ZD 25.16: Substack Star Power
Substack is attracting stars and blowing up in a good way.
Are you a Headphone American? What are your views on Agent2Agent conversation? Have you been through the vibe coding minefield? Chinese Towers vs American Blocks. How Substack is growing with star power. Pair with an acid garage house musical coda.
The Distilled Spirit
America Today
🎧 Headphone Americans ()
Noise canceling headphones are an amazing invention. You can use them to glide through life at the 1.5x speed of your podcast. But you lose something when you are wrapped snugly in your noise canceling cocoon. How can you find meaning amid the streaming?
✅ American Compliance Dream ()
We live in a culture of risk aversion. Nobody wants to take a risk — even 19 year-olds pick majors out of compliance with utility culture not curiosity. Congress is paralyzed in a battle for political survival. People are trained to optimize, not think, to the detriment of us all.
🐻 What I Learned from the 2022 Bear Markets ()
2022 was a really rough year for investing. 2025 is looking a bit eerily similar. Eric Soda has some good advice for surviving in such a market. He recommends pulling back and remembering what has worked. Buying good stocks and holding onto them and not getting caught up in market fluctuations while focusing on playing your own game is the winner.
🤖 Will Someone Using AI Take My Job? ()
”AI will not take your job, but someone using AI will” is a common refrain on LinkedIn and in workplaces around the country. The idea sounds so simple, almost incontrovertible. And in some ways it is true, but not exactly in the way you would think.
Sloppy Agentic Vibe Coding
🖼 The Original Slop ()
Indian Chintz was originally finely crafted, colorful and patterned fabric made in India. But commercial pressures lead to both bans of the original and cheap European knock-offs. It was possible to spot the knock offs because the originals had a quirkiness to them the mass printed pieces do. Not unlike AI art today.
🤵 Agent2Agent Conversations ()
Your AI Agents need a way to discover, negotiate and converse with each other. Google’s Agent2Agent protocol — often abbreviated A2A — is designed to do just that. The protocol should enable you to just build your agent, drop it into the pool and have it introduce itself, share its card and understand how to work with others. This pairs nicely with MCP for building much more composable AI systems. It should be noted that the protocol is might be a bit more hype than real.
💣 Cursor’s Enterprise Minefield ()
Cursor is amazing on some levels, but the app has problems. Especially for enterprise customers. Support is bad or non-existent. Pull requests get very messy as the tool will touch many things it does not need to touch. Sometimes it will code like it has a supply of LSD and do things like make up API calls that do not exist. In many cases you need a scalpel in large, complicated codebases and Cursor does not deliver a scalpel in its current implementation.
Building Things
🏭 Manufacturing Discontent (The Daily Upside)
”Liberation Day” has come and passed. What do US businesses need to do to re-shore manufacturing? And can they be competitive in a world with uncertain tariffs on their inputs and outputs?
🏦 Chinese Towers and American Blocks ()
Regulation shapes how people build in cities around the world. Parking requirements and fire codes shaped 5+1s in the US, while sunlight and greenspace requirements shaped china’s high rises.
🍾 Construction Physics Learnings ()
Brian Potter has learned a lot over the last four and a half years, 186 essays and 600,000 words. He shares some highlights in this very informative listicle covering the high level takeaways across the body of work.
Interesting Things
💃 How to Make a Great First Impression (Sahil Bloom)
First impressions are important. Sahil shares some great tips on how to make great first impressions.
⚽ Portuguese Soccer is More Competitive than You Think (PortuGOAL.net)
The Primera Liga is more competitive than you think. It is true there are three teams that win it, but it is almost always a two to three team fight and back to backs are elusive. The classicos are scheduled for maximum leverage. Worth finding if you can get GolTV.
🚦 Traffic Ticket Industrial Complex (alts.co)
Who would ever think cities got fat, lazy and addicted to ticket fine income?
Substack Star Power
In case you missed it, Substack is blowing up:
If you had told me
was interviewing , my first question would have been “what channel?” It turns out it was not a TV network that ran the interview. It was Acosta’s own Substack.The veteran reporter is far from alone. More serious journalists and leading authors are landing on Substack than ever before. At the same time readership is booming, with more than one million paid subscriptions added in the last six months.
Why now? Partially it is the economic environment. Major news outlets can no longer afford to keep the talent as their business model collapses. Further down the media hierarchy, traditional trade publications are struggling to maintain visibility amid a surge of newsletters and independent creators. As the creators of the platform note, people trying to make sense of the Trump administration have provided a recent push.
On Substack’s part, they do offer a lot of very easy-to-use tools for writers. The writing tools are simple. The distribution is very easy, just write your piece and hit send. Multimedia support in particular has come a long way. Live video is a first class citizen, it is a solid podcast and vlog distribution tool with enough native support to do many things.
Technology takes care of the mechanics, but the real prize if you listen to the journalists making the transition is the freedom. Freedom to cover what they want. Freedom to write whatever length makes sense rather than fitting space constraints. Authors can have as many layers of editing as they choose, typically less than the three you see at some papers. It is looking like a win-win for all parties.
Former TV Stars
Leading TV journalists have been launching vlogs on Substack. If you missed Hardball, it is back. Chris Matthews re-launched his show on Monday. He explained the launch on Jim Acosta’s Substack show.
MSNBC made some major format changes in the last six months. Much of that on air talent has migrated to Substack as well. Mehdi Hassan started
News after her show was canceled in late 2024. Joy Reid has been posting daily updates starting this year.Finding Freedom of Expression
Freedom of expression has been another feature former journalists have embraced on Substack. Publishing under one’s own name removes many of the constraints of working for larger publications.
As most readers are aware, Silver left ABC and 538 and has been writing The Silver Bulletin since he left that outfit in 2023. He seems much happier publishing on his own terms.
has long had a Substack — he has been on the platform since 2019 — but he has started publishing frequently at Strength in Numbers since 538 shut down. has launched his politics podcast; highlights include a 2028 primary draft with Nate Silver.Paul Krugman had a somewhat dormant Substack he had used for publishing technical essays the Times would not distribute. When he retired, he soon slid into a seven-day-a-week publishing schedule, much to the world’s benefit. He clearly enjoys choosing his topics and length, and adding a musical coda to each issue.
is nowhere near as famous as Krugman, but he is well known in telecom circles. After his stint at the ACA ended, he too hung out his shingle on Substack. Policyband is pretty focused, but if you are in telecommunications policy, his D.C. Memo is a morning must-read, even before the paywall. His model is more premium than many of the popular Substacks—he is aiming at a professional niche that will pay upwards of $30 a month for quality information.Thought Leaders Launching Things
Substack is starting to be a place where thought leaders go to launch new products for their brands.
Best-selling author Will Storr has launched You Are a Story on Substack. The newsletter content is an amazing exploration of the science of storytelling, but the real point of the effort is the upper-tier membership featuring masterclasses on storytelling from the master himself. Substack is both a means of publishing and selling premium access.
WIRED co-founder Peter Leyden has kicked off The Great Progression, his vision of the current episode in American history and in our times. It is a series of Substack articles, but also a series of monthly calls for paid subscribers.
Pete Buttigieg is using Substack to curate his political brand. Will the platform attract more political figures speaking directly to their audiences? Buttigieg has announced he’s not running in 2026 but wants to guide the conversation about the future. To that end, he has launched a Substack where he’s already posted interviews with Jim Acosta and Jon Stewart—and built a following nearing 300,000 subscribers.
Substack Astroturfing & Revenue Model Challenges
During the pandemic, when money was cheap, Substack had a paid author program, but that seems to have died in 2022. They do seem to do their best to make sure authors appear to be on their platform — albeit through not letting one have a private profile. Another red flag is how many authors are still publishing under default Substack domains like authorname.substack.com — they all are capable of doing custom domains and branding the content a bit. For example, look at this publication or The Silver Bulletin. If I am Krugman or Storr, I have a staff that can address this. One wonders if Substack incents them to keep their brand in play. On the other hand, in a highly competitive world, paying for talent is table stakes.
Another challenge Substack faces is its business model. It is built around a creator selling their subscriptions directly, with Substack taking a 10% cut off the top. As more high-profile creators join and monetize, Substack's 10% fee becomes a significant cost—especially for those with large audiences.
At the same time, viewers have limited time and limited budgets, so there is a finite limit on the number of subscriptions they can carry. There is at least clear demand for some sort of bundle to get access to premium content. How to build that within the existing freehold-style model is a challenge. Ad sales is similarly challenged — part of the promise is that creators control their own ad space; how does the platform sell on top of that?
The 10% cut off of the top creates another problem. At a certain level of revenue, it often makes more sense to take your list and move to other platforms that run on more of a fee-for-service model. Once you have a bit of scale — and become a cash cow for Substack — they start to face higher risk of customer loss.
Substack is working hard on platform features like Notes and video support to keep publishers engaged. These efforts are aimed at improving creator retention while avoiding the pitfalls of becoming just another algorithm-driven social network. If they can avoid this pitfall, Substack could become a cornerstone of the next era of independent media in a very good way.
Musical Coda
The Look
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