Hamish McKenzie on How Substack is Transforming Public Discourse

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.6 • 907 Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hamish McKenzie is co-founder of Substack, a platform for online publications including Persuasion and writing like Yascha’s weekly column. He is a writer and former journalist based in San Francisco. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Hamish McKenzie discuss how Substack was formed, why its business model rewards different behaviors to traditional social media, and its steadfast commitment to free speech in the face of criticism. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by Jack Shields, and Leonora Barclay Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @joinpersuasion Youtube: Yascha Mounk LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by Vanta.
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0:24.2	Head to vanta.com slash Spotify to learn more.
0:28.6	We haven't tried to fix the speech problems or the action problems that have resulted from the bad social media models of the last generation,
0:38.4	which I think is why people have this mania about misinformation, et cetera.
0:42.3	We haven't tried to fix that stuff with a smarter content moderation policy or a bigger
0:46.8	content moderation apparatus.
0:49.0	We've tried to fix that at the business model level, at the root.
0:52.2	And I think that's why you see Substack is a different type of ecosystem.
0:56.0	And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
1:04.4	A lot of the things I've been doing for the last five years as an editor
1:08.9	and increasingly also as a writer, wouldn't have been
1:12.1	possible without a recent technological innovation, which is called Substack. It is on
1:17.8	Substack that I started and hosted Persuasion when we founded the magazine in July 2020. And as you
1:26.3	know, it is on Substack that this podcast is now hosted and that I share a lot of
1:32.3	my writing with a really big audience that now is about 80,000 people.
1:37.0	So I thought that after all of these years, I should get one of the co-founders of Substack
1:42.8	onto the show to talk about how they conceived of the platform
	...

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