from my starting position. 

These tactics (or maybe it’s better to call them reflections) have definitely helped me better appreciate my achievements, but only ever after the fact. It’s a bit like how I experience the benefits of exercise, not so much in the moment of doing it, but only after a period of inactivity when I feel terrible for its absence. 

As the French political theorist, Germaine de Staël wrote, “The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals”. And so, I don’t think the move is to throw out these acts of reflection, but rather to accept their limitations. 

“The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals” ~ Germaine de Staël

Then the question becomes, how can we recognize our accomplishments in the moment? 

For me, the answer lies in getting back to why I write in the first place. I believe that the writing subjects we’re drawn to aren’t random. Richard Bach, the American writer said, “We teach best what we most need to learn.” And I think the same is true for writing—I write best about the things I need to work out for myself. 

I find this to be particularly important to remember at the close of one chapter and the beginning of another. And if you too are at a similar crossroads right now and struggling with which direction to take next, try asking yourself the following question: Even if no one read me, what would I write about? 

It’s easy to lose sight of why you’re even writing in the first place, so recentring can be a powerful way to help you get unstuck. Asking yourself this simple question will help you reconnect with your writing and remind you why you’re even doing it in the first place. You’ll be surprised how clearly the answer will come to you. And remember, the sheer act of even asking these kinds of questions is a celebration of how just far you’ve come.

Sincerely,Anna

This is the second in a recurring series of longform writer-to-writer advice, following Mason Currey’s advice column on creative growth.

Could you use some advice or inspiration from a fellow writer about creativity, motivation, and the writing life? Submit your question for consideration for a future advice column by leaving it in the comments below, or entering it (with the option to remain anonymous) using this form.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

We are pleased to announce the launch of Story Club, a new Substack by beloved author and teacher, George Saunders. With its unique, educational, community-oriented structure, Story Club will offer a masterclass in storytelling and the craft of short fiction.

The concept is modeled after Saunders’ latest book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, in which he unpacks a handful of short stories by four of the great Russian writers, considering how their stories work and why they move us. Saunders serves on the faculty of Syracuse University’s MFA writing program; the book was inspired by a class he teaches on the Russians.

With Story Club, Saunders and his community of readers will run with that idea, focusing on a new story each month. The selections will extend well beyond the borders of Russia, and Saunders will also invite his community of readers to help steer the curriculum. “I’m really excited about the spontaneous nature of this,” he said in our conversation, “and the fact that I can keep track of everybody in real time a little bit, and just as I do... at Syracuse, tailor the next class to meet what they need. So I think we’ll see stories from all over the world. I’m sure we’ll get to some fairy tales. In class, I’ll often use bits of movies and TV, because that’s a really interesting form of storytelling.”

Story Club’s posts will include essays and observations by Saunders, lessons on the elements of fiction, writing exercises, and interactive community features.

Saunders’ writing program at Syracuse admits less than one percent of applicants, only six students per year—MFA programs are by nature tiny and exclusive—but he sees Story Club as an attempt at democratizing graduate writing programs, or, as he puts it, “simulating a version of the MFA through Substack.” The privilege to study fiction alongside one of its greatest living practitioners has been available to only those fortunate few students each year at Syracuse, yet now, through Story Club, it is possible for anyone to join the community.

Saunders has kept his distance from social media—“I don’t do social media, because I don’t like it.” He describes Substack, in comparison, as “social media purified by conscience” and feels that it’s the right place for an endeavor like Story Club, “because [here] we’re all self-selected. This is a club based on mutual respect… I think the danger of social media is that you’re always feeling the pressure to say something right now. And with Substack, if I get organized enough (which I'm going to), it means that I can be starting something now, and when it’s ready, when it really has something to say, then I can release it to this self-selected community… The idea of being in some kind of real-time, quasi-personal touch with my readers is really exciting to me.”

Along with the community-driven exploration of great stories, Saunders’ Substack will also include his personal newsletter writing, and he plans to answer reader questions on craft and the writing life.

Saunders expects Story Club to serve as “a conduit between my readers and myself” and to reaffirm that “this writing life is not impossible. There are real people on the other end of books. It’s all about communication, and it goes in both directions. Part of what I offer my students is sort of a demystification of the whole thing. Yeah, it’s really hard. It takes everything you have. It obsesses you in every aspect of your life. But it’s also not impossible. And it’s a continuation of something you’ve been doing your entire life, which is trying to engage other people in your particular mode. I joke with my students that we’re trying basically to refine our charm: How are we charming, and how can we get more so, in prose? Sometimes I think the best thing a writing teacher offers is a little bit of positive reassurance. Just to say, It’s not impossible; you can improve… The real baseline ethos of Story Club is that idea: that we can all participate, and it will make any life better.”

Podcast editing and production by Seven Morris

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

Four years ago today, Bill Bishop launched the first-ever Substack publication. It was his newsletter about China, Sinocism, which he had been writing for free for five years for an audience of policymakers, diplomats, academics, investors, executives, and journalists. 

I had known Bill for almost a decade from my previous life as a reporter and was a regular reader of Sinocism. Around the time that we came up with the idea for Substack, Bill had been telling his readers that he was planning to introduce a paywall for the newsletter. I jumped into his inbox and suggested that he be Substack’s first publisher. Happily, he agreed! 

Chris and I promptly flew to Washington, D.C., where Bill had recently relocated after 10 years in Beijing, and started figuring out how we could build the first version of the product around his needs. By October 2017, Bill was ready to launch, and on the 15th of the month he enabled paid subscriptions. By the end of that day, he had brought in six figures of revenue, heralding the arrival of two businesses at once: his own, and Substack’s. 

To mark the four-year anniversary of the launch of Sinocism, I interviewed Bill for a special episode of the Substack Podcast (there it is, up there, behind the big play button). We talked about the early days of Sinocism, what he has learned from four years on the platform, and why he set sail for the world of paid-newslettering in the first place.

Says Bill: “It just really felt like there was a moment where the internet and consumers were ready for this kind of a model.”

I think he was right about that. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

Last week, ​Substack hosted a briefing and live Q&A with health and parenting experts aimed at answering questions about the latest data on kids and COVID, including back-to-school safety, vaccine timelines, and risk trade-offs.

We organized the event in order to tap into the collective expertise of parenting and data expert Emily Oster and epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina, two Substack writers who’ve been sharing valuable, data-driven information with their readers. By getting these experts together in a (virtual) room and in conversation, we hope to provide a resource for parents and anyone else grappling with making informed decisions as they navigate the ongoing pandemic with the children in their lives.

The discussion between Emily Oster (publisher of ParentData and bestselling author of Expecting Better and Cribsheet) and Katelyn Jetelina (publisher of Your Local Epidemiologist and Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center) was moderated by Christina Farr (publisher of Second Opinion, health-tech lead for OMERS Ventures, and former health reporter for CNBC).

The Q&A covered a wider range of reader-submitted questions, with discussion touching on everything from shifting vaccine timelines for the under-12 set, to the unknown long-term effects of COVID in kids, to what to do if your child comes down with the sniffles.

Listen to the full audio transcript above, or watch the video below:

Read more from the panelists by subscribing to Emily Oster’s ParentData, Katelyn Jetelina’s Your Local Epidemiologist, and Christina Farr’s Second Opinion.

Want to hear more Substack writers get together in conversation? Leave a comment to suggest who you’d like to listen in on.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

Last Wednesday, we hosted a workshop with Elle Griffin of The Novelleist to learn about how to serialize fiction on Substack.

When Elle finished writing her first book, she began to research the best way to publish it, but what she found was distressing. 98 percent of books published in 2020 sold less than 5,000 copies, and traditional publishing offered few viable paths for less established authors to make a living. Elle summarized her learnings in a Substack post called, “The one where writing books is not really a good idea.” The article’s sharp analysis of the publishing industry hit a nerve, garnering the post more than 70,000 views.

In the article, Elle analyzes online platforms like Wattpad, Patreon, Amazon, and Substack as potential alternatives to traditional publishing. She makes the case that while there isn’t yet a perfect home for fiction online, Substack presented the most promising opportunity to publish and monetize her serial novel.

We asked Elle to host a Spotlight On because of the rigor with which she has approached serializing her fiction on Substack. Elle has also been uniquely generous to fellow writers in the fiction genre – finding and gathering nearly 500 writers in the Substack Writers Unite Discord group, and also spotlighting other writers on her own Substack.

The transcript has been edited for length and readability. You can listen to the full interview as a podcast in this post. 

To sign up for future writer interviews and workshops, head here. 

Why did you decide to serialize your upcoming novel on Substack?

After I finished writing my novel, I set out to do what every writer does: pitch it to agents. I pitched more than 120 agents, and they all rejected it.

As I was going through that process, I realized why all these agents were rejecting my book. It’s a strange little gothic novel. It’s a book that will appeal to a certain kind of person, but it won't appeal to every kind of person.

If you're a big publishing house, what you're looking for are blockbusters – the Dan Browns of the world who are going to write a novel that’s going to sell millions of copies. The publishing house takes 70% of those royalties, and that's how they fuel their business. Meanwhile, only 0.01% of books will sell more than 100,000 copies. In fact, 96% of books sell less than 1,000 copies total!

Well, my book is definitely not a blockbuster. If I'm only going to sell 1,000 or 2,000 copies – because that's about as big of an audience as I can picture – how can I effectively monetize it? If I put the book up for sale on Amazon for $3 each, then my family and 100 other people might find it, and I'd make a couple hundred bucks.

At the same time as I was researching the publishing industry, the creator economy was emerging. New tools are allowing creative people to monetize a really niche audience. It only takes 1,000 people paying $8 a month for a creator to make a living of $100,000 a year.

Writers were tapping into the creator economy through Substack, but most weren’t writing fiction yet. I knew writers charging people from $5 a month up to $40 a month; on Substack, there were people earning millions of dollars a year.

Here's this platform that already has the business structure ready to go, so I wanted to try it for fiction. If there are 1,000 people out there who are willing pay $8 a month to subscribe to my novel as a serial, then that would work out financially for me. I could fund my writing. After all, this isn’t a new idea. The Count of Monte Cristo, Charles Dickens, and more classic books were all initially serialized.

How have you grown your email list so far?

I started my Substack in February, and it has grown by almost 1,000 readers in the last two months.

In trying to grow my audience on Substack, I figured the easiest way would be to learn from other Substack writers. I stalked everyone I could find on Twitter who used the combination of the word “fiction” and the word “Substack” in a tweet. I messaged them and invited them to a Discord server so we could learn from each other. There are hundreds of fiction writers in the community now, all talking about what has worked and not worked for each of us. We have a little spreadsheet called “cross promotions” where we put in our Substack URL and genre so we can contact each other and exchange mentions of one other’s work.

But what was most helpful for growth was writing two articles that took me a really long time to produce. One took me all of 2020 to research. The other one took me another six months to research. Those two articles were about the publishing industry at large. It turned out that they resonated with people because publishing is a black box, and there are a lot of writers also trying to understand how it works.

I shared those two articles a bunch of different ways, including on Hacker News. You can share your link on there, and sometimes they go viral and sometimes they don't, but one of mine did. That article had something like 60,000 views in one day, and a lot of subscribers came from that one piece of writing that really resonated.

How are you approaching charging readers for a serialized novel?

Fiction writing is not the same as writing nonfiction on Substack. With nonfiction, you're expecting rolling admissions. You're getting new subscribers every month, and it doesn't matter where those new people start reading because the next article you publish isn't necessarily attached to the last one.

For fiction, the posts are sequential, so I’m following the funding model you see with an online course. In these courses, you have to take the first class before the second class. There is a clear order, and people running courses often open enrollment just once a year. During those enrollment periods, they send tons of promotional communication encouraging people to sign up for their course. After that period, the promotions die down.

That's how I'm going to approach it with my novel. September is my “enrollment period.” My plan is to publish the first four chapters in September to my entire newsletter list for free. At the bottom of each of those posts, I’ll tell readers that in order to keep reading in October, they’ll need to subscribe and pay an annual fee. I’m charging $10 a month or $50 a year, so my hope is to encourage everybody to buy into the full year in September – essentially, they’re buying the whole book by doing so. When October hits, my audience should be locked in. Everybody will be signed up to get the book as paid posts, and all of them will be receiving installments at the same time.

I plan to do this same process every year. This first book will be done in June. I'll have July and August off, and in September, I’ll start my second book. So there will be a new book in the same window of time as when Substack starts saying to readers, “Hey, by the way, your annual subscriptions are about to renew.”

I think this annual approach is easier on writers who aren't used to asking for money because you just need to do so once a year, and then you can focus on writing.

Elle’s extra tips for fiction writers

* Use sections to delineate different topics and chapters. In addition to writing her novel, Elle publishes a Substack newsletter about fiction writing. She uses Substack’s sections feature to separate her posts into categories for readers, and shares in her demo (above) how other fiction writers are using sections to guide readers through the chapters of books.

* Prepare for readers to join mid-story. Update: since this workshop was hosted, we have created a feature that allows writers to enable “next” and “previous” buttons on their posts in the Publication Details section of the settings page. This allows readers to quick navigate to sequential post.

* Consider paid plans unique to fiction writing. Elle plans to publish four free chapters that go out to her entire list. After that, her chapters will be gated and paid. Elle noted that you can also try a founding member plan. Sasha’s founding plan includes a print copy of the book when it’s completed. Learn more about how to customize your subscription settings.

Hoping for more tips on how to start a fiction publication on Substack? Join Elle’s Discord community here.

Spotlight On is a series of live events hosted by Substack. The goal is to learn from writers across categories who have experienced success on Substack. Stay tuned for our next events here.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

Last week, we hosted a workshop with Tony Mecia of The Charlotte Ledger to discuss covering local news on Substack.

Tony worked in journalism as the business reporter and editor with the Charlotte Observer before he decided to strike it out on his own. He started The Charlotte Ledger and grew it the old-fashioned way, building relationships locally and relying on word-of-mouth from friends. Today, The Charlotte Ledger is a thriving business with a team of freelancers and regular contributors.

Writers like Tony have paved the way for independent local news on Substack. In our workshop, we brought together the greater community of local news writers to learn from Tony’s experience and absorb best practices for local news publishing on Substack.  

Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack and a writer himself, hosted the interview with Tony and discussed his journey publishing, growing, and going paid. At the end of this post, we also share Tony’s quick tips for polishing your newsletter.

The interview has been edited for length. You can listen to the full interview as a podcast in this post. 

To sign up for future writer interviews and workshops, head here. 

Why do you care so deeply about local news?

My background is in local news. I worked as an editor and reporter here in Charlotte for more than 10 years. I saw the connections that you can make here reporting, and how important it is to have somebody in your local community who is watching out for citizens, not paid for by marketing or advertising, and who can actually report honestly and straightforwardly. We've lost that, especially in smaller to mid-sized markets like Charlotte.

As local news in Charlotte weakened, I started looking at my options. I wasn’t going to move somewhere else. I don't want to move to Washington or New York for a job in journalism. I've lived here for more than 20 years. My home is in Charlotte and I care about Charlotte. So I thought, well, maybe I can start something.

At this time, there were a lot of national newsletters – Morning Brew, The Hustle – but there weren't a whole lot of folks using the newsletter format as a vehicle to report original local news.

Tell me about the moment you decided to go independent. What were you most nervous about?

The difference between writing nationally and locally is that your potential audience is a lot smaller when local. If I'm writing about cybersecurity or technology or national politics, the whole country may read that. Charlotte's a city of about 900,000 people in a county of 1.1 million in a region of 2.3 million. But I just thought, let’s try it.

I started in March of 2019. The first editions went to 12 friends and family members. My mom was very happy to get it. I posted it on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, since our focus is business-adjacent news in Charlotte. I asked that folks read, and if they liked the writing, that they please tell people about it. I had no idea what was going to happen.

What I found was the readership just kept growing. The total list is just a very steady upward line. That made me think, okay, I've got something here. We were publishing three mornings a week, and it was all free at that point.

How did it feel making the leap to paying subscribers?

The Charlotte Ledger was free for almost an entire year. The typical advice from Substack is to wait three months, or less in some cases, before going paid. But I was nervous that our growth would slow down once because we'd be putting a lot of writing out for paid subscribers that would no longer be shareable.

That actually hasn't been true. That first day when we turned on the paid subscriptions, I expected that a handful of people would sign up, but money just started pouring in. It was a few thousand dollars, and I thought, wow, this actually resonates with people. People are willing to pay for this.

It was a tremendous feeling. It wasn’t as if it was so much money that I could retire, but it was a good feeling to know that what you're producing is worth something to somebody.

If I had to do it over again, we probably wouldn’t have waited an entire year before turning on paid subscriptions. That hesitancy was just because of my nervousness. Waiting a year, with no income, with no revenue coming in is a long time. It worked out – my wife works, and we had some severance from a previous job and all that – but in hindsight, we should have turned on paid a little faster.

Why did you decide to cover business news rather than just local news in Charlotte?

I'm not opposed to doing local news, and we do a fair amount of general news, but our theory has always been that we want to do writing that's better than what's already in Charlotte, and we want to do writing that's different than what's already in Charlotte.

The number of business reporters here in Charlotte had declined, and I saw an opening content-wise. My background was in business news. It’s something that I knew and felt comfortable covering. There's a pretty big market for it in Charlotte. We’re a business town with banks and tech companies. It's a pretty big city. Business writing also has the advantage that if the newsletter is useful to an employee, they can charge the subscription cost to their company as a business expense.

What wisdom can you pass on to other local news writers who are considering Substack?

Two things. First, it's hard for journalists whose background is in reporting a story to all of a sudden have to think like a business person. But you need to think about your audience. There's a temptation with local journalism to think, “I'm writing about Charlotte, so anybody in Charlotte is going to be interested in it.” To succeed, you’ll need to hone that down a little bit more.

Ask: Who are you trying to appeal to? And how will you find them? You need to think strategically about who the people are who are most likely to read your work, then determine where they hang out physically or online and how you could reach them where they are. Use your marketing or business brain on those strategy questions.

Second, you're not alone. I've gotten a lot of good advice from fellow local news writers – City Hall Watcher in Toronto, The Mill in England. I'm not saying that we've got all the answers, but we've done this for longer than most people in the local news space on Substack. Steal good ideas from other people.

Tony’s quick tips for local news writers

* Don’t overthink your paid vs. free strategy. The Charlotte Ledger has days of the week where their posts are free. Their “paid days” are Wednesdays and Fridays. On occasion, they cover free topics that may be outside their publication scope because the team believes they may be shareable.

* Let free readers know what they are missing. For every paid post, The Charlotte Ledger sends out a shorter “teaser” version to their free subscribers. If free subscribers want to read the rest, they need to subscribe. Because of this tactic, The Charlotte Ledger sees new subscriptions even on “paid days.”

* Include guidance about subscribing at the top of every email. “Although we don’t want to be ‘annoying,’ we do have to think like a business.”

* To promote locally, consider partnerships. There are no magic growth hacks with local news. Instead, you’ll need to do a lot of little promotions consistently. Partner with a variety of people in your community to get in front of different groups. Tony has partnered with Charlotte’s local radio station, local Facebook Groups, and even hosted an awards show to ensure members of his community bump into The Charlotte Ledger.

* 10,000 readers is a useful benchmark. If you believe you can build a list of 10,000 free readers, you have a strong chance of converting 10% (1,000) of those people into paid subscribers. That’s enough to support a livelihood.

Hoping for more tips on how to start a local news publication on Substack? Check out our comprehensive playbook here.

Spotlight On is a series of live events hosted by Substack. The goal is to learn from writers across categories who have experienced success on Substack. Join us for our next Spotlight On: Fiction with Elle Griffin.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

In early June, we hosted an interview with Mike of Nongaap Investing to discuss finance writing on Substack. Mike is a former activist investor who writes about investing, corporate governance, board dynamics, and the power of incentives. 

We asked Mike to speak in part because he’s a lot of fun, and also because ​Mike’s an inspiring example of the success we are seeing many finance and investing writers experience on Substack. He’s doing so well that he even turned Substack into his full-time focus and sits among the top paid publications in our Business category. 

Linda Lebrun of the Substack Partnerships team hosted an interview with Mike and discussed his journey publishing, growing, and going paid. At the end of this post, we also share Linda’s quick tips for polishing your newsletter.

The interview has been edited for length. You can listen to the full interview as a podcast in this post. 

To sign up for future writer spotlights and workshops, head here. 

What surprised you most about what happened when you started writing on Substack? 

The biggest surprise was that anyone would even read my writing in the first place. 

My goal was just to become a more focused thinker for myself, not for anyone else. To get such a positive response very early in the process was a shock. I’m still shocked, even today, that anyone would pay to read my stuff. I just checked, and I think I’m number two in the Business category. That there are enough people out there that not only want to read about corporate governance but want to read it enough to pay a few dollars a month, remains amazing to me. 

What benefits did writing have for your career as an investor?

The forward button for a newsletter may be the most powerful networking tool you’ll ever have. That endorsement is social proof of someone who followed you forwarding your writing on to someone they respect. 

I tell folks who are trying to break into the investing world not to wait until they are in an interview or pitching a stock to put themselves out there. Your writing or thinking doesn’t have to be perfect to get started. Think of writing as a journey where you are iterating and demonstrating how you look at the world and how you think of the world. Doing that will help you find other people that respect and align with your own perspective, instead of trying to purpose-build a pitch or a stock thesis retroactively. 

It seems that meeting people has been even more satisfying than the business value you’ve seen from your Substack.

Absolutely. I think Substack is an even more powerful networking tool than a business tool for the average writer. You can 10x or 100x your professional reputation as long as you stay authentic with what you’re trying to do. People pick up on that, and you’ll build a real bond. 

The people who you really want to reach in life – the really interesting thinkers – everyone in the world wants to get an introduction to them. Few things actually open the door like a thoughtful piece focused on that person’s company or preferred style of investing. If you say something thoughtful, they’re more likely to come to you than they would in any other networking effort. You’re demonstrating that you would be an interesting conversation. 

What are key pieces of advice you have for writers who are just getting started?

Don’t be afraid to grow slowly. There’s sustainability when you’re willing to go slow. 

I know there’s pressure to build up your subscriber base as quickly as possible. That’s a valid way of doing it, but for me, it was important to not feel like I needed to push all of my writing out at once because that wouldn’t have been sustainable. You need to make sure that you find a cadence that fits your style and your life, because this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Substack is a business, but it’s also a personal development tool, a networking tool, and for me, an opportunity to get better as an investor. You’re going to get better with every piece you put out, and you’re going to slowly build an audience that will hopefully help you push the forward button and spread the word.

Linda’s quick tips for finance & investing writers

* Customize the “About” page to explain what readers can expect from you.

* Customize your “Thank you for subscribing” email. Consider including examples of some of your best past posts so new readers can dive right in.

* Include a preview image before you share a post. Consider using Unsplash to source images.

* Fill out your writer profile to demonstrate knowledge about the topics you cover.

* Social sharing helps people know your publication exists. Two helpful, simple tips for promotion: include your Substack link in your social media bios and pin a Substack post to the top of your social media profiles.

Spotlight On is a series of live events hosted by Substack. The goal is to learn from writers across categories who have experienced success on Substack. Join us for our next Spotlight On.

Should we be hosting a Spotlight On session with you? Tell us more about your Substack here.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

For the final episode of this season, we spoke with Nathan Tankus of Notes on the Crises, who writes about the pandemic-induced global depression and how policymakers should respond to it. Nathan started his newsletter at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States in order to analyze the economic impacts of the global crisis.

Nathan has been recognized as a prominent voice in economic policy. His newsletter has followers ranging from journalists to economists, including those working at the Fed, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Department of the Treasury. 

We talked about why Nathan decided to write about the pandemic, what it’s like to write in the field of economic policy, and the Bloomberg profile that skyrocketed the success of his platform.

We’ll take a brief pause as we wrap up this podcast season, but stay tuned for more conversations next month. Let us know if you have suggestions for who we should interview next season!

Links

* Notes on the Crises, Nathan’s newsletter

* Nathan on Twitter

* A 28-Year-Old With No Degree Becomes a Must-Read on the Economy, Nathan’s Bloomberg profile

Highlights

* (1:35) Why Nathan decided to start covering the pandemic

* (7:44) How Nathan built his initial following

* (24:28) The role of credentials in the field of economics

* (35:26) How a Bloomberg profile led to achieving his long-term goals

* (57:39) Nathan’s thoughts on monetizing his newsletter

On writing about a crisis:

Of course, crises are terrible things. But the one thing that analysts really relish in a crisis is that it's very easy to make a crisis, and analyzing what's going on in the crisis, your full-time job. Because it's such a timely and urgent issue, there are people who are always willing to have these conversations with you and to argue with you. It's the perfect instigator for public conversation and debate. 

On having the ability to write freely:

I was writing so much that first week. I wrote 21 pieces for Substack. I wrote one piece for another publication in a month. I was publishing a piece basically every weekday. That scale, that pace – there's just no other publication that's set up to do that kind of thing, especially not in the freedom that I had to just focus on it and do it the way I wanted to do it. Doing it myself was just complete freedom to define it how I wanted to.

On his decision to focus on one topic:

For other publications, it's not necessarily "news" to say the same thing ten different ways. But I felt it was news. To really understand the pandemic ... you can't just read one piece that explains it to you. It has to be something that you engage with day in and day out for weeks.

Transcript

Nadia (00:00:31):

You write Notes on the Crises, which covers in your words the play-by-play of the current pandemic-induced global depression and how policymakers should respond to that. I remember seeing your name pop up around mid-March. You started your newsletter on Substack at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. What prompted you to start writing?

Nathan Tankus (00:00:51):

Well, I hadn't really been paying attention. I had a lot of other things going on, a lot of other things that I was focused on. I hadn't really been paying attention to what was going on. I sort of vaguely knew what was going on, especially because I was following the Democratic primary, but not in detail. Then, March 9th was the first time I got a wake up call about what was going on. That was when free market trading on U.S. Treasury securities - when the prices went way up, which means the interest rates went way down.

Nathan Tankus (00:01:35):

We actually temporarily hit negative interest rates on some U.S. Treasury securities. That really made my eyes open up wide, and try to understand exactly what was going on. Around the same time, the oil price collapsed. Those things were signals to me because generally, the interest rates on U.S. Treasury securities fall because people expect that the Federal Reserve is going to cut interest rates a lot, and that they're going to hold them low or at zero for a long period of time. Generally, the Federal Reserve does that when there is a big recession.

Nathan Tankus (00:02:28):

That was the signal to put the market stuff aside and put whatever else was going on in my life aside and figure out, “Wait, what actually is going on here? Why is there a big depression coming?” I started reading up, thinking about the coronavirus, and started thinking through the implications of what we really were facing … reading some of the epidemiology literature backing the projections of what was going on, especially the College of London study that came out early on. That made me really wake up and think, this is the big one. No one in my life really gets it.

Nathan Tankus (00:03:13):

None of the people who are outside of the economics world really get it. Even the people within the economics world who I regularly engage with, they aren’t fully taking seriously the implications of what was going on. No one was really being paid to really spend all their time to focus and do that. I had been thinking about starting a Substack for a while to produce my own commentary. I had some other projects that I wanted to finish first, but this seemed to take precedence for me over all of that. It was time to just try to get out early, and try to do as much as I could to find what was happening.

Nadia (00:03:55):

It's like the perfect research problem. Because you're already well positioned to be thinking about this kind of stuff. You were working in a research capacity already, right? This is the most timely thing you could focus in on full-time.

Nathan Tankus (00:04:08):

Yeah, exactly. Of course, crises are terrible things. But the one thing that analysts really relish in a crisis is that it's very easy to make a crisis, and analyzing what's going on in the crisis, your full-time job. Because it's such a timely and urgent issue, there are people who are always willing to have these conversations with you and to argue with you. It's just the perfect instigator for public conversation and debate. With the collapse of journalism and the way that economic policy is structured in the United States, there was a real gap that I could fill. I think my experience over the last four months really shows that I was right in my estimate that if I started writing right then, it would be something that could define a real turning point in my career.

Nadia (00:05:25):

Which seems to be playing out already.

Nathan Tankus (00:05:27):

I mean, it couldn't have played out much beyond what I could have ever imagined.

Nadia (00:05:30):

Really?

Nathan Tankus (00:05:31):

I had some sense, but as I announced recently, I'm planning on turning Notes on the Crises into a full fledged publication, hiring guest writers, and hiring investigative journalists to investigate some things around the state unemployment insurance systems for me. I just could never have imagined having the resources to do that before this. I sort of had the idea I could have a decent, nice income like the Bloomberg profile talks about. Everything from the Bloomberg profile on me since has changed the scale of what I could do.

Nadia (00:06:18):

Yeah. You've had a really incredible trajectory. I have an entire section of this interview devoted just to talking about the Bloomberg profile.

Nathan Tankus (00:06:23):

Sure.

Nadia (00:06:23):

I'm excited to dig into all of that with you. I'm curious, you're saying that you felt like when you started writing, no one you really knew was talking about it. Nobody even in the economic circles that you were in were talking about it. When you started writing, were you thinking of having this be for the economic circles that you're involved in, or to make this entire situation palatable to a broader public audience?

Nathan Tankus (00:06:46):

I think I always thought of it as both - as really engaging the people I was in the economic policy conversation with, and writing broader things to make what was going on more accessible. I'm definitely still thinking of this as a two-tier thing. The thing is, there are people who I think broadly agreed with me about the scale of the crisis. But they're just not writing every day the way that I could. They didn't have the freedom. Even if they could write frequently, they didn't have the freedom to take a research perspective of trying to break down all the set of interrelated issues, and try to do it the way I was doing it.

Nathan Tankus (00:07:44):

The other thing is that I was writing so much that first week. I wrote 21 pieces for Substack. I wrote one piece for another publication in a month. I was publishing a piece basically every weekday. That scale, that pace - there's just no other publication that's set up to do that kind of thing, especially not in the freedom that I had to just focus on it and do it the way I wanted to do it. Doing it myself was just complete freedom to define it how I wanted to.

Nathan Tankus (00:08:30):

The other thing is, a lot of what I was doing was repetition, different ways of saying the same thing. For other publications, it's not necessarily "news" to say the same thing ten different ways. But I felt it was news. Because it's one thing to hear that it's a worse crisis than the Great Depression. It's one thing to hear it's the worst unemployment situation, far worse and far faster than the Great Recession. But to really understand that, to really have a grasp of what that means and the scale of the problem you're talking about, you can't just read one piece that explains it to you. It has to be something that you engage with day in and day out for weeks.

Nathan Tankus (00:09:18):

Then it fully starts to sink in, the scale of what we're talking about. Definitely when I was starting to write around mid-March, the scale even in economic policy circles wasn't being taken seriously. We're still not anywhere near responding to the crisis with the scale that it requires. I was talking about leaving a $3 trillion package just for households alone, let alone state and local governments. And leaving at least $1 trillion for state and local governments just over the first four months or six months or so. We still haven't reached that scale. That definitely was not the economic policy conversation that was happening in March. I was already, from the word “go” basically, making that point - talking about how the CARES Act, the big thing Congress ended up passing, which they did pass quickly, was far too small. That definitely was not the conversation, even among people who understood that we were in a big recession.

Nadia (00:10:34):

It's interesting to just think about the opportunity that presents itself when you have these big crises like this, this particular pandemic being the most extreme example I can think of, where it's a time when suddenly everyone you thought was an authority maybe isn't an authority anymore. No one really knows what's going on. Everyone is searching and grasping for anyone with a coherent narrative on the story. It seems like you were really well positioned to be able to do that.

Nathan Tankus (00:11:01):

Yeah, I was well positioned because that was my experience in the last crisis. What got me interested in economics was having this feeling that this was the most important thing going on, and that the assigned experts didn't really have a good handle on what was going on. That was fascinating to me. There's danger in that. Things aren't about crises all the time. Up until the public health crisis, I don't think we were necessarily facing some big economic crisis that was happening or going to happen in the next few years.

Nathan Tankus (00:11:37):

It had been over a decade since the 2008 crisis. When your introduction is a crisis, there's a danger of expecting that crises are going to happen all the time, which is something I had to be wary of. Entering that way, the advantage is that when crises do happen, you are prepared for them. You can think about what is often missing in the conversation during those crises, and what would be useful to someone who is just trying to get a handle on economics and a handle on the crisis in the moment, on the fly.

Nadia (00:12:25):

I'm particularly intrigued by this lack of gatekeeping that seems to emerge, even outside of crisis mode, in the realm of economics and finance-related writing. There are just so many prolific writers that are available at anyone's fingertips on the Internet. We've seen a lot of finance writers on Substack. It feels like there is this alignment with the idea of independent writing and this particular area of study. I'm thinking about Byrne Hobart - he writes finance and focuses on business on Substack. He also doesn't have a bachelor’s degree and has written about the experience of being hired at a hedge fund without one. Why do you think this particular vertical lends itself so well to a lack of gatekeeping? What comes to mind for me is maybe money as the ultimate metric or credential. But then is the converse also true, where in other fields of study, where there aren't these clear metrics or numbers involved, maybe those verticals are more likely to gatekeep than in economics or finance?

Nathan Tankus (00:13:27):

I think there's two layers. First of all, there are two different things there. There's gatekeeping and credentials in finance, and then there’s gatekeeping and credentials in economics and the economic policy conversation. They're a little distinct. For finance, I think that there are credentials. There are things that people are seeking, but they're not necessarily educational credentials. Finance is more of a quirky culture. It sees itself as distinct from the hierarchies that exist elsewhere in society.

Nathan Tankus (00:14:04):

Often, they're looking for a certain type of thinker or a certain type of person. Ultimately someone who can do the work that has some alternative way of proving their credentials besides an educational credential. They're ultimately looking for a product. They're looking for something useful. I think in the economic policy conversation, it's less that there aren't gatekeepers, but that there are people who can shepherd you. In the same way that with a golf club, you don't need to have a golf membership. You just need to be brought in by someone with a golf membership who decides to bring you in. I think that's what happened in the economic policy conversation. Someone following you on Twitter is a bit of an endorsement. Someone tweeting out your pieces is somewhat an endorsement, sometimes a really strong endorsement.

Nathan Tankus (00:15:16):

A lot for me was Joe Weisenthal and Bloomberg. Joe, as soon as I started writing, helped me. We've been friends for a while, and people who’ve talked and engaged for a long time. As soon as I started writing, he was super supportive. Tweeted out every piece really, really aggressively, along with the most extreme praise that you could possibly give someone as a writer. Him and then others - Miles at Yahoo Finance, various people put their weight behind what I was putting out there. People were then just engaging and arguing with me. David Beckworth from The Mercatus Center was quoted in the Bloomberg profile, and he did a big interview with me talking about Treasury issues, the coronavirus crisis, and the Federal Reserve.

Nathan Tankus (00:16:25):

I had a lot of people who were engaging me and taking me seriously, and having these back-and-forths gave me the legitimacy and signaled that I was really someone they needed to pay attention to. I wouldn't go so far as to say there are no gatekeepers. It's just that the gatekeepers structure is looser on Twitter. It's not about getting a four-year educational credential or agreeing with the set of analysis as an institution. A set of prominent figures can tweet out your piece, and that can be sufficient engagement, legitimacy, and so on.

Nadia (00:17:15):

That makes sense. As we're talking through this reputation that exists, you're mostly citing people on Twitter or individuals that you're talking to. I'm wondering how that parallels. Where do you see the overlap of what we think of as “trained economists,” versus this study of economics that can take place anywhere? I'm particularly curious for someone like you, who spent as much time learning outside of school as in school. It surprises me that you say you'd like to study for a PhD in law at some point. It sounds like to some extent, you are still bought into the idea of going through that more formal pathway. At the same time, it seems like focusing on law is motivated by this desire to understand money through a lens outside of the field of economics. I'm curious, what is your take on the more distinctly academic field of economics, and how does or doesn't that overlap with the reputation system that you're talking about?

Nathan Tankus (00:18:15):

I think it does overlap. I think economists are a little bit on the back foot when it comes to that kind of policy conversation, because the economic profession has a bad reputation coming out of the 2008 crisis. People debate how deserved that is. I would say it's mostly deserved, with obviously exceptions of individual people. I think that means that economists have a really hard time fully delegitimizing a person, as someone who is not worth listening to.

Nathan Tankus (00:18:59):

Within economics, they do that to people who are accomplished PhD professors all the time. Whether I or someone else who is a close colleague of mine has credentials is a little bit besides the point in terms of the hierarchies that people try to enforce within economics. With economic policy in the broader space, people are just looking for what's useful. If I'm saying something useful and people aren't finding this other mainstream economist's commentary useful, they're going to take something from me.

Nathan Tankus (00:19:31):

Now, there still is that barrier that I'm never going to be publicly some congressperson's advisor until I have a PhD. People will talk to me on background. I'll have a phone call on background with various people, but it's just not possible to really take me on in an advisory capacity, let alone in an actual position somewhere. That is still a barrier. Right now, I'm doing these journalistic pieces. People can put me in a category. They can rationalize it to themselves as: he’s producing sophisticated economic journalism. In some ways, I am pursuing doing that rather than engaging these academic debates. And to really be fully taken seriously in those academic debates, I'm going to need to get a PhD.

Nathan Tankus (00:20:26):

I'm also interested in teaching. I'm interested in pedagogy. On that level, I'm also interested in pursuing a PhD and pursuing a professorship position somewhere. Obviously, Substack has changed that a lot. I don't need it for any economic reasons. I could very, very easily and very comfortably live on writing my Substack into the future. But still, I would want to do that. Eventually, those kinds of positions make it much easier to be publicly sighted by congresspersons, and ultimately - who knows? - Be in a position to potentially be up for some sort of policy job.

Nadia (00:21:19):

It's interesting to hear you say that. I think my perception is, you've written this body of work on Substack that itself could be a research artifact or output that is worthy of something that, say, a PhD could have done. I'm wondering, have your goals changed? Maybe initially, you were just writing for whichever audience was going to listen to you. But now as you're reaching these different sorts of audiences and attracting serious interest from, say, government officials, do you feel that need for some bigger stamp of approval in order to get to those conversations that you want to have? And be in the room of the places you want to be? Is that recent success driving that change?

Nathan Tankus (00:22:04):

I think that was always my initial goal. A lot of the people, for example, who I have for email signups are in government. I've had eight people from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation sign up with their FDIC emails, before the Bloomberg profile came out, and a couple more since then. My government email following was actually pretty prominent before the Bloomberg profile. I had done an informal Zoom call with some congressional staffers in the past, and a few calls here and there with people. Bharat, who is one of the commissioners on the Coronavirus Oversight Commission, had been publicly supportive of my work already before anything came out with the Bloomberg profile.

Nathan Tankus (00:23:06):

I was already thinking in terms of, I want to have some influence now, and I want to be able to have more influence on governmental policy in terms of getting my PhD. Which I already wasn't planning on doing so, or pursuing more education in the fall. Especially with just coronavirus going around, really making that logistically harder. My plan basically on that has not really changed much otherwise. Except obviously the Bloomberg profile has given me more opportunities of, say speeding that process up.

Nadia (00:23:53):

In your ideal world, would there not be these sorts of barriers to getting into those next level conversations that you're talking about? Being officially cited on testimonials and things like that. Do you think there's a good reason why we do maintain that separation between independent researchers, or journalism, or however you want to characterize what you're doing right now, and the more credential, needs a PhD kind of thing? Is that the right way for the world to be?

Nathan Tankus (00:24:28):

I think there is a role for the educational credential and the educational institutions. Especially because so much of the alternative credentials that people rely on are racialized and gendered. I wrote a thread responding to the otherwise supportive Bloomberg profile the day it was posted disagreeing with the idea that I have no credentials. I have no educational credentials. I think that's a careful difference. When I was 19 and I put on a dress shirt and dress slacks and walked into a conference, my whiteness, being a man, made no one really give me a second look in terms of being in that room.

Nathan Tankus (00:25:26):

I deserved to be in that room. I had a pass to be in that room simply by the nature of what I looked like. That has facilitated greatly my ability to absorb information and to get into conversations with people, because until they realize that I have weird ideas or that I'm not educationally credentialed, the default assumption is that I deserve to be there. I think in a world that hasn't changed a lot of those other structures, but relied less on educational credentials, I'd be concerned that it would be more and more people who looked like me dominating those conversations.

Nathan Tankus (00:26:10):

That said, the flip side of that of course is that the educational credential needs to be much more accessible, and needs to be designed more to fit the lives of those kinds of people who we want to have in those conversations. People who are alienated from conventional academia in the way that it's structured, in the way that the default life is assumed to be the life of an upper middle class white guy. Education definitely needs to be structured in different ways. I think there should be an option for people who struggle with conventional education like myself, to be able to submit work alternatively. Submit something that is the equivalent of a dissertation to get a PhD, or enter into some sort of internship and apprenticeship process along with that dissertation, to gain some of those other skills, especially pedagogical skills.

Nathan Tankus (00:27:17):

We can design better and more alternative pathways. We can make it financially much more accessible. We can make academia much more culturally accessible. But I do think educational institutions do play an important role, in that there's these other sets of institutions and structures that will dominate if education steps out of the way.

Nadia (00:27:39):

That's a really wonderful analysis. Thank you for sharing that. I have one more question on this topic. Then I'd love to talk about the Bloomberg profile a little bit. I'm just wondering, much of the analysis in your publication appears through this lens of modern monetary theory. Which please correct my summary if I get anything wrong here, but is just this idea that governments essentially have a monopoly on being able to print money. And therefore can always issue more as opposed to the current mainstream narrative that new spending plans need to be "paid for" by citizens through taxes, or other sources.

Nadia (00:28:15):

As an outsider to this topic, it seems like the underlying concepts have been around for a while. But modern monetary theory in its modern form has been this growing movement in the past few years. It feels like especially with the recent pandemic and the memes that have come out of it, I feel like this is a sign of tastes that are shifting. Can you help us characterize, where has the growth of that interest been taking place? Is this happening in academic circles or elsewhere? Where are these new ideas being shared?

Nathan Tankus (00:28:44):

First, I'll give my little quick spiel on MMT. It's definitely a focus of the capacity of the federal government to create money. But it's not simply, we can print money rather than issuing bonds. It's really a reframing about how the system already works, that we already always rely on money finance. It's just complicated and convoluted with these sets of institutions that the public doesn't really understand. Then there's this instrument, the government Treasury security, which people think of as this national debt. This scary thing that's going to burden our grandchildren. Really is serving this monetary policy role.

Nathan Tankus (00:29:38):

It's serving a role in the Federal Reserve's complicated world of interest rates and financial conditions, and isn't serving this conventional role of, well, you need to go find money somewhere. It's serving this different purpose. When you look at it that way, there's a whole reframing you can do about how monetary policy works, how fiscal policy works, and even how non-financial regulation, how environmental regulation and health and safety regulation works. That provides a different lens for thinking about how economic policy can work, and how we can provision resources. How we can marshal fiscal resources to accomplish things that we want to do, like responding to the coronavirus depression and responding to the pandemic. That's my capsule spiel of MMT.

Nathan Tankus (00:30:42):

Obviously you can read the Substack, and there's a lot more detail you can go into. I can suggest specific posts as introductory things, but that's the heart of it for me. I think the reason that MMT has gotten more influential is simply because it got some prominence after the 2008 financial crisis and the Euro's own crisis for having correct things to say about those crises. Before MMT, there wasn't really a recognition that countries in Europe had given up quite a valuable thing by giving up their own currencies and relying on the Euro. MMT provided a coherent analysis, which I think has stood the test of time.

Nathan Tankus (00:31:36):

Over the years, simply its predictions have held up while other predictions didn't succeed. As time goes on and as these other predictions turn out to be wrong, about how the national debt is going to explode at any time, about how interest rates are about to explode and disrupt everything, how we're going to have hyperinflation. All these predictions, how they haven't come true. How ideas like the Trump tax cuts meant that the U.S. government couldn't respond to the next recession. These things have clearly proven not to be true. MMT is winning that battle of attrition, where at the same time, people are more and more recognizing that they are urgent problems, which we would want to use government spending to alleviate, that don't otherwise have a strong justification for why we'd be able to do that without say, raising taxes a bunch or cutting spending in other places.

Nathan Tankus (00:32:48):

Especially crises like climate change, but of course right now, coronavirus depression. In that time period where MMT has had the set of successful predictions, other sets of predictions haven't fared as well. The problems are more and more correctly seen as having the urgency that they have. The scales are shifting in one direction towards MMT. I think there also is just more and more recognition that specifically the U.S. dollar isn't going anywhere. Because we've had yet another crisis where the crisis happens, and there is a flight to safety, a flight to countries, to foreign countries wanting to buy up, get safety to the U.S. Other countries having the shortages of dollars because they need access to basic necessities as the global depression took hold.

Nathan Tankus (00:34:02):

The U.S. yet again stepping up to respond to that crisis, and to lend to governments around the world in order to respond to that crisis. In that moment, people want to look for explanations for why that's happening. When if you took the conventional view that big budget deficits meant that the dollar was going to collapse, the exact opposite happening yet again for the second time in a decade. It's hard to understand otherwise.

Nadia (00:34:34):

Got it, that makes sense. Thank you. I'd love to chat about the Bloomberg profile that came out in early July. You kind of blew up after this profile came up, being an understatement. You said that getting that profile piece changed your life forever and for the better. Just for context, for some of the folks that are listening to this, there's a line in the profile itself where they talk about your numbers a little bit. They say that you had 450 subscribers at the time of the profile, getting you $45,000 a year. Then the article came out, and that order of magnitude shifted completely. You mentioned on your Substack a week and some change later that you had gained another 1300 subscribers on top of that 450. What was that experience like for you?

Nathan Tankus (00:35:26):

Unbelievable. Honestly, it was just so overwhelming that I couldn't really handle it. That Friday after the profile, I got 388 subscribers. Almost the total of what I had up to the profile. That was just unbelievable, just completely unbelievable. To the point where I had to try to get a handle of, “This is real. This is happening.” That whole weekend, I had a bunch of phone calls with friends just to try to calm me down. It was such an increase in scale of what I was doing that I had this panic that I had to do a whole bunch of things.

Nathan Tankus (00:36:17):

I had to instantly hire people to do things, and figure out a way to get some of the attention that I had onto other people. That was overwhelming. It really took me until probably five days after the profile to really handle it, and get control, and be able to process that it was happening, because it was so fast. It felt like everything all at once because I went out to breakfast, and someone recognized me from the profile at breakfast. They were on their bike going by the outside of the restaurant. I was in their outside seating. He stopped from his bike to congratulate me.

Nadia (00:37:18):

Wow.

Nathan Tankus (00:37:19):

Then I got up, I paid my bill. Walked up to 8th Avenue, where I was living at the time. There was someone who was at the same sidewalk, and was looking over at me. I was like, "This can't be real." He stopped and asked me if I just had a profile published on me. Then he asked me for a selfie.

Nadia (00:37:45):

Oh my gosh.

Nathan Tankus (00:37:46):

That was two people who recognized me from the profile within eight minutes of each other. That was just so much. That felt like reality was collapsing in on itself and just folding, and the simulation was glitching. That completely blew my mind. Unfortunately, I didn't get recognized again from the profile since. But two within the eight minutes of each other was just unbelievable. Honestly, a lot of it was so overwhelming that I had to deal with it.

Nathan Tankus (00:38:30):

Of course, once I had processed those feelings and kind of, no, this is real. This is happening. You've had this big success. Then I was okay. I could start really seriously planning on what my long-term goals were. Ultimately, this is great. Now, I can pay guest writers, which I'm doing. I've hired a freelance journalist to do some investigative, some smaller investigative reporting for me. I'm in the process of getting the Substack translated into Spanish, and having a Spanish version of the Substack that will translate my archive, and then catch up to the current posts. I'm in the process of really expanding in that way. Now, I can have the potentiality of turning what originally was just the Nathan Tankus Show into a full fledged publication that becomes a platform for alternative economics ideas for the big audience that I now have.

Nadia (00:39:51):

So cool. I'm sitting here getting a total contact high just listening to your story. I'm hearing this mix of emotions from you. Did this article make you feel lucky, or this total loss of control? Because it's this experience that can happen to writers where literally one endorsement or major piece of coverage can just completely change our lives. I can imagine that being both thrilling, but also kind of disorienting.

Nathan Tankus (00:40:15):

Yeah, it was definitely disorienting. It was thrilling, but it was also disorienting. Luckily, I had a writer friend of mine who already had a large following. That was the other thing. My Twitter following went from 14,000 to 80,000. Now it's a little under 89,000. It was coming so quickly. I was getting Twitter followers faster than my heart was beating. Just in and out every moment, 24 hours. Because also, it was getting translated in all these different languages. A Twitter friend of mine, someone who has a Twitter who is a friend of mine, reminded me. I asked them, "How do you deal with it?" They reminded me that you can turn off the notifications for people you don't follow.

Nadia (00:41:05):

Smart move.

Nathan Tankus (00:41:06):

I had to do that. As soon as I did it, it was instant calm. It was like, oh, I'm having a normal experience that I would have had before. There was so much interaction. I started following more people. I would get notifications when I turned them off. It was like my normal set of interactions from before. It tells you how crazy the spotlight was on me at the time. It definitely is a feeling of not having any control over what's going on. I yo-yo'd between these big plans of basically using every single dime that had come in the door, maybe even more, to going, "No, got to wait and see exactly what's going to happen with all this." I'm pretty confident I can sustain it up until this point. I didn't fall below where I was at the peak.

Nathan Tankus (00:42:07):

I've done a more steady, slow growth since then. I'm taking a more wait and see approach. I'm still paying guest writers now and such. The way I'm exercising control now is keeping this big buffer between what I could be putting out the door and what I am putting out the door, in terms of expanding the publication and seeing how things go in the next six months or so. I'm confident that it's still sustaining growth. It's the kind of thing where the jump up, the discontinuous jump up, you can't control. But you can control what you do with it and what you try to do with it, and sustaining the slower pace from then on. That's how I've regained control.

Nathan Tankus (00:43:12):

It's a feeling of extraordinary luck. Obviously I did a lot of work to get to this point. But definitely also extraordinary luck to have the relationships that I have. I have a lot of Bloomberg journalist friends. Peter Coy, the person who authored the profile, isn't one of them. But I've definitely been more of a fixture in that space, both on Twitter and sometimes in person. That changes things. If I was an outsider to that group, and if say Weisenthal tweeted out my pieces but just tweeted it out as someone who just liked what someone was putting out. And not just someone who believed in my work, but also was a friend. Do I get the Bloomberg profile? I don't know. In some sense, you can think of that as also work.

Nadia (00:44:09):

Of course.

Nathan Tankus (00:44:12):

I had lunches, dinners, and going out to drinks with a crew of journalist friends for almost two years before the Bloomberg profile comes out. On the other hand, how many people will get that kind of opportunity? It's back and forth. I can argue it from almost any position. There definitely is a huge, huge element of luck involved. Also, the resources frankly to still be out there, still be putting my thoughts out there without having the big... being able to wait for the big day where I blow up.

Nadia (00:44:52):

I'm still just so struck by this line from the profile where it's just talking about you making $45,000 a year. They say, "He thinks he can learn another $20,000 from other speaking and writing engagements." It feels so surreal. I love seeing where that was at the time that you published it, and where you're at now. Just given everything that happened after that, do you feel like you were setting your sights too low before? Or is that just where it was? I'm wondering if there was some learning here about writers being able to set their ambitions higher than they previously thought possible.

Nathan Tankus (00:45:31):

I don't think there's any way to really set your ambitions. I was slowing down before the profile came out. I was netting one or two. I think it was a few days before where I got four subscribers in a day and was happy about that, because it hadn't been like that for a couple weeks. I think it's the kind of thing you can't plan for. My plans and my thought process at the time was reasonable. There was a way in which this profile could have been written differently, where I got 100 subscribers from it rather than 1350 or whatever the boost I said in the piece was.

Nathan Tankus (00:46:15):

That easily could have been what happened. That's all there is to it really. I think I was on a reasonable pathway to get to 100,000. Let's talk about being friends with Joe. Joe went in and changed the headline around noon of that day to punch it up. He's the one who went from... originally was like, "Credentials don't matter on the internet. I'm just a Nathan Tankus subscriber." Or whatever the original headline was. He punched it up to just, 20-year-old without a bachelors degree has blah blah blah following, or whatever the updated headline was.

Nathan Tankus (00:47:12):

That was the headline that really took off and went global. The article was succeeding. A lot of it was, Bloomberg has the best SEO in the business, far and away. It's also specifically having a profile. Bloomberg is distinct from having a profile in any other publication, even the New York Times. They have this system where if an article is doing well enough, they push it more. Friday night, part of the reason why my subscriptions that Friday were so crazy is because they push notifications of the article to people's phones and devices.

Nathan Tankus (00:48:01):

You can't pay for that kind of publicity, to literally have it show up on someone's Smart watch or something. I just saw some funny screenshots people were sending me funny pictures of. That's the kind of profile that it's impossible to put a value on. I guess it is possible, but it's extremely, extremely valuable. That's just so unique, and something you can't try to replicate it. The best you can do is put your work out there and built all the relationships you can, and hope that you take off at some point. But it's definitely not something you plan for.

Nathan Tankus (00:48:42):

I will say, my experience is that if you're writing about something timely that a lot of people care about, even without that big blowup, a slow and steady consistency can do a lot for you. I think I took advantage. I played my moment very well. I wrote almost every weekday for the first months at a time of the crisis, which was very fast moving. And was able to take advantage of that to have a real big growth initially, and not have any of the growing pains that other publications have. Then wrote pretty consistently from then on.

Nathan Tankus (00:49:29):

My experience, if you're writing about something that has a large enough potential audience, consistently putting out pieces twice a week, you can build an audience. You might be building an audience slower than I did. But if you have the time to devote to it, I think you can eventually build it to where there is a decent... where you can get a decent income out of it. Assuming that you have the depth of knowledge to sustain a twice a week publication, where any individual piece could potentially be interesting to people.

Nadia (00:50:09):

That's right. You were writing for four months before the crazy spike and growing consistently and upholding, it sounds like. You've touched on this a little bit, but I'm wondering what you think success looks like for an independent writer. Does having more paid subscriptions mean that it has to turn into a full-time publication? Or is it just being yourself and continuing to write as you are? Does that change the relationship that you have to your readers if you do turn it more into this publication?

Nathan Tankus (00:50:43):

I could have just kept on going the way I was. Frankly, making $180,000 a year is nothing to sneeze at. That's not something that could really sit well with me. First of all, that's more money than I could possibly imagine having anything to do with. Second, obviously I want to be successful, but I have broader goals. Sitting on $180,000 of income, just because I'm having personal success, doesn't mean anything is changing with this crisis.

Nathan Tankus (00:51:25):

Unemployment insurance benefits as we speak have expired. Based on my previous knowledge of the subject, and also what my investigative journalist is digging up, even if they pass the bill while we have been doing this interview, that isn't sufficient. A lot of people are going to have their benefits cut off, and some of them, it could take months for them to get their benefits. Some people still haven't straightened out their benefits for March.

Nathan Tankus (00:52:01):

I can't sit by when I potentially have the possibility within reach of hiring investigative journalists to dig up more materials on this, and really push the issue on this topic. And bringing in guest writers to write about timely and important stuff as well. Growing a publication lets me have more influence, and more influence can change it. Even if I didn't say anything on a big scale about unemployment insurance, even small, minor changes to legislation. We're talking about a really outsized impact for the amount of money I'm talking about investing.

Nathan Tankus (00:52:45):

There are companies that spend millions and millions and millions of dollars to get relatively minor administrative role making changes from different government agencies. Not even congressional legislation. For me personally, when you get to that scale, I can't imagine doing anything else but trying to make it bigger. The other alternative, which I'm certainly going to do some of, is just donating a bunch to a nonprofit I believe in. I want to be able to eat, but this has much more been about trying to exercise some influence. The money is nice, but it's a poor substitute for that unless I can directly plow it into having more influence over what's going on, and producing research and evidence of a lot of the dysfunction that's happening.

Nadia (00:54:00):

I really like that framing. One of the things that you mentioned you were getting after this recent growth is an editor. I'm curious, as an independent writer who is very much valued for your counterintuitive thinking and writing, what do you think the value is of having an editor?

Nathan Tankus (00:54:17):

Not having an editor was the biggest frustration going into this. That was the biggest thing I wanted to do. That was the thing I was unsatisfied with my income at the time was. To me, $65,000 a year was fine to live on, except I would keep on having to put out stuff that doesn't have editing. Everyone needs an editor. I firmly don't believe in unedited writing. I did it because it was a necessity at the time. For me, other people might not know this, but even just the few pieces that have come out since I've been using an editor I think are dramatically improved for having an editor. Having that checkup, getting rid of distracting spelling errors. But also restructuring the pieces to be more forceful, convincing, to be more accessible.

Nathan Tankus (00:55:19):

For me, I get final say on what the version is. I send my piece to my editor, and then I get edits back in suggestion mode. I accept or don't accept the suggestions. Then I look it over one last time to see if there's anything missing. There are some edits that don't fit my voice, so I don't accept those edits. But I also could take the idea of what they are going for or what she was going for and change it. I think editing is an absolute necessity for writing. I don't really think that editing is something that you can really get by with on a long-term business.

Nathan Tankus (00:56:03):

Obviously Substack is a writing outlet for your more free flowing stuff. I was able to be successful without having an editor. It's not the absolute necessity to have success. But as a writer who takes writing seriously, I don't think I could spend years staring at my own unedited writing ever. At some point, I would really want an editor. I think it's crucial. Especially now that I'm growing, editing now helps provide a more consistent voice across guest posts and my own posts. I think editing is an absolutely essential piece of writing.

Nadia (00:56:48):

Totally. Especially maybe when you're writing alone. It's good to have someone to look at your stuff, and someone to bounce ideas around with. The last thing I want to touch on before we wrap up is the fact that you also experimented with a few different models for paid subscriptions. In the beginning, I believe you had donations only. The pitch was, if you want to extra financially support me, go ahead. Then at some point, you started offering premium content in addition to your free stuff. It seems like you had this mindset shift at some point as going from thinking about paid subscriptions as this extra financial support, to someone actually paying for a service. Just wondering, for people that are listening, can you share any of your learnings there in terms of, how did your psychology evolve around that?

Nathan Tankus (00:57:39):

My initial thinking was, I felt like I couldn't justify taking money from someone unless I could show that I was going to consistently write. Frankly, I've blogged before where I dropped off. It was very inconsistent. I wasn't going to charge anyone, especially something that could potentially also have yearly subscriptions, if I wasn't sure I was going to be consistent with it. But the attention was so immediate and so big. My email list was getting so big that I realized quickly. First of all, I could write every day. Once you've done eight posts in 10 days or whatever, or eight posts in a week, you've shown that you're consistent. You believe in it.

Nathan Tankus (00:58:26):

Secondly, I knew that the audience was there to provide financial support. I didn't realize the extent to which Joe would immediately start tweeting out pieces, and that I would get this immediate rush of attention from it, from the very first piece. The first piece that wasn't just a glorified Facebook post. It's one where I literally created the Substack so that I could have a place to put a Facebook post that I wrote on the crisis just for my friends essentially, my Facebook friends. The first post after that was a post about, were we already heading towards a recession? That got over 10,000 unique views, which is crazy. It's largely because Joe picked the perfect sentence to tweet out, and tweeted it out. I learned very quickly that I had a huge audience that I didn't realize, or what felt huge at the time. Now, the scale is even so much bigger than it was then.

Nathan Tankus (00:59:40):

The biggest thing I think I learned is that people don't think of it as just giving you money, I want this person to have an income. That was my big fear when the Substack had gotten so big. I was like, "Well, people can do that. People can figure it out, have some sense of what's going on. They know that." Or, at least in my head. This is more money than any one person should have. Obviously I have a big finance audience. I'm sure a lot of them would listen to this and go, "What are you talking about?" When I'm calling $150,000 more money than God or whatever. But for me, I couldn't in good conscience tweet about, "Subscribe to my Substack" or whatever, when my annualized income was that high.

Nathan Tankus (01:00:36):

The only way I could justify it was that I could make a commitment that that money was going elsewhere. What I learned in doing that is that, yeah, people see it as they're paying for a service. I would say the lesson to take from that isn't necessarily, you need to be doing premium posts all the time. People think that they're paying for a service even if the posts are free. Generally, there are a lot of people who they like paid content. But if they have a feeling that X or Y thing that I like isn't going to happen without me providing financial support to it, they'll do it. That's why publications like The American Prospect or The Nation or whatever, they can get monthly recurring donations from people as well, even when all of the writing is publicly available.

Nathan Tankus (01:01:36):

While I do think you should realize, or the potential audience of this should realize that people are thinking in terms of paying for a service, that doesn't necessarily mean you need to make everything about premium content. At least in my experience. Especially if people see the value of the conversation that you engage with by having publicly available posts, or mostly publicly available post. And they think it's timely and important. If you're writing, for example, Petition, who I believe is ranked number sixth or number seventh, the most highly paid Substack. The work they put out, that is a mostly paid subscription type of work. I think their pricing reflects that, as well as their posting schedule. Because you're talking about a relatively big, but a specific bankruptcy audience that isn't trying to influence... do what I'm trying to do. Which is stop the wave of bankruptcies.

Nathan Tankus (01:02:48):

They want more inside information on corporate restructurings, on what's going on, largely because of their own investment decisions or purchasing decisions, and so on. That's the kind of work that you don't necessarily see a ton of value in having a ton of publicly available information. Thinking about your audience that way, about, do people think they're getting their personal benefit from your work? Or whether they see some public value in your writing, I think is the biggest determinant in whether you think you should be doing mostly paid posts or mostly free. That said, it all depends on your audience. Many audiences have many different kinds of views on this. I also kind of believe in publicly available content. The more I can avoid putting a paywall on something, or that the paywall just becomes a preview of content, that's my preference.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

For the final episode of this season, we spoke with Nathan Tankus of Notes on the Crises, who writes about the pandemic-induced global depression and how policymakers should respond to it. Nathan started his newsletter at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States in order to analyze the economic impacts of the global crisis.

Nathan has been recognized as a prominent voice in economic policy. His newsletter has followers ranging from journalists to economists, including those working at the Fed, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Department of the Treasury. 

We talked about why Nathan decided to write about the pandemic, what it’s like to write in the field of economic policy, and the Bloomberg profile that skyrocketed the success of his platform.

We’ll take a brief pause as we wrap up this podcast season, but stay tuned for more conversations next month. Let us know if you have suggestions for who we should interview next season!

Links

Notes on the Crises, Nathan’s newsletter

Nathan on Twitter

A 28-Year-Old With No Degree Becomes a Must-Read on the Economy, Nathan’s Bloomberg profile

Highlights

(1:35) Why Nathan decided to start covering the pandemic

(7:44) How Nathan built his initial following

(24:28) The role of credentials in the field of economics

(35:26) How a Bloomberg profile led to achieving his long-term goals

(57:39) Nathan’s thoughts on monetizing his newsletter

On writing about a crisis:

Of course, crises are terrible things. But the one thing that analysts really relish in a crisis is that it's very easy to make a crisis, and analyzing what's going on in the crisis, your full-time job. Because it's such a timely and urgent issue, there are people who are always willing to have these conversations with you and to argue with you. It's the perfect instigator for public conversation and debate. 

On having the ability to write freely:

I was writing so much that first week. I wrote 21 pieces for Substack. I wrote one piece for another publication in a month. I was publishing a piece basically every weekday. That scale, that pace – there's just no other publication that's set up to do that kind of thing, especially not in the freedom that I had to just focus on it and do it the way I wanted to do it. Doing it myself was just complete freedom to define it how I wanted to.

On his decision to focus on one topic:

For other publications, it's not necessarily "news" to say the same thing ten different ways. But I felt it was news. To really understand the pandemic ... you can't just read one piece that explains it to you. It has to be something that you engage with day in and day out for weeks.

Transcript

Nadia (00:00:31):

You write Notes on the Crises, which covers in your words the play-by-play of the current pandemic-induced global depression and how policymakers should respond to that. I remember seeing your name pop up around mid-March. You started your newsletter on Substack at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. What prompted you to start writing?

Nathan Tankus (00:00:51):

Well, I hadn't really been paying attention. I had a lot of other things going on, a lot of other things that I was focused on. I hadn't really been paying attention to what was going on. I sort of vaguely knew what was going on, especially because I was following the Democratic primary, but not in detail. Then, March 9th was the first time I got a wake up call about what was going on. That was when free market trading on U.S. Treasury securities - when the prices went way up, which means the interest rates went way down.

Nathan Tankus (00:01:35):

We actually temporarily hit negative interest rates on some U.S. Treasury securities. That really made my eyes open up wide, and try to understand exactly what was going on. Around the same time, the oil price collapsed. Those things were signals to me because generally, the interest rates on U.S. Treasury securities fall because people expect that the Federal Reserve is going to cut interest rates a lot, and that they're going to hold them low or at zero for a long period of time. Generally, the Federal Reserve does that when there is a big recession.

Nathan Tankus (00:02:28):

That was the signal to put the market stuff aside and put whatever else was going on in my life aside and figure out, “Wait, what actually is going on here? Why is there a big depression coming?” I started reading up, thinking about the coronavirus, and started thinking through the implications of what we really were facing … reading some of the epidemiology literature backing the projections of what was going on, especially the College of London study that came out early on. That made me really wake up and think, this is the big one. No one in my life really gets it.

Nathan Tankus (00:03:13):

None of the people who are outside of the economics world really get it. Even the people within the economics world who I regularly engage with, they aren’t fully taking seriously the implications of what was going on. No one was really being paid to really spend all their time to focus and do that. I had been thinking about starting a Substack for a while to produce my own commentary. I had some other projects that I wanted to finish first, but this seemed to take precedence for me over all of that. It was time to just try to get out early, and try to do as much as I could to find what was happening.

Nadia (00:03:55):

It's like the perfect research problem. Because you're already well positioned to be thinking about this kind of stuff. You were working in a research capacity already, right? This is the most timely thing you could focus in on full-time.

Nathan Tankus (00:04:08):

Yeah, exactly. Of course, crises are terrible things. But the one thing that analysts really relish in a crisis is that it's very easy to make a crisis, and analyzing what's going on in the crisis, your full-time job. Because it's such a timely and urgent issue, there are people who are always willing to have these conversations with you and to argue with you. It's just the perfect instigator for public conversation and debate. With the collapse of journalism and the way that economic policy is structured in the United States, there was a real gap that I could fill. I think my experience over the last four months really shows that I was right in my estimate that if I started writing right then, it would be something that could define a real turning point in my career.

Nadia (00:05:25):

Which seems to be playing out already.

Nathan Tankus (00:05:27):

I mean, it couldn't have played out much beyond what I could have ever imagined.

Nadia (00:05:30):

Really?

Nathan Tankus (00:05:31):

I had some sense, but as I announced recently, I'm planning on turning Notes on the Crises into a full fledged publication, hiring guest writers, and hiring investigative journalists to investigate some things around the state unemployment insurance systems for me. I just could never have imagined having the resources to do that before this. I sort of had the idea I could have a decent, nice income like the Bloomberg profile talks about. Everything from the Bloomberg profile on me since has changed the scale of what I could do.

Nadia (00:06:18):

Yeah. You've had a really incredible trajectory. I have an entire section of this interview devoted just to talking about the Bloomberg profile.

Nathan Tankus (00:06:23):

Sure.

Nadia (00:06:23):

I'm excited to dig into all of that with you. I'm curious, you're saying that you felt like when you started writing, no one you really knew was talking about it. Nobody even in the economic circles that you were in were talking about it. When you started writing, were you thinking of having this be for the economic circles that you're involved in, or to make this entire situation palatable to a broader public audience?

Nathan Tankus (00:06:46):

I think I always thought of it as both - as really engaging the people I was in the economic policy conversation with, and writing broader things to make what was going on more accessible. I'm definitely still thinking of this as a two-tier thing. The thing is, there are people who I think broadly agreed with me about the scale of the crisis. But they're just not writing every day the way that I could. They didn't have the freedom. Even if they could write frequently, they didn't have the freedom to take a research perspective of trying to break down all the set of interrelated issues, and try to do it the way I was doing it.

Nathan Tankus (00:07:44):

The other thing is that I was writing so much that first week. I wrote 21 pieces for Substack. I wrote one piece for another publication in a month. I was publishing a piece basically every weekday. That scale, that pace - there's just no other publication that's set up to do that kind of thing, especially not in the freedom that I had to just focus on it and do it the way I wanted to do it. Doing it myself was just complete freedom to define it how I wanted to.

Nathan Tankus (00:08:30):

The other thing is, a lot of what I was doing was repetition, different ways of saying the same thing. For other publications, it's not necessarily "news" to say the same thing ten different ways. But I felt it was news. Because it's one thing to hear that it's a worse crisis than the Great Depression. It's one thing to hear it's the worst unemployment situation, far worse and far faster than the Great Recession. But to really understand that, to really have a grasp of what that means and the scale of the problem you're talking about, you can't just read one piece that explains it to you. It has to be something that you engage with day in and day out for weeks.

Nathan Tankus (00:09:18):

Then it fully starts to sink in, the scale of what we're talking about. Definitely when I was starting to write around mid-March, the scale even in economic policy circles wasn't being taken seriously. We're still not anywhere near responding to the crisis with the scale that it requires. I was talking about leaving a $3 trillion package just for households alone, let alone state and local governments. And leaving at least $1 trillion for state and local governments just over the first four months or six months or so. We still haven't reached that scale. That definitely was not the economic policy conversation that was happening in March. I was already, from the word “go” basically, making that point - talking about how the CARES Act, the big thing Congress ended up passing, which they did pass quickly, was far too small. That definitely was not the conversation, even among people who understood that we were in a big recession.

Nadia (00:10:34):

It's interesting to just think about the opportunity that presents itself when you have these big crises like this, this particular pandemic being the most extreme example I can think of, where it's a time when suddenly everyone you thought was an authority maybe isn't an authority anymore. No one really knows what's going on. Everyone is searching and grasping for anyone with a coherent narrative on the story. It seems like you were really well positioned to be able to do that.

Nathan Tankus (00:11:01):

Yeah, I was well positioned because that was my experience in the last crisis. What got me interested in economics was having this feeling that this was the most important thing going on, and that the assigned experts didn't really have a good handle on what was going on. That was fascinating to me. There's danger in that. Things aren't about crises all the time. Up until the public health crisis, I don't think we were necessarily facing some big economic crisis that was happening or going to happen in the next few years.

Nathan Tankus (00:11:37):

It had been over a decade since the 2008 crisis. When your introduction is a crisis, there's a danger of expecting that crises are going to happen all the time, which is something I had to be wary of. Entering that way, the advantage is that when crises do happen, you are prepared for them. You can think about what is often missing in the conversation during those crises, and what would be useful to someone who is just trying to get a handle on economics and a handle on the crisis in the moment, on the fly.

Nadia (00:12:25):

I'm particularly intrigued by this lack of gatekeeping that seems to emerge, even outside of crisis mode, in the realm of economics and finance-related writing. There are just so many prolific writers that are available at anyone's fingertips on the Internet. We've seen a lot of finance writers on Substack. It feels like there is this alignment with the idea of independent writing and this particular area of study. I'm thinking about Byrne Hobart - he writes finance and focuses on business on Substack. He also doesn't have a bachelor’s degree and has written about the experience of being hired at a hedge fund without one. Why do you think this particular vertical lends itself so well to a lack of gatekeeping? What comes to mind for me is maybe money as the ultimate metric or credential. But then is the converse also true, where in other fields of study, where there aren't these clear metrics or numbers involved, maybe those verticals are more likely to gatekeep than in economics or finance?

Nathan Tankus (00:13:27):

I think there's two layers. First of all, there are two different things there. There's gatekeeping and credentials in finance, and then there’s gatekeeping and credentials in economics and the economic policy conversation. They're a little distinct. For finance, I think that there are credentials. There are things that people are seeking, but they're not necessarily educational credentials. Finance is more of a quirky culture. It sees itself as distinct from the hierarchies that exist elsewhere in society.

Nathan Tankus (00:14:04):

Often, they're looking for a certain type of thinker or a certain type of person. Ultimately someone who can do the work that has some alternative way of proving their credentials besides an educational credential. They're ultimately looking for a product. They're looking for something useful. I think in the economic policy conversation, it's less that there aren't gatekeepers, but that there are people who can shepherd you. In the same way that with a golf club, you don't need to have a golf membership. You just need to be brought in by someone with a golf membership who decides to bring you in. I think that's what happened in the economic policy conversation. Someone following you on Twitter is a bit of an endorsement. Someone tweeting out your pieces is somewhat an endorsement, sometimes a really strong endorsement.

Nathan Tankus (00:15:16):

A lot for me was Joe Weisenthal and Bloomberg. Joe, as soon as I started writing, helped me. We've been friends for a while, and people who’ve talked and engaged for a long time. As soon as I started writing, he was super supportive. Tweeted out every piece really, really aggressively, along with the most extreme praise that you could possibly give someone as a writer. Him and then others - Miles at Yahoo Finance, various people put their weight behind what I was putting out there. People were then just engaging and arguing with me. David Beckworth from The Mercatus Center was quoted in the Bloomberg profile, and he did a big interview with me talking about Treasury issues, the coronavirus crisis, and the Federal Reserve.

Nathan Tankus (00:16:25):

I had a lot of people who were engaging me and taking me seriously, and having these back-and-forths gave me the legitimacy and signaled that I was really someone they needed to pay attention to. I wouldn't go so far as to say there are no gatekeepers. It's just that the gatekeepers structure is looser on Twitter. It's not about getting a four-year educational credential or agreeing with the set of analysis as an institution. A set of prominent figures can tweet out your piece, and that can be sufficient engagement, legitimacy, and so on.

Nadia (00:17:15):

That makes sense. As we're talking through this reputation that exists, you're mostly citing people on Twitter or individuals that you're talking to. I'm wondering how that parallels. Where do you see the overlap of what we think of as “trained economists,” versus this study of economics that can take place anywhere? I'm particularly curious for someone like you, who spent as much time learning outside of school as in school. It surprises me that you say you'd like to study for a PhD in law at some point. It sounds like to some extent, you are still bought into the idea of going through that more formal pathway. At the same time, it seems like focusing on law is motivated by this desire to understand money through a lens outside of the field of economics. I'm curious, what is your take on the more distinctly academic field of economics, and how does or doesn't that overlap with the reputation system that you're talking about?

Nathan Tankus (00:18:15):

I think it does overlap. I think economists are a little bit on the back foot when it comes to that kind of policy conversation, because the economic profession has a bad reputation coming out of the 2008 crisis. People debate how deserved that is. I would say it's mostly deserved, with obviously exceptions of individual people. I think that means that economists have a really hard time fully delegitimizing a person, as someone who is not worth listening to.

Nathan Tankus (00:18:59):

Within economics, they do that to people who are accomplished PhD professors all the time. Whether I or someone else who is a close colleague of mine has credentials is a little bit besides the point in terms of the hierarchies that people try to enforce within economics. With economic policy in the broader space, people are just looking for what's useful. If I'm saying something useful and people aren't finding this other mainstream economist's commentary useful, they're going to take something from me.

Nathan Tankus (00:19:31):

Now, there still is that barrier that I'm never going to be publicly some congressperson's advisor until I have a PhD. People will talk to me on background. I'll have a phone call on background with various people, but it's just not possible to really take me on in an advisory capacity, let alone in an actual position somewhere. That is still a barrier. Right now, I'm doing these journalistic pieces. People can put me in a category. They can rationalize it to themselves as: he’s producing sophisticated economic journalism. In some ways, I am pursuing doing that rather than engaging these academic debates. And to really be fully taken seriously in those academic debates, I'm going to need to get a PhD.

Nathan Tankus (00:20:26):

I'm also interested in teaching. I'm interested in pedagogy. On that level, I'm also interested in pursuing a PhD and pursuing a professorship position somewhere. Obviously, Substack has changed that a lot. I don't need it for any economic reasons. I could very, very easily and very comfortably live on writing my Substack into the future. But still, I would want to do that. Eventually, those kinds of positions make it much easier to be publicly sighted by congresspersons, and ultimately - who knows? - Be in a position to potentially be up for some sort of policy job.

Nadia (00:21:19):

It's interesting to hear you say that. I think my perception is, you've written this body of work on Substack that itself could be a research artifact or output that is worthy of something that, say, a PhD could have done. I'm wondering, have your goals changed? Maybe initially, you were just writing for whichever audience was going to listen to you. But now as you're reaching these different sorts of audiences and attracting serious interest from, say, government officials, do you feel that need for some bigger stamp of approval in order to get to those conversations that you want to have? And be in the room of the places you want to be? Is that recent success driving that change?

Nathan Tankus (00:22:04):

I think that was always my initial goal. A lot of the people, for example, who I have for email signups are in government. I've had eight people from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation sign up with their FDIC emails, before the Bloomberg profile came out, and a couple more since then. My government email following was actually pretty prominent before the Bloomberg profile. I had done an informal Zoom call with some congressional staffers in the past, and a few calls here and there with people. Bharat, who is one of the commissioners on the Coronavirus Oversight Commission, had been publicly supportive of my work already before anything came out with the Bloomberg profile.

Nathan Tankus (00:23:06):

I was already thinking in terms of, I want to have some influence now, and I want to be able to have more influence on governmental policy in terms of getting my PhD. Which I already wasn't planning on doing so, or pursuing more education in the fall. Especially with just coronavirus going around, really making that logistically harder. My plan basically on that has not really changed much otherwise. Except obviously the Bloomberg profile has given me more opportunities of, say speeding that process up.

Nadia (00:23:53):

In your ideal world, would there not be these sorts of barriers to getting into those next level conversations that you're talking about? Being officially cited on testimonials and things like that. Do you think there's a good reason why we do maintain that separation between independent researchers, or journalism, or however you want to characterize what you're doing right now, and the more credential, needs a PhD kind of thing? Is that the right way for the world to be?

Nathan Tankus (00:24:28):

I think there is a role for the educational credential and the educational institutions. Especially because so much of the alternative credentials that people rely on are racialized and gendered. I wrote a thread responding to the otherwise supportive Bloomberg profile the day it was posted disagreeing with the idea that I have no credentials. I have no educational credentials. I think that's a careful difference. When I was 19 and I put on a dress shirt and dress slacks and walked into a conference, my whiteness, being a man, made no one really give me a second look in terms of being in that room.

Nathan Tankus (00:25:26):

I deserved to be in that room. I had a pass to be in that room simply by the nature of what I looked like. That has facilitated greatly my ability to absorb information and to get into conversations with people, because until they realize that I have weird ideas or that I'm not educationally credentialed, the default assumption is that I deserve to be there. I think in a world that hasn't changed a lot of those other structures, but relied less on educational credentials, I'd be concerned that it would be more and more people who looked like me dominating those conversations.

Nathan Tankus (00:26:10):

That said, the flip side of that of course is that the educational credential needs to be much more accessible, and needs to be designed more to fit the lives of those kinds of people who we want to have in those conversations. People who are alienated from conventional academia in the way that it's structured, in the way that the default life is assumed to be the life of an upper middle class white guy. Education definitely needs to be structured in different ways. I think there should be an option for people who struggle with conventional education like myself, to be able to submit work alternatively. Submit something that is the equivalent of a dissertation to get a PhD, or enter into some sort of internship and apprenticeship process along with that dissertation, to gain some of those other skills, especially pedagogical skills.

Nathan Tankus (00:27:17):

We can design better and more alternative pathways. We can make it financially much more accessible. We can make academia much more culturally accessible. But I do think educational institutions do play an important role, in that there's these other sets of institutions and structures that will dominate if education steps out of the way.

Nadia (00:27:39):

That's a really wonderful analysis. Thank you for sharing that. I have one more question on this topic. Then I'd love to talk about the Bloomberg profile a little bit. I'm just wondering, much of the analysis in your publication appears through this lens of modern monetary theory. Which please correct my summary if I get anything wrong here, but is just this idea that governments essentially have a monopoly on being able to print money. And therefore can always issue more as opposed to the current mainstream narrative that new spending plans need to be "paid for" by citizens through taxes, or other sources.

Nadia (00:28:15):

As an outsider to this topic, it seems like the underlying concepts have been around for a while. But modern monetary theory in its modern form has been this growing movement in the past few years. It feels like especially with the recent pandemic and the memes that have come out of it, I feel like this is a sign of tastes that are shifting. Can you help us characterize, where has the growth of that interest been taking place? Is this happening in academic circles or elsewhere? Where are these new ideas being shared?

Nathan Tankus (00:28:44):

First, I'll give my little quick spiel on MMT. It's definitely a focus of the capacity of the federal government to create money. But it's not simply, we can print money rather than issuing bonds. It's really a reframing about how the system already works, that we already always rely on money finance. It's just complicated and convoluted with these sets of institutions that the public doesn't really understand. Then there's this instrument, the government Treasury security, which people think of as this national debt. This scary thing that's going to burden our grandchildren. Really is serving this monetary policy role.

Nathan Tankus (00:29:38):

It's serving a role in the Federal Reserve's complicated world of interest rates and financial conditions, and isn't serving this conventional role of, well, you need to go find money somewhere. It's serving this different purpose. When you look at it that way, there's a whole reframing you can do about how monetary policy works, how fiscal policy works, and even how non-financial regulation, how environmental regulation and health and safety regulation works. That provides a different lens for thinking about how economic policy can work, and how we can provision resources. How we can marshal fiscal resources to accomplish things that we want to do, like responding to the coronavirus depression and responding to the pandemic. That's my capsule spiel of MMT.

Nathan Tankus (00:30:42):

Obviously you can read the Substack, and there's a lot more detail you can go into. I can suggest specific posts as introductory things, but that's the heart of it for me. I think the reason that MMT has gotten more influential is simply because it got some prominence after the 2008 financial crisis and the Euro's own crisis for having correct things to say about those crises. Before MMT, there wasn't really a recognition that countries in Europe had given up quite a valuable thing by giving up their own currencies and relying on the Euro. MMT provided a coherent analysis, which I think has stood the test of time.

Nathan Tankus (00:31:36):

Over the years, simply its predictions have held up while other predictions didn't succeed. As time goes on and as these other predictions turn out to be wrong, about how the national debt is going to explode at any time, about how interest rates are about to explode and disrupt everything, how we're going to have hyperinflation. All these predictions, how they haven't come true. How ideas like the Trump tax cuts meant that the U.S. government couldn't respond to the next recession. These things have clearly proven not to be true. MMT is winning that battle of attrition, where at the same time, people are more and more recognizing that they are urgent problems, which we would want to use government spending to alleviate, that don't otherwise have a strong justification for why we'd be able to do that without say, raising taxes a bunch or cutting spending in other places.

Nathan Tankus (00:32:48):

Especially crises like climate change, but of course right now, coronavirus depression. In that time period where MMT has had the set of successful predictions, other sets of predictions haven't fared as well. The problems are more and more correctly seen as having the urgency that they have. The scales are shifting in one direction towards MMT. I think there also is just more and more recognition that specifically the U.S. dollar isn't going anywhere. Because we've had yet another crisis where the crisis happens, and there is a flight to safety, a flight to countries, to foreign countries wanting to buy up, get safety to the U.S. Other countries having the shortages of dollars because they need access to basic necessities as the global depression took hold.

Nathan Tankus (00:34:02):

The U.S. yet again stepping up to respond to that crisis, and to lend to governments around the world in order to respond to that crisis. In that moment, people want to look for explanations for why that's happening. When if you took the conventional view that big budget deficits meant that the dollar was going to collapse, the exact opposite happening yet again for the second time in a decade. It's hard to understand otherwise.

Nadia (00:34:34):

Got it, that makes sense. Thank you. I'd love to chat about the Bloomberg profile that came out in early July. You kind of blew up after this profile came up, being an understatement. You said that getting that profile piece changed your life forever and for the better. Just for context, for some of the folks that are listening to this, there's a line in the profile itself where they talk about your numbers a little bit. They say that you had 450 subscribers at the time of the profile, getting you $45,000 a year. Then the article came out, and that order of magnitude shifted completely. You mentioned on your Substack a week and some change later that you had gained another 1300 subscribers on top of that 450. What was that experience like for you?

Nathan Tankus (00:35:26):

Unbelievable. Honestly, it was just so overwhelming that I couldn't really handle it. That Friday after the profile, I got 388 subscribers. Almost the total of what I had up to the profile. That was just unbelievable, just completely unbelievable. To the point where I had to try to get a handle of, “This is real. This is happening.” That whole weekend, I had a bunch of phone calls with friends just to try to calm me down. It was such an increase in scale of what I was doing that I had this panic that I had to do a whole bunch of things.

Nathan Tankus (00:36:17):

I had to instantly hire people to do things, and figure out a way to get some of the attention that I had onto other people. That was overwhelming. It really took me until probably five days after the profile to really handle it, and get control, and be able to process that it was happening, because it was so fast. It felt like everything all at once because I went out to breakfast, and someone recognized me from the profile at breakfast. They were on their bike going by the outside of the restaurant. I was in their outside seating. He stopped from his bike to congratulate me.

Nadia (00:37:18):

Wow.

Nathan Tankus (00:37:19):

Then I got up, I paid my bill. Walked up to 8th Avenue, where I was living at the time. There was someone who was at the same sidewalk, and was looking over at me. I was like, "This can't be real." He stopped and asked me if I just had a profile published on me. Then he asked me for a selfie.

Nadia (00:37:45):

Oh my gosh.

Nathan Tankus (00:37:46):

That was two people who recognized me from the profile within eight minutes of each other. That was just so much. That felt like reality was collapsing in on itself and just folding, and the simulation was glitching. That completely blew my mind. Unfortunately, I didn't get recognized again from the profile since. But two within the eight minutes of each other was just unbelievable. Honestly, a lot of it was so overwhelming that I had to deal with it.

Nathan Tankus (00:38:30):

Of course, once I had processed those feelings and kind of, no, this is real. This is happening. You've had this big success. Then I was okay. I could start really seriously planning on what my long-term goals were. Ultimately, this is great. Now, I can pay guest writers, which I'm doing. I've hired a freelance journalist to do some investigative, some smaller investigative reporting for me. I'm in the process of getting the Substack translated into Spanish, and having a Spanish version of the Substack that will translate my archive, and then catch up to the current posts. I'm in the process of really expanding in that way. Now, I can have the potentiality of turning what originally was just the Nathan Tankus Show into a full fledged publication that becomes a platform for alternative economics ideas for the big audience that I now have.

Nadia (00:39:51):

So cool. I'm sitting here getting a total contact high just listening to your story. I'm hearing this mix of emotions from you. Did this article make you feel lucky, or this total loss of control? Because it's this experience that can happen to writers where literally one endorsement or major piece of coverage can just completely change our lives. I can imagine that being both thrilling, but also kind of disorienting.

Nathan Tankus (00:40:15):

Yeah, it was definitely disorienting. It was thrilling, but it was also disorienting. Luckily, I had a writer friend of mine who already had a large following. That was the other thing. My Twitter following went from 14,000 to 80,000. Now it's a little under 89,000. It was coming so quickly. I was getting Twitter followers faster than my heart was beating. Just in and out every moment, 24 hours. Because also, it was getting translated in all these different languages. A Twitter friend of mine, someone who has a Twitter who is a friend of mine, reminded me. I asked them, "How do you deal with it?" They reminded me that you can turn off the notifications for people you don't follow.

Nadia (00:41:05):

Smart move.

Nathan Tankus (00:41:06):

I had to do that. As soon as I did it, it was instant calm. It was like, oh, I'm having a normal experience that I would have had before. There was so much interaction. I started following more people. I would get notifications when I turned them off. It was like my normal set of interactions from before. It tells you how crazy the spotlight was on me at the time. It definitely is a feeling of not having any control over what's going on. I yo-yo'd between these big plans of basically using every single dime that had come in the door, maybe even more, to going, "No, got to wait and see exactly what's going to happen with all this." I'm pretty confident I can sustain it up until this point. I didn't fall below where I was at the peak.

Nathan Tankus (00:42:07):

I've done a more steady, slow growth since then. I'm taking a more wait and see approach. I'm still paying guest writers now and such. The way I'm exercising control now is keeping this big buffer between what I could be putting out the door and what I am putting out the door, in terms of expanding the publication and seeing how things go in the next six months or so. I'm confident that it's still sustaining growth. It's the kind of thing where the jump up, the discontinuous jump up, you can't control. But you can control what you do with it and what you try to do with it, and sustaining the slower pace from then on. That's how I've regained control.

Nathan Tankus (00:43:12):

It's a feeling of extraordinary luck. Obviously I did a lot of work to get to this point. But definitely also extraordinary luck to have the relationships that I have. I have a lot of Bloomberg journalist friends. Peter Coy, the person who authored the profile, isn't one of them. But I've definitely been more of a fixture in that space, both on Twitter and sometimes in person. That changes things. If I was an outsider to that group, and if say Weisenthal tweeted out my pieces but just tweeted it out as someone who just liked what someone was putting out. And not just someone who believed in my work, but also was a friend. Do I get the Bloomberg profile? I don't know. In some sense, you can think of that as also work.

Nadia (00:44:09):

Of course.

Nathan Tankus (00:44:12):

I had lunches, dinners, and going out to drinks with a crew of journalist friends for almost two years before the Bloomberg profile comes out. On the other hand, how many people will get that kind of opportunity? It's back and forth. I can argue it from almost any position. There definitely is a huge, huge element of luck involved. Also, the resources frankly to still be out there, still be putting my thoughts out there without having the big... being able to wait for the big day where I blow up.

Nadia (00:44:52):

I'm still just so struck by this line from the profile where it's just talking about you making $45,000 a year. They say, "He thinks he can learn another $20,000 from other speaking and writing engagements." It feels so surreal. I love seeing where that was at the time that you published it, and where you're at now. Just given everything that happened after that, do you feel like you were setting your sights too low before? Or is that just where it was? I'm wondering if there was some learning here about writers being able to set their ambitions higher than they previously thought possible.

Nathan Tankus (00:45:31):

I don't think there's any way to really set your ambitions. I was slowing down before the profile came out. I was netting one or two. I think it was a few days before where I got four subscribers in a day and was happy about that, because it hadn't been like that for a couple weeks. I think it's the kind of thing you can't plan for. My plans and my thought process at the time was reasonable. There was a way in which this profile could have been written differently, where I got 100 subscribers from it rather than 1350 or whatever the boost I said in the piece was.

Nathan Tankus (00:46:15):

That easily could have been what happened. That's all there is to it really. I think I was on a reasonable pathway to get to 100,000. Let's talk about being friends with Joe. Joe went in and changed the headline around noon of that day to punch it up. He's the one who went from... originally was like, "Credentials don't matter on the internet. I'm just a Nathan Tankus subscriber." Or whatever the original headline was. He punched it up to just, 20-year-old without a bachelors degree has blah blah blah following, or whatever the updated headline was.

Nathan Tankus (00:47:12):

That was the headline that really took off and went global. The article was succeeding. A lot of it was, Bloomberg has the best SEO in the business, far and away. It's also specifically having a profile. Bloomberg is distinct from having a profile in any other publication, even the New York Times. They have this system where if an article is doing well enough, they push it more. Friday night, part of the reason why my subscriptions that Friday were so crazy is because they push notifications of the article to people's phones and devices.

Nathan Tankus (00:48:01):

You can't pay for that kind of publicity, to literally have it show up on someone's Smart watch or something. I just saw some funny screenshots people were sending me funny pictures of. That's the kind of profile that it's impossible to put a value on. I guess it is possible, but it's extremely, extremely valuable. That's just so unique, and something you can't try to replicate it. The best you can do is put your work out there and built all the relationships you can, and hope that you take off at some point. But it's definitely not something you plan for.

Nathan Tankus (00:48:42):

I will say, my experience is that if you're writing about something timely that a lot of people care about, even without that big blowup, a slow and steady consistency can do a lot for you. I think I took advantage. I played my moment very well. I wrote almost every weekday for the first months at a time of the crisis, which was very fast moving. And was able to take advantage of that to have a real big growth initially, and not have any of the growing pains that other publications have. Then wrote pretty consistently from then on.

Nathan Tankus (00:49:29):

My experience, if you're writing about something that has a large enough potential audience, consistently putting out pieces twice a week, you can build an audience. You might be building an audience slower than I did. But if you have the time to devote to it, I think you can eventually build it to where there is a decent... where you can get a decent income out of it. Assuming that you have the depth of knowledge to sustain a twice a week publication, where any individual piece could potentially be interesting to people.

Nadia (00:50:09):

That's right. You were writing for four months before the crazy spike and growing consistently and upholding, it sounds like. You've touched on this a little bit, but I'm wondering what you think success looks like for an independent writer. Does having more paid subscriptions mean that it has to turn into a full-time publication? Or is it just being yourself and continuing to write as you are? Does that change the relationship that you have to your readers if you do turn it more into this publication?

Nathan Tankus (00:50:43):

I could have just kept on going the way I was. Frankly, making $180,000 a year is nothing to sneeze at. That's not something that could really sit well with me. First of all, that's more money than I could possibly imagine having anything to do with. Second, obviously I want to be successful, but I have broader goals. Sitting on $180,000 of income, just because I'm having personal success, doesn't mean anything is changing with this crisis.

Nathan Tankus (00:51:25):

Unemployment insurance benefits as we speak have expired. Based on my previous knowledge of the subject, and also what my investigative journalist is digging up, even if they pass the bill while we have been doing this interview, that isn't sufficient. A lot of people are going to have their benefits cut off, and some of them, it could take months for them to get their benefits. Some people still haven't straightened out their benefits for March.

Nathan Tankus (00:52:01):

I can't sit by when I potentially have the possibility within reach of hiring investigative journalists to dig up more materials on this, and really push the issue on this topic. And bringing in guest writers to write about timely and important stuff as well. Growing a publication lets me have more influence, and more influence can change it. Even if I didn't say anything on a big scale about unemployment insurance, even small, minor changes to legislation. We're talking about a really outsized impact for the amount of money I'm talking about investing.

Nathan Tankus (00:52:45):

There are companies that spend millions and millions and millions of dollars to get relatively minor administrative role making changes from different government agencies. Not even congressional legislation. For me personally, when you get to that scale, I can't imagine doing anything else but trying to make it bigger. The other alternative, which I'm certainly going to do some of, is just donating a bunch to a nonprofit I believe in. I want to be able to eat, but this has much more been about trying to exercise some influence. The money is nice, but it's a poor substitute for that unless I can directly plow it into having more influence over what's going on, and producing research and evidence of a lot of the dysfunction that's happening.

Nadia (00:54:00):

I really like that framing. One of the things that you mentioned you were getting after this recent growth is an editor. I'm curious, as an independent writer who is very much valued for your counterintuitive thinking and writing, what do you think the value is of having an editor?

Nathan Tankus (00:54:17):

Not having an editor was the biggest frustration going into this. That was the biggest thing I wanted to do. That was the thing I was unsatisfied with my income at the time was. To me, $65,000 a year was fine to live on, except I would keep on having to put out stuff that doesn't have editing. Everyone needs an editor. I firmly don't believe in unedited writing. I did it because it was a necessity at the time. For me, other people might not know this, but even just the few pieces that have come out since I've been using an editor I think are dramatically improved for having an editor. Having that checkup, getting rid of distracting spelling errors. But also restructuring the pieces to be more forceful, convincing, to be more accessible.

Nathan Tankus (00:55:19):

For me, I get final say on what the version is. I send my piece to my editor, and then I get edits back in suggestion mode. I accept or don't accept the suggestions. Then I look it over one last time to see if there's anything missing. There are some edits that don't fit my voice, so I don't accept those edits. But I also could take the idea of what they are going for or what she was going for and change it. I think editing is an absolute necessity for writing. I don't really think that editing is something that you can really get by with on a long-term business.

Nathan Tankus (00:56:03):

Obviously Substack is a writing outlet for your more free flowing stuff. I was able to be successful without having an editor. It's not the absolute necessity to have success. But as a writer who takes writing seriously, I don't think I could spend years staring at my own unedited writing ever. At some point, I would really want an editor. I think it's crucial. Especially now that I'm growing, editing now helps provide a more consistent voice across guest posts and my own posts. I think editing is an absolutely essential piece of writing.

Nadia (00:56:48):

Totally. Especially maybe when you're writing alone. It's good to have someone to look at your stuff, and someone to bounce ideas around with. The last thing I want to touch on before we wrap up is the fact that you also experimented with a few different models for paid subscriptions. In the beginning, I believe you had donations only. The pitch was, if you want to extra financially support me, go ahead. Then at some point, you started offering premium content in addition to your free stuff. It seems like you had this mindset shift at some point as going from thinking about paid subscriptions as this extra financial support, to someone actually paying for a service. Just wondering, for people that are listening, can you share any of your learnings there in terms of, how did your psychology evolve around that?

Nathan Tankus (00:57:39):

My initial thinking was, I felt like I couldn't justify taking money from someone unless I could show that I was going to consistently write. Frankly, I've blogged before where I dropped off. It was very inconsistent. I wasn't going to charge anyone, especially something that could potentially also have yearly subscriptions, if I wasn't sure I was going to be consistent with it. But the attention was so immediate and so big. My email list was getting so big that I realized quickly. First of all, I could write every day. Once you've done eight posts in 10 days or whatever, or eight posts in a week, you've shown that you're consistent. You believe in it.

Nathan Tankus (00:58:26):

Secondly, I knew that the audience was there to provide financial support. I didn't realize the extent to which Joe would immediately start tweeting out pieces, and that I would get this immediate rush of attention from it, from the very first piece. The first piece that wasn't just a glorified Facebook post. It's one where I literally created the Substack so that I could have a place to put a Facebook post that I wrote on the crisis just for my friends essentially, my Facebook friends. The first post after that was a post about, were we already heading towards a recession? That got over 10,000 unique views, which is crazy. It's largely because Joe picked the perfect sentence to tweet out, and tweeted it out. I learned very quickly that I had a huge audience that I didn't realize, or what felt huge at the time. Now, the scale is even so much bigger than it was then.

Nathan Tankus (00:59:40):

The biggest thing I think I learned is that people don't think of it as just giving you money, I want this person to have an income. That was my big fear when the Substack had gotten so big. I was like, "Well, people can do that. People can figure it out, have some sense of what's going on. They know that." Or, at least in my head. This is more money than any one person should have. Obviously I have a big finance audience. I'm sure a lot of them would listen to this and go, "What are you talking about?" When I'm calling $150,000 more money than God or whatever. But for me, I couldn't in good conscience tweet about, "Subscribe to my Substack" or whatever, when my annualized income was that high.

Nathan Tankus (01:00:36):

The only way I could justify it was that I could make a commitment that that money was going elsewhere. What I learned in doing that is that, yeah, people see it as they're paying for a service. I would say the lesson to take from that isn't necessarily, you need to be doing premium posts all the time. People think that they're paying for a service even if the posts are free. Generally, there are a lot of people who they like paid content. But if they have a feeling that X or Y thing that I like isn't going to happen without me providing financial support to it, they'll do it. That's why publications like The American Prospect or The Nation or whatever, they can get monthly recurring donations from people as well, even when all of the writing is publicly available.

Nathan Tankus (01:01:36):

While I do think you should realize, or the potential audience of this should realize that people are thinking in terms of paying for a service, that doesn't necessarily mean you need to make everything about premium content. At least in my experience. Especially if people see the value of the conversation that you engage with by having publicly available posts, or mostly publicly available post. And they think it's timely and important. If you're writing, for example, Petition, who I believe is ranked number sixth or number seventh, the most highly paid Substack. The work they put out, that is a mostly paid subscription type of work. I think their pricing reflects that, as well as their posting schedule. Because you're talking about a relatively big, but a specific bankruptcy audience that isn't trying to influence... do what I'm trying to do. Which is stop the wave of bankruptcies.

Nathan Tankus (01:02:48):

They want more inside information on corporate restructurings, on what's going on, largely because of their own investment decisions or purchasing decisions, and so on. That's the kind of work that you don't necessarily see a ton of value in having a ton of publicly available information. Thinking about your audience that way, about, do people think they're getting their personal benefit from your work? Or whether they see some public value in your writing, I think is the biggest determinant in whether you think you should be doing mostly paid posts or mostly free. That said, it all depends on your audience. Many audiences have many different kinds of views on this. I also kind of believe in publicly available content. The more I can avoid putting a paywall on something, or that the paywall just becomes a preview of content, that's my preference.

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