Audio Substack: New Subscription Service

Introducing Narrative Control, including Hanania, Goldberg, Greenwald, Razib, and Tracey

UPDATE (9/15/21): The service described here has been discontinued. See here for update.

There is too much good content out there. Between books I want to read, blog posts, articles, and Twitter, not to mention interesting podcasts, I have found myself overwhelmed in the last few years. Substack, a blessing for unorthodox voices that want to reach a wide audience, has unfortunately only added to the problem.

To deal with this issue, I have come to rely more on audio. There are only so many hours a day I can sit at a desk, and usually when there I have to work. But while at the gym, running errands, and doing household chores, I am now able to consume information throughout the day. So whenever it is possible to get content in audio form, I tend to take advantage, making use of Audible for audiobooks, and Apple News and Audm for mainstream media articles.

Unfortunately, for many of my favorite Substack authors, there tends to be no such option. If I don’t have time to read their posts, I just end up missing them. I’ve decided to change that, putting together a product that I will use myself and will hopefully benefit others.

Introducing Narrative Control, which puts 5 very important authors together in podcast form. So far, the following writers have signed on to the project.

Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist

Michael Tracey, independent journalist

Zach Goldberg, CSPI Research Fellow and discoverer of the Great Awokening

Razib Khan, writer on genetics and history

Richard Hanania, me

We’ve got a cool logo.

Here’s how it works. You become a subscriber to this Substack for $10/a month. Either click here or click the “Subscribe” button in the top right corner of this page. You then get a private RSS feed that you can add to your podcast app. Every time one of the above authors releases a Substack, within 48 hours you will get a professionally produced podcast that reads the text for you in whatever app you use to listen to podcasts (this excludes posts that are just announcing other content, like when I announce and link to an op-ed or media appearance).

The podcast is called Narrative Control, a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the fact that each one of the authors has a point of view that is generally excluded from most of academia and the popular press, whether it is challenging the national security establishment, wokeness, or blank slatism. I’m a believer in some version of the “mainstream media,” which has the resources and dedication to do in-depth reporting. Yet the perspective taken there tends to be quite narrow, which is why many of us use Substack in the first place.

I plan to add more writers as time goes on. There’s also a possibility that we may have a premium version with a much wider spectrum of authors. If you have good suggestions for newsletters or blogs to add, recommend them in the comments and I may reach out.

Everything I write on this Substack will continue to be available for free. If you are on the free mailing list, nothing will change. But for audio versions of my posts, you’ll need to become a subscriber to the podcast, and you’ll get recordings of everything produced by the other four authors too.

I think this is a pretty good deal. $10/a month is about what you’d pay for one Substack. The goal isn’t really to get as rich as possible, but convert what I think is the most important content being regularly produced into a format where it can reach the most people. Hopefully I will make enough to cover the costs of producing this and the time I have to put in.

You can subscribe now, and you’ll start getting podcasts next week.