Helen Tobin, Head of Comms at Substack on how brands can reach new audiences.

I'm Justin Brady, and here's a story. When she joined the company, Substack was a newsletter site. Today it attracts A-listers, A-list writers, journalists. Journalists are like jumping over to Substack.

It has video. It has an app now. It's even getting into podcasting, and it's valued at over a billion dollars, making it officially a unicorn. And it's all because of Helen Tobin, the head of comms who joins us from Substack.

Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. It is definitely not all because of me, but it has been a fun journey to be part of. So I'm happy to be here today to talk to you about it.

Well, at least now you can claim that it was all because of you, because some podcasters say it. Exactly. So you have a really fascinating history. You've been with The Atlantic.

You've been with People Magazine, Penguin Random House, one of the most well-respected publishers, book publishers in the world. like authors kill to be represent to publish through penguin random house but now you're going to a company and you've been here for a little while that's direct to audience right sub stack is kind of the new media so are you effectively killing off your old jobs no no no i wouldn't go that far i think i think the through line in my career so far is that i've always been um really motivated by helping writers, creators, people who make our culture succeed in the world.

I think that culture is really valuable. I think, you know, what you read matters. And my whole career has been about helping people discover things that matter to them. I believe that a book can change your life.

And I've spent my career kind of helping elevate writers, authors, first as a publicist at Penguin Random House, and then later through journalism, whether it was at People Magazine, or then at The Atlantic where I was helping, you know, some of the biggest and most important writers at the magazine get their work seen and feel heard. And so when Substack, when the opportunity with Substack came along, it felt like a natural fit because my opportunity was to help a bunch of smart, brilliant, creative writers, people who maybe never could have gotten a book deal with Penguin Random House or have gotten a byline at The Atlantic, share their work with the world and get paid for it.

And I think that's really important. and it's been a privilege to be part of it. Yeah, it's interesting because you have small creators, but then you also have big names coming over as well, and they're all kind of intermingling on the platform. So maybe Substack and Going Direct hasn't entirely killed journalism, traditional journalism, but has it at least decentralized it and shift, kind of, I hate the word democratized, but has it kind of decentralized it and leveled the playing field?

Yeah, I mean, I think so. And I hope so. Again, I think our institutions have a lot of value. There's a reason people trust The Atlantic or The New York Times or a book published by Penguin Random House.

And I think those institutions will continue to have value. But I think one of the trends we've seen is that people do trust individual voices and they trust individual people often more times than than our institutions. And I think that Substack has really made it possible for anyone to have a voice and share it with the world and get paid for their work. So authors often still want book deals.

People still value a byline and a legacy media outlet. But I think that what Substack has made possible is to have fewer gatekeepers and more of those voices be heard and more people get to be paid for their work and paid for their writing. And it's really meaningful. I mean, I remember the first time an old colleague at The Atlantic reached out to me and said, hey, we would love to syndicate a piece from this writer on Substack.

And that's amazing. That's amazing that this person could type into a box in their computer or now people can, you know, just pick up their phone and talk into it and make culture that has a lot of value get paid for it. And then these legacy institutions are searching Substack. They're using Substack to find new voices, to syndicate pieces, to find writers for book deals.

And these people don't have to wait to be discovered. They can have the power to publish themselves on Substack. Hey, can we take a timeout just for a second? Trust is at a premium, especially as AI Slop makes its way everywhere.

And podcasts are a great way to scale relationships and trust really quickly. They're the relational extension of your brand. And they're great core content of which SEO, like search engine optimized content comes off of, and a bunch of clips for all your social media platforms. I build podcasts for iconic brands.

I train hosts, I help them with strategy, and I help them focus on actual results. If this is something you want to work on, if you want to build your own media channel for your company, I guarantee you can do that. DM me, email me, get in touch. Let's build this thing.

I want to push into, and I'm sure we'll get to the brands and how they can use it, but I want to push into this one thing that you've kind of repeated in some posts, and you've actually said it on this interview right now, which is amplifying voices. And so you have a particularly interesting approach to PR. One, I think is great. I completely agree with it.

But it's like, I think in PR and comms, there's this push to shape CEOs and executives into these all-knowing, wise oracles and to shape them really into something they're not. You have a completely different focus on comms and PR at Substack, which is actually going to the writers and all the unique voices and amplifying them. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I think it's really powerful, right?

So when I was first hired at Substack, my first role here was help make writers famous. And so it was on Dream Drop, right? You get to go to this wide range of people and say, you're incredible. Your work is incredible.

We want to help elevate you in the world. And we were able to either land them TV segments or profiles in magazines or use the media in this really powerful way to build the brand of Substack. So yes, there is a part of Substack where our founders, our co-founders of CEOs go talk to the world about Substack. But some of the best stories about Substack, some of the most powerful storytelling we've done is when we put creators front and center and had them go tell the world, Substack changed my life.

Substack made it possible for me to buy a house. Substack made it possible for me to have a voice or quit my job that was not what I wanted to do and make Substack my full-time job. And I think by elevating creators and showing what's possible, it's brought so many more people to the platform because people, for so long before we had an app, before Substack was a destination, people would subscribe to their favorite creator. They wouldn't necessarily subscribe to Substack.

And so we used those creators and elevated their voices and helped share their perspectives with the world to bring a lot of audiences to Substack. And now Substack in 2025 is a destination because so many of those amazing creators are here and they're bringing more creators and more audiences here. And so now somebody will say, I have a Substack or I subscribe to Substack or I download the Substack app. But that's been a long journey.

And that was definitely not where we started back when I joined in 2021. Yeah, I know that maybe a lot of people think of Substack as a citizen journalism platform. A lot of famous names over there, but it's not quite that anymore. It's evolving because now you have, I think it's over 5 million now.

There's a lot of people now. The number is kind of constantly dialing up. So by the time anybody listens to this, this number is going to be wrong. But how do brands get involved with Substack?

Like should brands get involved? Like my traditional thinking of like PR comms for a brand is own your channels, push stuff on the website and also build out in all these platforms as well. So do brands kind of apply the same thinking of like a social media site to Substack? They build their own stuff, but then also customize and tailor it for Substack or what the best approach here How should brands start utilizing Substack or is it still just for citizen journalists Yeah I mean there definitely still a lot of journalism on Substack, politics, analysts.

That's a big part of Substack. But I think people are often surprised to learn how vast it is now. I mean, fashion is a huge category. Food is a huge category.

Every time I talk to people about Substack, they'll say, oh, my Substack is just AI or my Substack is just sports and my Substack is just cooking. And it's funny because everyone has their own experience of Substack, right? They're in a little slice of the platform. But it's certainly not just journalists, although that is core to Substack.

And I think when we see, you know, even just in the last year, brands coming to us and saying, how do we activate here? How do we show up? It's a really interesting question because we're so focused on creators. We're so focused on independent creators and we only make money when creators make money.

So Substack's entirely free to use. We take a 10% cut of paid subscriptions. There's no advertising on the platform. So it's interesting because the way that we've seen brands show up is by either starting their own Substack or partnering with creators who are already here who have, you know, a niche or an audience that they really want to work with.

And I think when brands start at Substack, it's really important that they treat it seriously, right? Like they can't just be another channel they throw off or, oh, I'm just going to cross post what I post on Instagram to Substack. That actually won't work. I also talk to brands or people who say, can I just use it for press releases?

If you're going to use it as just an email marketing platform, it's not going to work for you. You are going to be so disappointed. I think it goes back to what I said at the beginning of this conversation, which is people trust people and people trust individual voices. If you're a brand and you're thinking, how might you show up on Substack?

Like, are there people you can put forward? Is there a face you can put there? Is there a story you have to tell? Can you integrate authentically into the platform and work with other creators in the platform and be part of the conversation?

Because I think if you just treat it as an email marketing tool, it's not going to work for you because we're not designed for that. Like, we're designed to support creators and help them build their media empires. Yeah, I love the line about, like, people asking you if they can push press releases through it that's such a that's such an old dumb way of thinking i'm sorry for any bit i'm offending but um i've hope i i would have hoped brands a while ago learned that like there needs to be core content like the core idea for the content and then that content is shaped based on which platform you're pushing it out and how those platform works right like if you're going to push a press release i think most brands most cmos most pr people most comps people should know that like having influencers read press releases on their instagram reel probably wouldn't work so the same thinking applies obviously to sub stack um is that kind of the recommendation though like take the core uh idea you want to get out there as a brand start there but then when you push it out to all your platforms including sub stack know the audience and give them the value they expect when they're on this platform am i oversimplifying it No, I don't think you're oversimplifying.

But I think even one step back forward, I would say to people, do you have the Substack app? Like, do you download the app? Do you, like, scroll through it? Do you see what the conversation is?

Do you follow, you know, you can subscribe to a bunch of creators and get their emails in your inbox. And that's wonderful. But with the app, you can also just follow a bunch of people. So you can see their notes.

You can see what they're posting, but you don't have to get all their emails. And it's a good way to just familiarize yourself with the types of conversations happening. So I'm always surprised by people who don't really engage with Substack and then they're already jumping to like, how do I show up there? I suggest just spend some time in the ecosystem.

Familiarize yourself with some of the people there, the influential people on the platform and figure out where your brand would fit in. And then to your point, Justin, it's like, think about the messages and think about your target audience and think about how you're going to show up for them. But Substack is not just a monolith, right? There's not one Substack community.

It's a place that makes it possible for a bunch of individual communities to thrive and creators to build their own worlds on the Internet that they control. And so you have to think deeply about, like, which worlds you want to be a part of and which communities you want to show up in. Yeah, I mean, human factors still apply here, right? Everybody thinks it's cringy and gross when the person shows up at a at a chamber of commerce meeting and just doesn't listen to anybody, doesn't know who anybody is.

They're just hawking their wares, selling their stuff. And then the same principle applies in Substack like it would any other platform, which is listen first, be a human, provide value. Yeah, absolutely. And I think people sniff that out really fast on Substack.

And I think it has to do with the model, too, right? Like we are the way we're monetizing is through direct relationships, right? So the feed feels really different when you scroll on Substack because we're not optimizing for time spent. We don't make money because you spend more time on Substack.

So if you're scrolling on a Twitter or an Instagram, they want you to stay on the app because they can serve you ads because that's how they make money. If you're scrolling on Substack, our feed is optimized for you to click in and spend time with a creator and then pay them because that is how we make money. And so it feels very different when you show up there. And for brands and PR people or CMOs thinking about how they would show up there, you have to think about what is the type of messaging content work I can show up in that makes people want to engage more deeply.

because this is a relationship. This isn't just about an ad or getting eyeballs in front of someone. This is about building that direct connection and building that relationship with your audience. So if a brand wants to get on there and they really have a great strategy, which is just give audience value, don't talk about our brand at all, like not at all, just build value, but they don't want to monetize, right?

Because they're viewing this as a content strategy. They want to get eyeballs. They want to build relationships. If they don't want to monetize, but they're still building content.

Is there conflict with your business model and their objectives? No, I don't think so. I think there's a lot of people on Substack brands and other public figures, politicians, people who we know will never monetize on Substack. They're never going to turn on paid.

And we still welcome them. And we think, bring your audience in, bring in people who are curious, find people who are curious and make Substack better. And if the whole ecosystem is better for everyone, more people are going to come to Substack and they're going to find creators who they do want to pay for. So of course, we make money when creators turn on paid subscriptions, but we welcome people who we know will never turn on paid subscriptions because they're going to bring in a different type of audience who we hope then finds other creators they fall in love with and pay them directly.

Yeah. So the idea is, yeah, okay, we're not going to, if a brand goes out there and makes this incredible content, we don't get paid off them, but we really don't care because they're attracting audience and more audience makes more content and more content generates more revenue for us. Yeah. I mean, if for example, the real, real has a sub stack and it's this women's, uh, it's a resale fashion brand.

And if they bring in, you know, if they say to millions of people on their other channels, Hey, you should come subscribe to our sub stack. And those people come to sub stack. And then they discover whether it's through recommendations or through scrolling the feed or through cross posting or these other features on Substack. Oh, actually, I really want to pay for Amelia Picharca or Emily Fitzpatrick or Jaleel Johnson or these other fashion creators.

I've discovered them. I'm going to support them. That is a win for these creators. It's a win for the real world.

It's a win for Substack. And ideally, more people in the Substack app are discovering more content that is meaningful to them and that they want to support. Yeah. I think it was a couple of years ago, you guys rolled out a new feature called Notes.

And some people tried to say, oh, this is an answer to Twitter. Of course, Elon buying Twitter. Of course, it happened like a year later. So it doesn't look linked at all.

But it does raise the question, though, with all these features, like Instagram had Reels and then other people did vertical video. I think maybe it was TikTok first. I don't remember who did what first. But everyone kind of tries to match features.

And so, you know, Substack has a lot of powerful features. It's growing like a freaking rocket ship. It's a unicorn. It has newsletter video feeds.

It actually has podcast functionality You can actually use it as a podcast host and integrate all that too Is there any risk in the future of kind of becoming everything to everybody Or do you have a lane that you're like dedicated to? I think we're dedicated to quality, right? I think it's like people talk, tell us all the time how, you know, scrolling on Substack feels different, spending time on Substack feels different. So you might open Instagram or Twitter or TikTok and scroll and look up and say like, oh gosh, I spent an hour here and I kind of feel gross and I don't know what I did with that time.

And that's no shade to those platforms. But I think what makes Substack different isn't that it has video or a feed or writing or podcasting. What makes Substack different is that it's optimized for quality. It's optimized for smart people.

I mean, I think people come to Substack and they leave feeling like they learned something. They feel a little smarter. and, you know, there's fun stuff on there. It's not all just eat your vegetables, but I think, you know, they feel better and they have a different experience.

And so I think fundamentally the business model and the way that the feed is optimized and the way notes is optimized and how we optimize for direct relationships and trust and quality is what makes Substack feel different. Not because we've invented a new way to serve you short form video, but because of what we're optimizing for. I want to get to trust here in a second, but you said something fascinating, which is kind of like older platforms incentivize the wrong things, which I actually agree with you.

Some of the platforms that shan't be named do incentivize really just crappy stuff. I get it. It's a money business. That's fine.

But I do agree with you. Quality is a challenge, is a big thing. And I would imagine when you're smaller that quality is not as hard because you're getting the early adopters, you're getting the big names, you're getting people who are polished, they know how to write, they know. But as you get more and more people, and the noise gets louder, some platforms in the past, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn, actually, I think pretty much all of them, start to rely on algorithms to shape users' feeds.

So how do you manage expectations when the volume is growing substantially? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Substack has a feed, right? So if you download the Substack app and start scrolling, you're going to see the notes feed. We, of course, use machine learning and algorithms to help you find content that you care about, right?

So the feed is going to show you people you subscribe to. It's going to show you people they subscribe to. It's going to help you kind of discover the world of Substack. And I think the difference is like on those other platforms, posting something viral that gets you, you know, dunking on someone or going viral in those platforms is the goal, right?

The whole goal is to just like get a bunch of likes or reposts and that makes you feel famous and cool. And that type of, and the algorithm incentivizes that type of content. And I think the difference on Substack is that like that content isn't incentivized, right? The content that's incentivized is the thing that's leading to paid subscriptions.

So actually, if you were a creator on Substack right now and you posted a note, you could click into the note and it could tell you how many people then clicked through and paid for your sub stack. So if you post it, so, so you could say, Oh, my note where I posted something really thoughtful or interesting, or that advanced the discourse or that, that mattered, that made me $300. We've had an, I think we've had a note that made someone like $10,000. Right.

And so it's like, it's completely different than posting on those other platforms. And again, it's like this idea of like, well, what you're, what you're incentivized for is paid subscriptions and you're getting paid because you have something original or interesting or thoughtful to say. And so it's not to say that people can't post silly stuff on notes, but I think the thing that they're going to see that really gets picked up and shared and gets them paid is that deeper thinking, that higher quality content.

So you're trying to set up the machine learning, the algorithm, all the magic to not incentivize virality. So, I mean, there may be a better word for this. And rage. You're trying to incentivize depth, and you're doing that through people who are paid subscribers or paying for subscriptions because people who are going to see the next viral post on Facebook or X, and you see people do this, right?

They post like inflammatory stuff just to get reactions. Sometimes we click those things. We read those things. We get dwell time.

We expand them to read them. But those type of people who get the attention don't really get the money all the time, right? Like, even though that may have got my attention, and like you said earlier, it felt a little gross. I'm not going to pay that person.

So that's kind of where your little magic sauce is. Yeah, exactly. I think it's with the model. It's that, like, if you are on Substack, you have a direct connection to your subscribers.

It's unmitigated. You can post and it will go directly to their inboxes. and you're making money because people are paying for that. And I think the other thing that we've recently rolled out that's been really positive for us is these badges, these status badges that show up next to readers where people can see if you pay for a sub-stack subscription.

And that is really meaningful to people because a lot of creators, a lot of other consumers, they want to have conversations with real people. And it's a really positive signifier. If I know you pay for a sub-stack, you might not pay for my sub-stack, But you, Justin, are someone who supports independent media. You support creators.

You want to pay for subtext. You want to have an honest dialogue. You're not here to just be a troll or a bot or someone to just yell in the replies. You're here to have a discussion, a dialogue, an interesting conversation.

And so I think that is kind of the framework that incentivizes everything about how we develop the product is how do we make sure that we're having that we're incentivizing these trusted relationships. Is that ever going to weight the algorithm of machine learning, how many people you follow, like it's a bot detection kind of system? I don't know. I'm not kind of quite the right person to answer that question.

But I think, you know, the model and the direct relationships is how we think about everything. And I think, you know, if you're paying for a lot of sub stacks, you're probably just going to see different people in your feed and you're probably engaging in a different way than you would if you didn't pay for any sub stacks. Can I talk about the $10,000 sub stack? You said it was a note?

A note. Yeah, I mean, it's a really- Can you talk about who this was from and what they did? It's a really cool feature. I should fact check myself.

I don't know all the details, but I find it really fun because, you know, if you post on Twitter and you go viral, right? Like the jokers people are like, subscribe to my SoundCloud or subscribe to my Substack. Like, otherwise, how are you, what are you doing with that, right? What does it mean to go viral?

It means that you're giving money to the CCP or to Mark Zuckerberg or to Elon Musk, like versus on Substack, if you're quote going viral on notes, you can click in your note and it can tell you this note led to 32 paid subscriptions, which made you $800 or something like that. And it's like, oh, my creative work is valuable and I get paid for it, not one of these other guys. And so it's a really fun feature because I think it shows people that, you know, again, their creativity is valued.

Yeah, absolutely. What were, did you guys do any analysis? Like, who was this $10,000 note from? And what did they do right?

I don't remember. I shouldn't have brought it up if I didn't have more of my talking points prepped. It was a good example. I think it was leading up to the election, if I had to guess.

We made a big push around politics in the election. And I think there was a lot of commentary and analysis about that. And I think it just makes people really curious. And I think those types of things, you know, again, these types of notes that are getting making people money, they're building trust relationships, they're getting paid subscribers.

People see them and they're curious and then it helps them, you know, discover new writers and pay for them. And so it's like a really positive loop for the creator and the subscriber. Yeah, I mean, but the deeper question, I guess, is what are you? We talked about brands and how, you know, but what are the kind of the best practices?

like if someone comes up to you privately and they're not broadcasting this on a podcast to a bunch of people what are those like three things they always ask i know you get asked this all the time by the way I know you do which is how do I get more readers on Substack Like how do I do that What are the and I probably know you have a default response you give everybody. So what is kind of the magic sauce? How do you attract a following on Substack? I think the most important thing is tapping into the power of the network.

So there's, you know, I think it's now like more than 50% of all subscriptions and 30% of paid subscriptions come from inside the Substack network. So if you're launching on Substack, how are you tapping into the Substack network? Are you, I would say to anybody who's launching, like make a list of people you know, admire, have relationships with on Substack, people you read, people you watch, and reach out to them and maybe ask them if they'll go live with you and have a conversation or if they'll recommend you.

You should start recommending them. I mean, there's so many features within Substack that help you tap into the power of the network. And so you should first start thinking about How do I tap into the power of the network of Substack and interact with the network? The second thing I would do is like share on your external channels, right?

So if you're posting on Substack, there's all these tools that allow you to just reshare automatically to your external channels. One of the neat things about podcasting on Substack actually is we could, Justin, we could be having this conversation on Substack Live. And we could be using our phones, talking into our phones. It would feel like a FaceTime call.

And then as soon as that ended, you and I would both get both the full draft of the video that we could send to our subscribers. And then we have this AI tool that would automatically clip the like five or six most interesting parts of the conversation for us and suggest that we share those to LinkedIn and Instagram and Twitter and TikTok. So you're taking this work that you've already done. And not only are you sharing the full piece with your subscribers and maybe you're paywalling it, but it's clipping it, the product's clipping it automatically for you so you can share externally to other people.

And then I guess the last piece from, you know, just the network and the sharing externally on your other channels is tap into the discovery features too, right? So you mentioned notes in the feed. So if you're engaging on notes, think of notes as the top of your funnel. Think of like showing up there, sharing pieces, sharing clips of some of your posts.

You've already done the hard work of the thinking with this full post that you made or this video that you publish. share clips of it on notes and use allow that to help drive discoverability so you can tap into the power of the network that way so if you just go away thinking okay i have to make sure to use the features tap in the power of network i have to make sure to use notes and then i have to make sure to share externally then i think it could really help you find an audience that's actually for for anybody listening to that like rewind five minutes and maybe listen to it twice because it's incredibly good advice, but it was eloquently delivered.

So I think people will just like gloss past it. But one of the key things you said was tap into your network, tap into the network of people that you like trust or know or people you respect on Substack. This is actually an incredible tool that I noticed a lot of creators, a lot of founders, CEOs, CMOs miss all the time, which is they think, I'm just gonna put great content out there and I'm going to ignore everybody. I'm just going to put great stuff out there.

People will eventually find it. I'll have a following and I'll make a bunch of money. And rarely does that actually happen. It's actually how good of a community member are you?

How good, how well can you tap into relationships? Because IRL or in real life relationships are actually what probably grows subsets of subscriptions the most, like the relationships you build. Yeah, absolutely. And I think about it.

I mean, we used to say in my book publishing days, like nothing is as powerful as word of mouth, right? Like you're way more likely to buy a book because I pressed it to your hand or say, hey, I just read this amazing book. You should read it. Then you are to read a review in New York Times and then buy the book.

Like that word of mouth is really powerful. And on Substack, the way that translates is often through recommendation. So if your favorite person on Substack is Lenny Rachitsky and he says, hey, the people I read on Substack are Gergay and Emily Sundberg and, you know, Dwarakesh Patel, then you're like, oh, I want to read what Lenny reads. I want to watch what Lenny watches.

Like I trust Lenny. So I am going to trust his recommendations and I'm going to go subscribe to those people. And so our job is to make it really easy at Substack for you to find and subscribe to those people. But it is that human to human connection.

It's that you trust your favorite creators. You trust your favorite other fellow consumers. You want to read what they read. You want to see what they're seeing.

And so using that is a way to grow the network and a way to grow for everyone. Yeah, my first subscription was Cyan Bannister, Ugly Duckling. And that was a convert from X, by the way. She was posting stuff on X.

And I'm like, huh? I got to go subscribe to this. Last question. We're like a little over time.

Can I ask you one last question about AI slop? this is like the big term now the last two weeks is AI slop of course like Sora came out and people are boasting just junk videos everywhere and there's a lot of fear in the creator community about I honestly am not scared of it at all I think people don't like AI slop I think people like humans I think it's not going to work I think AI will be a part of creation it's not going to be the whole thing it's a whole another show but you've built an incredible rocket ship based on what you've talked about earlier throughout this show, which is authenticity and trust, like increasing trust.

Now, as AI slop propagates and spews all over the internet, trust is going to be an even more valuable currency. And so how do you protect Substack from like AI slop and just AI slop overwhelming the entire platform? Because we saw what happened to like SEO, like skyscraper junk and people just taking great content, ripping it off and just doing it better. How do you protect the platform from that kind of stuff?

Yeah, I mean, I think your point is exactly right. Like people trust people and direct relationships are going to become even more important in this day and age. And so, you know, we at Substack are not anti-AI. We think AI has a lot of use cases.

We think it's really important. Our team actually did the Substack AI report earlier this year where they surveyed thousands of creators to say, how are you using AI? And you could imagine based on some of the people on Substack, authors, creators, some people said, you know, I would never touch it. And other people said, oh, it really helps me get started.

Like it helps me when I have writer's block. I use it as a tool. I use it in this way. So it's fascinating to kind of see how people are embracing AI at times to make their work better.

We don't have a policy that's, you know, no AI generated content. And again, like we think AI has a lot of good uses, but that's also why we invest in direct relationships. The whole model incentivizes direct relationships because we need to make sure people trust people. And when I mentioned those those readers status badges earlier this year, it's another example or earlier this conversation.

It's another example of how we're kind of saying, how do we make sure that people can see who the real people are, who the people are who are paying for creators, who are paying for culture so that we can continue to elevate and incentivize original thought, quality work, and not AI swap. I would guess it's come up, but you're sitting on an LLM goldmine, and I would guess this has come up in meetings. Is there any plan to license user content to LLMs like Grot, ChatGPT, Perplexity?

Is there any plan to license that and give people a payout on the licensing as well? You know, I don't know that I'm the right person to speak to that. I will say that in Substack and settings right now, any creator can go in and there's a setting where they can say, hey, I don't want any of this crawled by any AI at any point. Which, again, we care a lot about creators having ownership and control.

And so it's important to us is that they get to opt in and decide that for themselves. Yeah, that's a great answer. Helen Tobin, the head of comms at Substack. If people want to build a relationship with you and learn about all your wise information, how do they do that?

You should subscribe to me on Substack. I'm just at HT on Substack. Follow me there. And I'd love to talk to you.

And we will make sure to get that in the show notes page at justinbradyshow.com. Helen, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure to be here. Bye.