Telling the Future Has 1,000 Subscribers!

Onward to 10,000

A postcard commissioned for the Paris Exhibition in 1900 showing people in the year 2000 having tea in a salon heated with radium.

Thank you for supporting Telling the Future! Telling the Future hit a milestone this week when it reached 1,000 subscribers a little more than two years after it launched in February 2022. I have a lot of exciting things planned for Telling the Future, but I’ll need your help for Telling the Future to continue to grow.

Telling the Future just reached 1,000 subscribers! One thousand people is enough to fill a large auditorium. I’ve certainly never spoken to that large an audience at one time. The number of Telling the Future subscribers has grown slowly but steadily since I started a little over two years ago. It finally reached 1,000 subscribers this week after I sent out my 50th newsletter. I’m sincerely grateful to everyone who has supported me by buying a paid subscription, sending me a message saying they enjoyed something I wrote, or just signing up to receive these newsletters. I truly find it staggering so many people read what I write. Thank you for allowing me to send my ideas to your inbox.

Telling the Future reached 1,000 subscribers on March 12, 2024.

Your support means a lot to me. Trying to make a sustainable career as a freelance writer entails real risk. As regular readers know, I had a stroke a few months after I started writing that left me initially unable to walk and made me wonder whether I could keep doing this. But with your encouragement—and with your patience as I continue to recover—I am still writing. Now, almost two years later, Telling the Future is now recommended by 19 other Substack authors, including Superforecasting author

Dan Gardner

, Thinking in Bets author

Annie Duke

, and

Good Judgment

. My posts and podcasts have been written up in Semafor, cited in Brookings research, and mentioned by

Matthew Yglesias

,

Astral Codex Ten

, and

Don't Worry About the Vase

. I’m proud to be part of the growing and vibrant community of forecasters and people interested in forecasting.

The truth is that 1,000 subscribers is just as start. I have a lot of exciting things planned, including a podcast that should come out soon about life expectancy with Our World in Data’s Saloni Dattani, who writes a fantastic substack on scientific research called

Scientific Discovery

. But it takes a lot of time and effort to make careful forecasts, write newsletter posts, and record podcast episodes. I’ll ultimately need more subscribers to continue doing this. So if you enjoy Telling the Future, the best way to support me—besides buying a paid subscription—is to help me promote it by sharing it widely with others. Thanks again for your support!

This Vox article on acclaimed forecasting team Samotsvety does a nice job of explaining how good forecasters work. I was happy to see that Open Philanthropy has added forecasting as an official grantmaking area. Telling the Future was initially made possible by a grant from the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund, so I know from personal experience how much difference grant funding can make. I hope Open Philanthropy will support other projects like mine, because forecasting is a vital skill we can cultivate.