Got this question recently, about community building. I’m a big believer that audio and visuals help build trust, which helps build community, as it’s you on display, in real life, unlike words on a page which can look very similar to other words on a screen.

What if my writing is the regular gathering? Maybe I don’t want to do a ton of video content—that’s okay. What if I treat my writing and sharing my work, and inviting others to comment/reply/engage, as the gathering I’m hosting every week? It’s been an interesting shift of perspective!

When I started a music blog back in 2001, we wrote it real by-the-books at first, just the facts, and nobody said a word — no comments, nothing. It wasn’t until we opened up and showed our actual personality that people started sticking around.

I still talk to people from that site 25 years later.

I’m not saying you need to publish six times a day like we did. I’m not saying post daily. I’m not saying start a podcast. But building community is about showing up in front of people, regularly, and inviting them to comment, reply, engage. If you want those things, you need to model that. You can’t just hope it happens.

So lean into email, because the inbox is intimate in a way social media ain’t. Bring people into your newsletter — “hey, I was talking to so-and-so about this.”

If you want to use names, ask for permission. Otherwise, it’s okay to generalize (like this post).

So much of building community is proving there’s community, beyond a like or a comment. Bring other people’s conversations into the forefront. My rectangle on a Zoom call doesn’t have all the answers, but all our rectangles together, we get closer, and you can say that in writing just as much as on a Zoom call.

Now, is all of this slower going without video? Sure. Video gives people the cues, the body language, the vibe, all that trust-building happens faster when they can witness you. But you can still do it with words, you just gotta be more intentional about it since it won’t come up easily. Be vulnerable, bring other people forward, make it a safe space, and know it’s not gonna happen overnight.

I’ve been doing my calls since 2023, writing online since 2001, none of this is quick. Challenge accepted though. Give it a shot.

Talking about your thing once ain’t enough, as there’s just too much going on in everyone’s lives. But how do we repeat our message without feel cringe?

That’s what we’ll be talking about later this week in our REPEAT REPEAT REPEAT Escape Pod Zoom call (Thursday, August 6 at 2:00 PM EDT – more info here).

Once you realize that no one sees everything you make, you’ll feel better. No one opens every single email, and they certainly don’t see every social media post. But you also don’t want to just send an image with a BUY NOW button 19 times a week either. There is a balance to find, and we’re gonna find it together.

Thursday, August 6 at 2:00 PM EDT – sign up here

The sky isn’t falling, and most people don’t even know what “a Substack” is, let alone Pangram.

This was the common theme that carried through our two “WHO’S WATCHING THE WATCHERS?” Escape Pod Zoom calls. While, sure, there’s a lot of hot takes from multiple fronts within the Substack eco-system about this subject matter (read Substack CEO Chris Best’s piece here), we need to step back and remember that there’s a big real world out there.

We probably don’t need to quit using Substack today, but as always, don’t put all your eggs into any one platform. Export your email list. Back up your work. Even better, put the bulk of your work on your own site, so if any platform goes away tomorrow, your work is safe.

Then write for the people who showed up, who read your emails and bookmark your blog. Have more conversations than hot takes, and focus on the existing relationships you already have in your creative orbit.

During yesterday’s “WHO’S WATCHING THE WATCHERS?” conversation, we started talking about Substack’s recent partnership with Pangram, the thing to detect AI writing. The thing is, talk to a bunch of people in the real world, and they have no idea what “a Substack” is, let alone what the fuck an AI detection tool is.

Let’s not outsource our taste to these AI conglomerates, and instead rely on the decades of life experience. The magazines we read when were kids. The songs we listened to on the radio. The adventures we had when renting movies.

From “The Lost Civic Life of Movie Rental Stores,”

Video clerks and store owners fostered a true third-place atmosphere in their stores. “There was always conversation in our store,” recalls Jerry Frebowitz, owner of Philadelphia’s Movies Unlimited. “Especially on Saturdays . . . there was so much film talk going on. Total strangers were talking to each other; it was really a phenomenon.” Though his customers always came to rent a movie, Frebowitz says, “They definitely stayed to talk . . . hardly anybody came in to get the movie and leave.”

There was no shortage of slop before AI, it’s just now we have a multi-billion dollar industry behind it trying to to sell bottom of the barrel CPM ads against it. Just as the techbro vultures co-opted the vibrant blogging ecosystem of the 2000s, they’ll decimate the post-social / current newsletter landscape to the ground as well.

Just go for a walk and let it burn/ Talk to our neighbors. Gather on a Zoom call (we’re talking about this again on Monday). Send each other letters. Update your website. Hop on the phone.

Does this solve everything? Does this “grow your audience” or help you make $10,000 per month?

Friend, the future is each other. The only zen at the top of a mountain is the zen you bring with you. Find your zen.

I wrote, “maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer” back in January of 2024.

Now Mark Zuckerberg writes, “the history of democracy and economics has proved that centralized power stifles human potential.”

I mean, he’s talking about the fantasy world of “delivering personal superintelligence,” but he’s right about one thing: centralized power stifles human potential.

It stifles creative potential, artistic potential, (ahem) home ownership potential… large platforms like Facebook and Instagram wield so much power, determining who wins and who loses on a minute to minute basis. I know they don’t owe anyone free traffic, but it’s their digital roulette table system that stifles the creative efforts of millions (unless they pay up, of course).

If you’re going to leave social media, you need somewhere to go. Somewhere to put your attention.

Like leaving the house – where are you going? Leaving a bad relationship or workplace – you need to physically and mentally go somewhere else.

So leaving social media isn’t just about newsletters and websites and screen time, because honestly we’re taking multiple hours per day and putting them somewhere else. Where do we move that attention?

For me, that’s been walking. I’ve started a movement practice, as Cody Cook-Parrot speaks of in their book The Practice of Attention (affiliate link).

Take a moment now to consider what forms of movement feel accessible, enjoyable, and grounding for you. Maybe it’s dancing alone in your kitchen, stretching when you rise in the morning, biking along a trail or to work, tending your garden.

I can just slip out the door for 20 minutes, see a neighbor, pet a dog, see a cat, listen to the crows – things that much more enjoyable than the firehose of “content” I get from scrolling.

Just as we don’t stare at social media for three straight hours, I also don’t walk for three straight hours a day. But a mile here, an hour walk there, and by the end of the day I’ve covered 10 miles. This is something (at the time of writing this) I’ve done for 63 days in row (and covered 720 miles).

So maybe try spending 10 minutes writing lyrics, or painting, or writing, or humming a melody into your voice notes – what could add up to hours per day that would “feel accessible, enjoyable, and grounding for you?”

Where could you put your attention? What could your “720 miles” look like for your creative journey?

The shows and movies we loved used to come on VCR tapes, or discs. We’d watch hours at a time, one program, show, or movie at a time.

Now we watch a flurry of brief story lines, bloopers, sports high lights, movie scenes, dancing, crashes, breaking news, podcast interviews – hours of “content” ingested a few seconds at a time.

It’s no wonder we’re exhausted after just 20 minutes of “relaxing.”

Then we spend hours per day trying to cram our work into that whirlwind, and we’d be lucky if a few people will even see it.

That’s why I think it makes more sense to find those “few people” in other places – local and online communities, reaching out, collaborating, interacting with the people doing the same level of work in our creative orbit.

Sure, maybe we “only” reach a few people from all that, but this effort is foundational, building the skills and sense of how to navigate the human to human world of making all this work.

The thing that comes easy might just be your big thing, which came up in a recent conversation about selling. It’s easy to get stuck in the mindset of “this is easy for me, so it must not be valuable.”

Sometimes I feel like these blog posts aren’t my finest work. But then I’ll include one in a newsletter and get five email replies like, “this was so good!”

But the filters of perfection and safety hold us back, or the idea that our work has to be hard. Maybe trust in the “easy thing” and see where it lands.