You know what’s cooler than 10,000 subscribers? 100,000 subscribers.
“Writing takes a kind of demented patience.’'
One of my favorite Substack writers is Chris Arnade, a former Wall Street trader who quit his job to wander around random cities, capturing their essence through his writing.
This is something I regret not doing more.
Despite holding what many consider a dream job—travelling the world and writing about it—I’ve often neglected to write about my adventures. During a recent trip to El Salvador, for instance, I planned to write several articles about Bukele but produced only one. Felt like a missed opportunity.
I’m being as productive as I can be, sorry, thanks.
Since starting in 2021, I’ve published 250 articles on Substack, alongside contributions to The American Conservative, The Daily Caller, The Blaze, City Journal, The Post Millennial, and other Substacks.
My journey to 10,000 subscribers can be divided into distinct travel eras, each reflecting my growth and transformation since I wrote my first article.
Karlstack covers five sections: Economics, Academia, Politics, Crypto, and Personal. If you’re not interested in my personal blog, you can manage your subscription settings to opt out of Personal.
To be blunt, it’s been a long, painful, gruelling process. At times, I slept on couches, in basements, hostels, condos, hotels, housesitting gigs, and AirBnBs. I became discouraged and considered quitting several times. I made more mistakes than I care to admit.
"Success is too easy. Failure is the secret. As much failure as possible as fast as possible."
- Lucas Matsson
The good news is that it is working.
Here’s a rough comparison with peer writers:
- has ~5,000
- has ~6,000
- has ~8,000
- has ~11,000
- has ~13,000
- has ~15,000
- has ~16,000
- has ~16,000
- has ~22,000
Not to compare myself to others, of course, but sometimes I can’t help it.
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
―Ernest Hemingway
Starting from scratch was the toughest part. While my peer writers began their Substack journeys with established platforms, I had no Twitter following or online presence. I went from 0 to 36k on Twitter.
Here’s how much I’m earning from Twitter ads.
Since I would be tweeting for free anyway, it’s a nice little bonus.
Every writer on Substack is chasing
, , and , who each earn millions of dollars annually. As with most professions, Substack follows the power law, where 99% of the benefits go to the top 1% of content creators.
Here are my audience metrics:
Montreal
I began writing on an angry, bitter note — I was aggrieved over being blackballed by PhD programs.
“I was angrily blogging about academia, because I got rejected from every PhD program I applied to. That was pretty nakedly my motivation.”
I was doubly aggrieved because I was stuck living in Quebec during Covid.
Montreal is a great city, but life was incredibly frustrating with the nightly 9:30 p.m. curfew, mask mandates, and lockdowns.
Here is the view from hiking to the top of Mount Royal, Montreal’s namesake, at night:
As a result of my frustrations, this period’s writing was characterized by frequent swearing. In my first few articles, I dropped f-bombs, c-bombs, p-bombs, and more, which I now regret.
It's easy to toss around slurs when you think no one is paying attention, but once you gain an audience of serious readers (and realize your mom is reading your articles, hi mom), you see the importance of maintaining a more respectful tone.
The President of the American Economic Association set her up. This whole thing was Card attacking EJMR because EJMR exposed his friends in the Berkeley mafia. It’s right there in the quote — presumably the controversy they are talking about was EJMR's criticism of unethical research practices by Hoynes. So he hid behind a small Asian undergrad girl to help out his cronies, and legit arguments about her corruption were then publicly dismissed because this place is a "cesspool of misogyny." A remarkably cunning and underhanded behavior. It’s akin to a detective saying "those people found corruption in the police, why won't you go and put some cocaine in one of their drawers.’’ What a bitch move, what a snake, what a pussy.
It was a strategic mistake to ‘‘go paid’’ so early, with just ~300 free subscribers. If I could go back in time, I would wait until I had at least a few thousand free subscribers first. When to go paid is a contentious debate in the Substack community. These were my first 9 paid subscribers:
Another mistake I made early was my tendency to write long, rambling screeds. I quickly learned that audiences prefer concise, clean text; stripped of fluff, focusing on valuable information. If you want to become a better writer, focus on delivering value. This is the best video to watch:
Halifax Era
I met a girl in Montreal, and when she got a job offer in Nova Scotia, I followed her. This was my most valuable lesson: never sign a lease with your girlfriend unless you're married, idiot.
On the bright side, she had a cat, so for 12 months, I had a cat. Most of my pictures during this time were of the cat.
This was the view from our condo:
For nearly a year, all flags in the country were flown at half-mast to honor ‘‘remains buried at Canada’s Indigenous residential schools.’’
Every flag at half-mast... For nearly a year... For a hoax!
I walked around a lot.
I valued living next to the water.
This is the view from the bridge I walked across every morning:
As if every Canadian flag being at half-mast wasn’t demoralizing enough, at some point, the government adorned my favorite bridge with Ukraine flags. Canada wasn’t even proud enough to fly its own flag, but they deign to fly a foreign flag over my favorite bridge. Felt like a slap in the face.
When the truckers went on strike, the grocery stores in Halifax were mostly empty. I attended a freedom rally.
At this point, I got hired at The Daily Caller and I promptly quit that job to chase Claudine Gay/Harvard on Substack, which ended up being the best decision of my career.
My last day employed at The Daily Caller was March 12, 2022.
I published this story on my Substack on March 13, 2022:
Two years ago, not many people outside the world of academia knew who Claudine Gay was. Chris Brunet did, and he was on her case from the start.
In a phone interview with The American Conservative, Brunet recalled the genesis of his journey to take down the ex-president of Harvard University: “About two years ago, I got an email with an anonymous tip from someone at Harvard about research misconduct by a professor in the political science department…. Once I started tugging at that string, it led me directly to Claudine Gay because it turned out she was covering up for him.”
At the time, Brunet had leveraged his experience on Substack writing about corruption in academia into a job at the Daily Caller. After presenting the anonymous tip and subsequent pitch for an article to expose Claudine Gay’s academic history (or lack thereof), Brunet recounts being told he could not publish the story for legal reasons.
“They wouldn’t run it because it was too much legal risk, which is true, because Harvard, they sic lawyers on the New York Post, right, they’re quick to sue,” Brunet said. “So it was a lot of legal risk and not very much upside.” Brunet ended up leaving the Daily Caller that day, having a gut feeling that the Gay story was worth pursuing.
Some have claimed that Brunet was actually fired from the Daily Caller in an attempt to persuade his readers that he is not a trustworthy source of information. Yet Geoffrey Ingersoll, the editor-in-chief of the outlet, corroborated Brunet’s story in an email with TAC.
“It made me happy to see his work vindicated, and to see a fraud who was bad for the university and bad for America go down in the process,” Ingersoll said.
— Chris Brunet: Who Is the Man Behind Gay’s Ouster at Harvard
I went back to Substack, reaching 74 paid subscribers.
After breaking up with my girlfriend, I skipped town.
I left town when we were over
'Cause it didn't feel the same
Every backroad had a memory
And every memory held your name
— Jersey Giant, Tyler Childers
Mexico Era
I wanted to travel but didn’t know where.
I picked the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico because it was cheap, close, and safe, but still kinda foreign; a good place to dip your toe into travel. It was a mistake to go to Cancun, though. Cancun is divided into 2 parts, a hotel zone (a long strip of beach), and the inland town.
I booked an AirBnB inland, living with the locals.
To be clear: the hotel zone sucks too.
The beach, when I trekked there, was patrolled by heavily armed army guys.
I ate street tacos pretty much every night.
The pharmacies openly sold anabolic steroids.
In many ways, Mexico is freer than America.
Next, I went to Playa del Carmen for a couple of months, which is super basic.
The Airbnb there was nicer, they had a pool on the roof:
Playa del Carmen was teeming with Russians escaping the war (who can blame them?), to the extent that Russian real estate agents were actively advertising to them.
I worked at this coffee shop most days:
I left Mexico with 175 paid subscribers, plus the title of contributing editor at The American Conservative.
Ottawa —> Montreal —> Calgary
I spent one month in each of these three cities.
Calgary felt soulless, with an unremarkable downtown surrounded by sprawling cookie-cutter suburbs.
However, Banff, the mountain town next to Calgary, is probably the best place I’ve ever visited in Canada. I would live there in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, since Banff is a national park, it has strict residency restrictions. Essentially, you can only live there if your parents or grandparents did, you have to be grandfathered in.
England
Next, I spent a couple of months in a small town in Dorset, England.
It was the quintessential countryside experience.
The town was dotted with old cathedrals:
And surrounded by fields and gardens:
I took a train to the Isle of Portland, on England’s southern coast, to write a story about their refugee crisis.
This was as close as I could get to the barge full of asylum seekers, I had to climb a hill to get this angle, it was tucked away out of sight and surrounded by a large perimeter fence.
Italy
I went hiking in Tuscany for a couple of weeks:
Then I spent a month in Rome, in an AirBnB. This was the garden:
I didn’t like Rome for one reason: too many tourists. It's ironic since I was a tourist myself. However, the city felt overwhelmed by AirBnbs and endless walking tour groups, which was offputting. It lacked the vibe of a lived-in city and instead felt like an open-air museum/tourist trap.
I wish I could say I explored all the museums and every inch of the Vatican, but the crowds were terrible, I really can’t deal with crowds. Instead, I spent most of my time preparing for my presentation at Stanford.
While in Rome, I wrote a profile on Giorgia Meloni:
Greece/Turkey
I embarked on a week or two-long cruise around the Greek islands.
Santorini was beautiful but felt artificial. Like Rome, it seemed more like a tourist trap than a place where people genuinely live.
The cruise ship stopped in Istanbul, which became my least favourite city of all time. In 2023, Istanbul was the most-visited city in the world, drawing over 20 million international travelers. As a result, every street was packed with people, making the entire city feel congested and cramped, or at least that's how I remember it.
The cruise was pleasant, but I felt a constant unease about the fleet of servile Filipino staff catering to my every whim. I did not enjoy having servants.
I thought about writing a piece on the opulence and excess of modern cruises, but I stumbled across David Foster Wallace’s 24-page essay on the same subject, and that bastard nailed it so perfectly that I got depressed and gave up.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have gotten depressed at my lack of talent compared to DFW.
Perhaps the lowering of one’s standards is the necessary step for the creation of art.
I can imagine a person beginning to feel that he’s not able to write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that’s surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I’m meeting right now. Of course I can write. Anybody can write. People might think that their product is not worthy of the person they assume they are. But it is.
If you get stuck, lower your standards and keep going.
— poet William Stafford
After the cruise, I spent a month on the Greek island of Crete. I chose Crete because it was inexpensive, given the off-peak tourist season (winter), which offered good deals on AirBnBs.
I chose a small town by the sea:
More specifically, zooming in, this farm was my AirBnB:
I chose an olive farm filled with cats, dogs, chickens, and geese because I wanted to experience farm life firsthand. It’s hard to overstate how much more enjoyable a peaceful farm is compared to the bustling streets of Istanbul. When I settle down (soon, hopefully?) I will not be settling down in a big city.
I spent much time biking around Crete aimlessly.
I frequently biked past groups of gipsies.
They had loud parties & bonfires every night.
I was jealous of their sense of community.
However, they are filthy.
Their settlement was surrounded by mountains of garbage.
I can't begin to fathom the psychological toll this environment must have on them. It baffles me why they don't organize and clean up their space. If they banded together, they could transform their surroundings in less than a day, freeing themselves from living amidst such filth.
I often biked into the biggest city on the island, Heraklion.
One day I biked into town for coffee and saw that I had taken down the president of Harvard.
Cool.
On Christmas Eve, I left Greece.
Romania
I had COVID throughout my entire stay in Romania, leaving me weary and unable to engage in much activity. Consequently, I have few pictures to share from this leg.
The thing I will remember most is a small cafe.
I spent most days there, finding a small comfort in the routine.
Every morning, I ate the same breakfast.
It was good to have something familiar.
It gave a sense of structure to my days.
After a month of wandering the city, I wrote an article about it:
Recently,
wrote a reply:
I was over the moon to receive this! Even though the gist of the article was that I was wrong, it was nice to know that someone cared that much to write a thoughtful reply. The author has spent 22 years in Romania, which you can see in every word.
Florida
I left Europe because I needed to attend a conference in Florida.
While in Florida, I spent a few weeks visiting my family.
I bought a Harvard hoodie as a war trophy.
El Salvador
Florida was relatively close to El Salvador, just a few hours by flight.
Since I had never visited Central America before, I decided to go.
We all know that El Salvador was #1 in murder a few years ago, and is now #1 safest. It’s still in a state of emergency. In Santa Ana, this is evident as everything shuts down at night. While you can walk the streets safely, they are eerily empty, giving the city a ghost-town feel at night.
After so many years of murder, the locals are thrilled to have tourists back, the return of tourism a point of national pride. Walking down the street people would randomly come up to me and shake my hand.
Every conversation in El Salvador involves someone asking you about pupusas, the national dish — HAVE YOU TRIED PUPUSAS YET?! — it gets old fast, the lowest form of conversation. Pupusas are essentially just tortillas with melted cheese. They’re fine. I think the reason they are brought up in every conversation is the locals need something, anything, to be proud of.
This was my view from my hostel in Santa Ana, the second biggest city.
Every night the mountains would light on fire. I later learned it was a volcano.
Santa Ana is pretty ghetto, this is what every street looks like:
Many buildings had watchtowers with slits for guards to shoot out of.
The only good building in the city was the cathedral.
On literally every street corner, and standing in every business, was a man with a shotgun.
In Canada they name their high schools after social justice warriors.
In El Salvador they name their high schools after Albert Camus:
One idiosyncratic quirk of the country is that every public bus in El Salvador was uniquely pimped out by its driver. My favorite was one adorned with a huge Confederate flag.
Since El Salvador has embraced bitcoin, you can pay at McDonald’s in bitcoin.
One thing about El Salvador is that the bread sucks. In Europe, they had amazing artisanal bread everywhere, but here, every restaurant/store exclusively sells these white puffy buns.
After Santa Ana, I went to the capital, San Salvador. This was a mistake.
One thing I learned about Central America is that the worst city in each country is always the capital. Every capital is just ugly pavement and traffic and favelas, with few redeeming qualities. The best part of every country is always nature: beaches, mountains, jungles, etc.
Honduras
I took a bus from El Salvador to Nicaragua.
Every bus is always full of people blasting music, games, and movies on their phones without headphones. This noise used to bug me, but I’ve gotten used to it, and barely notice it now. It’s just their culture. I accept it.
Our bus cut through Honduras, and this country gave me the heebie jeebies; made my skin crawl. I have no desire to visit Honduras. It felt dangerous and mean.
Nicaragua
My bus dropped me off in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, this was also a mistake. As I said, every capital city sucks. I didn’t leave my hostel very much:
When I did venture out, there wasn’t much to see or do. Rampant poverty. Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, after only Haiti.
There were murals everywhere demonizing America and the CIA.
Nicaragua’s national rhetoric seems to be stuck in the 1980s, nostalgic for the era of Iran-Contra when they were relevant on the world stage. Throughout the towns I visited, murals adorn the walls, portraying the CIA as the enemy—a testament to their existential struggle against perceived oppressors.
I fled Managua and went to San Juan del Sur, the top backpacking destination in the country.
On the chickenbus to San Juan del Sur, I got a really bad heat stroke.
See that Jesus statue in the top left corner?
This is the view from the top of the hill overlooking San Juan del Sur:
I stayed in a boujie party hostel and fell into the trap of partying a little too hard.
Every weekend it looked like this, which made me feel like I was in college again:
I ended up staying at this hostel for over 3 weeks, and it was a blur.
Every night the bar was lit.
I measured the passage of time in karaoke nights.
Random cattle wandered around the hostel.
I heard tales of one nearby hostel that had a pet pig living there, and guests were allowed to feed the pig dozens of beers.
To get from the hostel into town, I had to take a shuttle through dirt roads.
One thing about Nicaragua is that it’s a brutal dictatorship with no free press, which made things dangerous for an investigative journalist. I would have been thrown in jail instantly if they found out about me. I got sketched out and fled.
Here is a sneak peek of my Nicaragua article I wrote for The American Conservative, which should be published any day now:
Costa Rica
After Nicaragua I spent a month in Costa Rica, splitting my time between surfing hostels in the towns of Tamarindo and Puerto Viejo, both of which were heavily gentrified. At this point, I had learned to avoid the capital cities and simply find a nice beach town.
Costa Rica is much more affluent than Nicaragua — it felt downright 1st world, almost. The dogs, instead of being strays, all seemed to have owners and collars. The population was visibly healthier and happier.
Again, I fell into the trap of relaxing a little bit too hard. It’s difficult to be passionate about autistically investigating corruption in academia while living in a beach paradise.
Panama
Yesterday I took a 10+ hour bus ride to Panama.
I arrived in a small town…
Then took a boat…
… and finally arrived on my island off the coast, where I will be staying for at least the next couple of weeks.
I don’t have many insights into Panama since I just arrived.
America
In July my Central American tour will come to an end, as I will be flying to Washington DC to speak at a conference:
Sadly, I don’t think the headline speaker will be able to attend, since he will have to report to prison the week before.
After my talk, I reckon I will stick around in America for a while 🙂.
I am not sure which states to visit, though. Planning that now.
Advice
Don’t become a writer or journalist.
“Don’t be a writer, if you possibly can’t … The arts are not a way to make a living … This is a damn insult to life.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
Even with insane luck, dedication, networking, and a little bit of skill, and rising to be in the top 1% of Substack writers, I am barely scraping by with 311 paid subscribers.
If you are one of the 311, your support means the world to me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you aren’t, I won’t use this as an opportunity to pester you into paying; rather, I will keep trying to break big stories and hope you will see the value in them and in supporting me.
Since day 1, I’ve struggled with the idea of paywalling content. I could probably double my subscriber count overnight if I started paywalling my articles. Maybe I should. However, I have focused on overall growth instead of pure monetization.
My point is this: unless you are already a famous big shot, you will struggle financially and spiritually. But the struggle is good. The struggle is the essence of the journey.
If you can’t help but write, embrace the struggle—it means you are truly alive. With a bit of luck, you won’t have zero readers, and your stories can hold the power to change the world… or even compel the president of Harvard to step down.
Epic post for a well deserved milestones. Jealous of your travels. Will keep recommending your stack til you reach 100K.
Great post! For comparison purposes, I have 7,443 subs of which ~100 paid. I have no paywalls of any sort and no paid content, and don't really post "Subscribe now" banners either. Have been on Substack since 11th October 2021. I was, however, blogging for ~12 years before that. This is just a hobby, not my job.