27-03-2025
Everyone Has a Substack. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Substack is revolutionizing newsletters by breathing new life into a familiar yet tired formula, similar to how podcasts transformed radio. Now, writers can enhance their words with audio, video, events, merch and more. But with such a dynamic product comes risks. Given its myriad use cases and pockets of hyper-specific knowledge, Substack is also a place ripe for false narratives to spread. Without proper guardrails, the platform is headed for the same pitfalls we've seen with podcasting: Anyone can start one, and there is little to no accountability for what is going out to the public.
Things didn't start out that way. In the mid-to-late 2000s, podcasts were a niche endeavor born out of the radio era. If you thought of yourself as a history buff, you were listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Finance gurus tuned into NPR's Planet Money, while sports fans downloaded ESPN's The B.S. Report each week. Fast-forward to today, podcasts have blossomed into a primary news source for millions of Americans, especially impressionable young men. The format even played an outsized role in the 2024 election, with both candidates appearing on various shows, including Call Her Daddy and The Joe Rogan Experience.
