The Bulwark Built a Profitable $20 Million Business by Breaking the Old Media Rules

 

The Bulwark Built a Profitable $20 Million Business by Breaking the Old Media Rules

What began as a Never Trump passion project has become a fast-growing media company with more than 140,000 paid subscribers.

BY ROB WALKER

Aug 6, 2026

From a cramped room in an uptown New Orleans neighborhood, stuffed with a fancy video lighting setup and decorated with a plant and a pinto bean poster, Tim Miller has become arguably the most familiar public face of an unlikely sounding media business success story. The Bulwark Daily podcast, which the former political operative hosts from his home far from the D.C.-New York political-media epicenter, features guests like journalist Maggie Haberman, pundit Piers Morgan, and former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, along with Miller’s own at-times performative brand of partisan commentary. One memorable example: Unable to air a clip of Vice President JD Vance being booed at the Olympics, Miller recreated the moment himself. (“Boooo! You suck!” etc.) 

Miller’s show ranks consistently in the top 10 news podcasts, putting its anti-MAGA (but avowedly centrist) agenda in the company of Megyn Kelly’s, Candace Owens’s, and Tucker Carlson’s MAGA-friendlier offerings; the video version anchors a YouTube channel with more than 1.7 million followers.

The Bulwark, a media company founded in 2018 by apostate Republicans as a Never Trump redoubt, is much more than Miller’s show these days, with more than 50 employees publishing 10 newsletters and nine podcasts, mostly free but some available only with a subscription (annual price: $100). The subject matter ranges from national security to business to entertainment. Live events have been added to the mix, with shows that basically consist of Bulwark personalities chatting and arguing about the news, selling out in major cities, and sometimes requiring second nights.

This bundle gives subscribers multiple reasons to stay, and it lets the Bulwark capture different audiences. A subscriber who came into the Bulwarkverse via Miller’s podcast might discover Lauren Egan’s Democratic politics newsletter. A reader of Will Sommer’s entertaining coverage of MAGA conspiracy culture may find their way to Sarah Longwell’s more nitty-gritty (and, for Trump opponents, depressing) Focus Group podcast. All will be teased with subscriber-only extras for those who can’t get enough. Editor Jonathan V. Last’s Triad newsletter — five days a week and often 2,000 words a shot — has turned out to be a major converter of paid subscribers.

“I think that one of our projects has been to rebuild the bundle,” says Last, referring to the unbundling of news organizations and rise of individual star writers and creators who use platforms like Substack to go solo. (A recent redesign of its site emphasizes a more cohesive, magazine-like feel.) “I think we are much more than the sum of our parts. We bring together a bigger audience, build a bigger community because we’re all together than any of us would on our own. And I think there’s a lot of value in that for the people who read us and listen to us and talk with us and a lot of value for us as people who are on a mission and not just trying to make money.”

But the telegenic, 44-year-old Miller, who sometimes sports a single strand of pearls, has become a kind of face for the brand as it has made its surprising rise from a modest nonprofit to a growing and profitable business with annual revenue topping $20 million last year — and on track to reach about $30 million this year. It recently passed one million total Substack subscribers and more than 140,000 paid. It has more than 1.7 million followers on YouTube, where Miller’s podcast has had 71 million views in the past year. 

Most of the growth has happened in the past two years or so, and for a variety of reasons, from being opportunistic about branching out into new media to staying conservative and deliberate in their growth strategy. But one that Miller likes to emphasize is the authentic voice. “People ask, ‘What is authenticity and what is tone?’” Miller told me recently. “And sometimes it’s hard to describe it, but I would say I’m mad about what’s happening. I’m actually mad.”  

That’s not enough to turn a political mission into a company, but it’s a start. And it’s fair to say that the key players in the Bulwarkverse, most notably publisher and founder Longwell and editor Last, are actually mad too, and not hesitant to say so. Certainly none of them were motivated to pursue the Bulwark project as a cool-headed plan to build a profitable new-media brand.

The company began as a passion project by founders who saw the rise of President Trump as bad for the Republican Party and the conservative cause, and for America. Longwell had essentially no background in publishing, and by her own account has instead largely run the business on intuition and opportunism. But clearly she understands communications — and suspects it may have helped to come from outside traditional media. “My North Star is not to recreate the failing model,” she says.

And what that really adds up to is a combination of embracing instinct and openness to experimentation. The Bulwark has built a new kind of ideological media company with a series of fortuitous decisions, starting with figuring out how to reward its fans.

A great hang

The Bulwark is a near-direct descendant of The Weekly Standard, the neoconservative magazine co-founded by pundit and political veteran Bill Kristol. This in turn descended from a long tradition of smaller-circulation magazines of politics and policy ideas (notably including The Public Interest, founded by Kristol’s father, Irving) that sometimes achieved genuine influence, but didn’t attract a mass audience, often depending on a wealthy patron to stay afloat. The Standard, which staked out a conservative anti-Trump stance during and after the 2016 election, was unceremoniously shuttered in 2018 by parent Clarity Media, owned by the conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz.

Longwell, who had spent much of her career doing communications strategy for clients of conservative PR firm Berman and Company, had become increasingly focused on opposing Trump — especially as much of the Republican establishment reversed its initial Trump resistance and fell in line. She and Kristol, among those who saw Trump as an authoritarian threat to the American system, launched the first version of the Bulwark as essentially a Drudge Report-style Never Trump news and opinion aggregator. 

Last, a Standard veteran who had built the magazine’s digital presence, agreed to help get the Bulwark up and running. (He intended to leave political journalism after that; the demise of The Weekly Standard had left him cynical, and mad.) He imagined a new iteration of the small political magazines he’d grown up in. “We can build a little website that is a digital home for ideas,” he recalls thinking at the time. Longwell helped create Defending Democracy Together Institute, a nonprofit that funded the Bulwark, raising money from donors, basically the usual tradition of public-idea media, but on WordPress. (Longwell left Berman and Company but started Longwell Partners, a political communications firm with an emphasis on focus group analysis. Her book drawing lessons from that research, How to Eat an Elephant, comes out in September.)

Even this early version of the site, with regular contributions from Kristol and Last and the original podcast (hosted by Charlie Sykes), found an enthusiastic audience, who, to the founders’ surprise, wanted to chip in. This inspired the site’s first intuitive evolution: It switched to a for-profit model in 2020, moving its written content to Substack, and launching a few new products for paid subscribers. JVL, as he became known to fans, was sticking around, but his ambitions were modest. At best, he expected 7,000 paid subscriptions in six months; it got 12,000 in roughly two months, and Longwell believed it could go much higher. “Sarah understood much, much sooner,” he says.

To this day, most Bulwark content is free. The company takes a minimalist approach to pay-walling on the theory that subscribers are paying for an extra dose of community, not a product or service. This stems from the original idea that content like The Secret Podcast — featuring Longwell and Last, talking, arguing, and laughing about current political events — could be a bonus product that “engaged” with paid subscribers, “as a thank you,” Longwell says. “That sort of became the core of the subscription model that ultimately now is our business model.”

Meanwhile, Longwell had reached out to her old friend Miller. A veteran of the failed presidential campaigns of Jon Huntsman and Jeb Bush, and outspoken foe of Trumpism, Miller started contributing written pieces. When Sykes departed, Miller became host of the flagship podcast. “We were confident that he would do well,” Longwell says. “I don’t know that we foresaw that it was going to go this well.”

Miller’s journey — from GOP insider to apostate to not simply a Never Trumper but something like a left-adjacent independent — is the story some chunk of The Bulwark’s audience has been living, making him a particularly credible narrator of the moment, at least for his devoted audience. But he’s also able to transcend any single niche narrative. He’s a veteran cable news contributor, yet his ability to be funny, self-deprecating, and genuinely conversational on camera distinguishes him from the shouting heads vibe. Miller is a prepared, attentive interviewer who is quick on his feet, but Longwell emphasizes his tone: Yes, he’s mad, but he’s funny and charming. “He’s just a great hang,” she says.

And that’s as good a summary as any of what the Bulwark brand has become. The site publishes serious analysis and reporting, but particularly on some of its podcasts, there’s a lighter touch, too. Miller and Longwell have a running argument over Trump’s gilded makeover of the Oval Office (Miller, curiously, defends it), and both get showily exasperated with “dark JVL’s” pessimism about voters ever turning on MAGA. There’s also plenty of mocking coverage of the antics of MAGA extremists like Laura Loomer. Politics can be tough, and there’s no way to sugarcoat it, Longwell says, but “we’re going to make it fun” — and conversational and communal and the opposite of despair. 

Turning on the cameras

When it comes to the actual business of the Bulwark, Longwell stresses that she’s taken a bootstrapped approach. (You might even call it conservative.) In 2024, Semafor reported that Kathryn Murdoch, the wife of media scion James, and Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, had made small investments to cover early shortfalls. The company broke even in 2025, and despite offers, Longwell says the company has taken on no further investment and is otherwise employee-owned with no plans to sell.

A large part of that success is due to another simple, intuitive decision. As Longwell says, “We turned on the cameras.” That is, they began adding video versions of their podcasts to YouTube in 2023 — standard procedure now, but an experiment at the time, suggested by Longwell Partners employees who believed YouTube was key to the future of political persuasion. Miller also began contributing his own direct-to-camera takes on current news, in a way that felt less like professional news and more like a smart friend explaining things over a FaceTime; some were excerpted as social media-friendly shorts.

People were starting to treat YouTube as a news source, and the platform was already saturated with both right-wing and hard-left content. “But the center-left news and opinion kind of space that we occupy, there just wasn’t a lot out there,” Miller says. And the Bulwark spoke to them in addition to its GOP refugee audience. “There was a ton of demand on YouTube for anti-Trump, center-left content and there was not a ton of supply. We were kind of in the right place at the right time.”

In the summer of 2024, when President Biden withdrew from the presidential race and the American political atmosphere became electric with uncertainty, the Bulwark had a perfunctory YouTube account with roughly 278,000 followers. By late September, it had grown to 631,000 subscribers. The video platform was soon generating between $200,000 and $300,000 a month from advertising. More important, it had become a discovery engine funneling a whole new audience toward paid Substack subscriptions.

The Bulwark has since doubled down on video, adding a “Bulwark Takes” feed in which various contributors respond to events throughout the day (racking up some 226 million views in the past year), and livestreamed commentary on coverage of events like presidential addresses. As with the adoption of Substack, none of this requires heavy investment dollars or time-consuming development processes; it just utilizes free, turn-key tools.

Life after Trump

To annoy the Bulwark’s principals, ask whether the company has a post-Trump future; you won’t be the first. Their bet is that the Bulwark community can be built to last beyond the current administration, but that project can’t be rushed. And of course, they have heard the comparisons. Crooked Media, the home of Pod Save America, has more than 100 employees, and its hosts are reportedly paid $28 million. The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s contrarian-conservative Substack-based publication, grew to more than 170,000 paid subscribers before being acquired by Paramount Skydance in 2025 for a reported $150 million. That acquisition put a number on what a successful subscription-based opinion publication can be worth, a surprising number to some observers.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 This Is the Worst Leadership Habit Spreading Through Business Right Now Anger is the new management shortcut. Smart leaders should avoid it.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Aug 4, 2026

One of the many noxious and contagious byproducts of the Trump era—where the Orange Monster rants incessantly in bitter and infantile “Truths” all night—is that everyone’s first reaction these days to anything going wrong is anger followed closely by the assignment of blame to anyone other than themselves. The more trivial the issue, the greater level of “righteous” anger it seems to provoke. Trump is the undisputed master of rage baiting and blame shifting and, sadly, it’s worked far too well for him. After fear, anger is the world’s greatest negative motivator.

To say that today the world is more easily provoked, offended, and pissed off than ever before is an obvious understatement. It seems that everyone you encounter has a list of offenses and grievances which they maintain top of mind and are eagerly prepared to share. We’re seeing it all day long in growing instances of road rage, outrageous abuse and childish behavior in sports, and neighbors confronting and setting upon neighbors for minute and imagined violations of their respective spaces and newly conceived “rights.”

While MAGA may be louder, more detailed and particular, and far more out front with their scripted ailments and fallacious arguments, egged on by the ignoramuses at Fox News, you don’t have to inquire too deeply into the psyche of almost anyone to uncover what has most recently gotten their goat. Maybe people always stewed and squawked, but they were never so outspoken, amplified and broadcast by social media.

Because Trump has turned over every rock to unearth and release scumbags and slimeballs of all kinds, the rest of what were once the normal folks—who had some sense of restraint, courtesy and decorum—now also feel (perhaps in self-defense) that they too have to “get their licks in” whenever and wherever possible.

Facts no longer matter—science, expertise and even reality are debatable—and everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, right or wrong, and sticking to it. In most multi-generational households, it’s easier and more prudent not to have any discussions of verboten issues instead of engaging in useless and unproductive arguments with elders whose minds are already made up and whose heads are stuck in the sand.

As we’ve always known, nothing sells more newspapers or sucks up more media and online time than performative displays and fake hearings by the clowns in Congress and intemperate tantrums by government officials who are clearly more concerned with “hits” and airtime than with any attempts to tell the truth. The D.C. press is a little lost these days because they’re afraid to aggravate Trump and there’s not much hair-raising news being made by the Dems.

Stirring the pot and feeding more lies and poison to their ignorant base is the prime Republican activity in D.C. these days, although there’s a fair amount of fear mongering on both sides of the aisle. Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan (of sleazy locker room and sordid shower fame) has already logged more than 100 appearances on Fox News but has never introduced a single bill in Congress in his entire career.

There’s plenty of shame, blame, and damage to go around, but the real harm that’s being done for the long term is that too many experienced business leaders, eager entrepreneurs, and successful sports coaches are internalizing the Trumpist tactics and making manufactured anger a prominent and driving part of their strategy, philosophy and approach to teaching their teams, exciting and encouraging their sales folks, and literally inciting their athletes to all act in an unhealthy, unethical and demeaning manner when dealing with their opponents and competitors. Winning is important but making sure your “enemies” lose is the most important consideration. Forget respect—it’s all about revenge.

This is a page directly torn from Trump’s operating manual: degrading and diminishing the opposition, creating false offenses, attributing evil intentions, and alleging illicit actions—all with the objective of fostering, festering and promoting fear and anger in the troops. This is what we’re seeing implemented by Trump clones and followers in various programs across the country. Coaches teasing, taunting, and angering their charges with press accounts, inflammatory videos, and other media. Trainers telling their charges that working up a good “hate” is great for your game time adrenaline and pumps up your energy. Entrepreneurs telling their team that they need to hate their competition and remember that those “people” are trying to take away their livings and put their families out on the street.

This fundamentally corrupt approach is bad for the mental health of the athletes, which is sad, but where it really hurts is in business. Anger may work overnight, but over time, it fades and can’t be effectively sustained. There are four major reasons why it’s a bad bet from the get-go and needs to be avoided.

First, artificial anger flames out quickly, wears out its welcome rapidly, and accomplishes nothing sustainable.

Second, anger without a concrete objective and a finite end in sight is a waste of energy.

Third, anger may energize and mobilize the team but without hands-on direction leads nowhere.

And finally, while it may be an effective short-term mobilizer, it’s a lousy long-term management tool.

It’s fine to fire up your folks with passion and purpose, and that’s a sustainable foundation to build your business. Having to find someone or something new to hate every week is a tough task, a fool’s errand, and the worst way to lead. A great leader understands that some anger may be inevitable and usable, but he or she works to convert that emotion into constructive energy and real solutions that ultimately address the root causes of the anger.

Howard Tullman joins Lisa Dent on WGN radio to talk about his INC. Magazine column on expensive matchmaking

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Rich, Busy, and Clueless: The New Clients Fueling a $250,000 Matchmaking Boom

Technology has made the matching process ever easier, which has had a mixed impact.

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Jul 28, 2026

 

 

In the decades before the scourge of the pandemic, admitting that you met your mate through a marriage broker or an online dating service was generally regarded as a confession of behavior somewhere between despair and desperation. It wasn’t as bad as buying a mail order bride or marrying a pen pal who was in prison for life, but it could still raise eyebrows. Blind dates, hooking up and one-night stands were all deemed to be acceptable youthful behavior and not expected to lead anywhere anyway. But marrying someone you met on Match.com just wasn’t something you bragged about to your friends and neighbors. It smacked of having no other choices and settling for someone equally at wit’s end.

However, Covid-19 gave millions of cellar dwellers and wallflowers permission and the opportunity to actively seek out companionship and even more substantial commitments in online forums and dating services where they wouldn’t have otherwise been caught dead. And to be clear, it was no longer confined to any particular age group or gender. It wasn’t as pristine as Tom Hank’s and Meg Ryan’s romance in You’ve Got Mail, but at least it was no longer perceived as pathetic. But the whole matching process—finding your future on your phone—was never really accepted and always regarded as déclassé.

Technology has made the matching process ever easier and easier which has had a mixed impact. Initial connections were much simpler to secure because there were millions of people in the database, but at the opposite end of the martial spectrum, equal millions of would-be romances and suggested introductions were immediately thwarted by tech-enhanced critical scrutiny and rejections resulting from a quick scan of a prospect’s online persona. There’s a persistent FOMO-like sense among online searchers that a better bet and a more attractive match are just a swipe or two away. So, they keep searching and coming up empty. After all is said and done, the bottom line has never really changed. Many people still think looking for love online is for losers. This persistent attitude and a consistent lack of results have led to user fatigue, disappointment, and large-scale abandonment of the online services. And it’s created a resurgent demand for face-to-face personal matchmaking services.

As a result, and notwithstanding all of the subtle and not so subtle opprobrium, the U.S. matchmaking industry has rapidly expanded to meet that demand. It now numbers over 2,000 “professional” firms of various sizes and of widely different skill sets, experience levels, and even pricing models. This number is, of course, substantially supplemented by “helpful” parents, friends and other family, know-it-all neighbors and yentas, and plenty of intrusive experts at the office.

But the real explosive growth in the business—more than two-thirds of the newer firms—has come from corporate chains expanding nationwide, much like the model of H&R Block. These numerous and readily accessible players occupy (and have actually already overcrowded) the lower segments of the marketplace. Their stated efforts to use technology and now AI to professionalize and standardize a very sloppy, unregulated, and chaotic industry have mainly resulted in dramatic price increases for their basic standardized and turnkey services. These price hikes combined with a Wild West environment without rules or regulations regarding any player’s behavior, promises, representations or performance guarantees have brought the expected onslaught of crooks, con men and scam artists – all enabled by A.I. and the awareness that no civilian, client or customer can ever tell what’s really inside of their black box. High demand, high prices, an ignorant and gullible customer base, and no applicable laws make for an environment ideally suited to cheats and criminals.

But technology has also been inadvertently responsible for the expansion of a singular high-end segment of the match-making business which has thrived in the new environment—especially on both coasts and in D.C.—by offering previously unimaginably high prices for their personalized and customized services. Their specific targets—rarely overtly stated—are tech-created rich nerds looking for love with huge gobs of cash, no time, no class, and no clue as to how to proceed to find a partner.

And there are lots of new mini-millionaires like these being created every day by AI IPOs and the expiration of all manner of lockups and other trading restrictions, especially around crypto deals. They literally have more money than they (or their parents) have ever had in their lives and almost no ability to evaluate which of these firms might make sense for them to employ in their quest.

So, in the time-honored tradition of the very best tech promoters and marketers, these poor suckers fall back on the stupidest rationale of all: How can it be bad if it costs so much? Worse yet, there’s clearly a Veblen effect as well which dictates that higher prices for luxury or scarce goods increase the demand rather than reduce it. And finally, there’s clearly a FOMO effect which the high-end and high-priced personal matchmakers make very clear and that is that their time and resources are limited, the number of great men or women out there who are looking is a finite number, and waiting will never get you anything worth waiting for.

The bottom line: the highest-end boutique players in this very narrow field are perfectly comfortable charging rates between $50,000 and $250,000 for their services with no strings and no guarantees attached. They serve executives, high-net-worth individuals, and successful entrepreneurs. And they’re getting these kinds of numbers and growing their revenue every year. It’s all legal for now, but I guess the real question—like so many Trumpian actions these days—is should it be legal?

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Stripe Wants to Buy PayPal. The Real Prize May Be Hiding in Plain Sight

Stripe’s $53 billion bet reveals a brutal truth about the tech Industry.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Jul 21, 2026

One of the oldest ideas in the technology world is that most of the competitive races among new entrepreneurial entrants that are proposing to provide various novel products and services will eventually resolve themselves into markets and verticals dominated by one (or at most two or three) very large and successful players while the rest of the also-rans and wannabes share the crumbs left on the table, until they eventually fold up their tents and pack it in.

It’s a cyclical circumstance in the tech industry and we’re seeing it again today in the AI frontier engine competition with the clear dominance of a few major platform players. Technology is a “winner take all” world driven by several practical and structural considerations that typically drive this kind of concentration conclusion. Some of the key contributing factors to this recurring outcome: demonstrated economies of scale, market-dictated centralization and standardization requirements, the herd mentality of large technology purchasers—believing that you can’t go wrong or lose your job if you’re buying what everyone else is using—and the power of Metcalfe’s Law, which describes and defines the exponential growth characteristics of networks.

And, of course, when you have a passive and forgiving regulatory environment and an utter lack of enforcement of antitrust laws aided, abetted and actively encouraged (if not directly ordered and demanded) by an easily bribed and corrupt administration, it becomes easier and easier to consolidate even traditional industries into the hands of a few powerful players aiming to crush their competitors as we see every day now in the broadcast, entertainment and media sectors. The message to the insiders and the sharks is pretty clear—the gloves are off, join the crooks in the White House in grabbing whatever you can, and worry about the consequences way down the line—if ever.

So, it comes as no great surprise that PayPal, which really started the whole online payments business in 1998, is once again being tossed around and targeted by Stripe. Founded more than a decade later in 2010, Stripe has just made an offer to buy PayPal for about $53 billion, about one third of Stripe’s most recent valuation. More interesting, in the manner of the minnow swallowing the whale, PayPal handled over $1.8 trillion in payments, which completely dwarfs Stripe’s current operations. But with its stock under tremendous negative pressure, PayPal makes a very attractive target for a business like Stripe, which has been trying to consolidate and control the overall e-commerce processing space since its inception.

PayPal was bought in 2002 by eBay and pretty much moldered in the shadows there until it was spun off as its own entity in 2015. Earlier this year, the CEO was fired, the stock being down more than 25 percent, and, more recently, PayPal split itself into 3 divisions—one of which is its rapidly growing Venmo division (acquired by PayPal in 2013) which processed about $300 billion in payments last year. Stripe—which in its own operations is clearly best of breed—certainly sees the Venmo division as a great add-on.

Of course, this would represent a very substantial contraction of the overall consumer payment space even though Apple Pay is growing quickly and other programs like Zelle are also gaining some modest traction. In the old pre-Trump days, this kind of a proposed deal—especially on this scale—folding together the two leaders in the space would be highly suspect from a regulatory standpoint. But in today’s laissez faire environment, you secure the Orange Monster’s blessing (often under the table), and then this kind of deal simply becomes business as usual.

In all fairness—and putting aside the fact that this smells like another Lutnick self-dealing special that we’ll only learn about a year from now—the truth is that PayPal may have committed the cardinal Silicon Valley sin of becoming boring and passé, unduly complicated in a world seeking speed, convenience and ease of access; and ultimately being perceived as behind the times, especially when compared to the simplicity of players like Stripe. While we might gripe about the concentration issues, the fact is that PayPal largely brought all this attention and grief on itself. It had a diamond in Venmo buried within a corporate bureaucracy that should have been exploited, promoted, and accelerated. Instead, in a final fit of accelerating its own demise, PayPal split itself into distinct parts that highlighted and identified the old news and the new value embedded within. This wasn’t lost on some of the bankers whose earliest analysis and comments were around the idea that Stripe might very well be able to make more profit and drive more growth for Venmo than PayPal ever could at this point.

Joseph Schumpeter may have died in 1950, but his doctrine of creative destruction lives on. Founders and market leaders aren’t entitled to persist indefinitely and it’s the regular emergence of new entrepreneurial companies with better technology, ideas and resources that eventually spurs change, innovation and growth. Sometimes it doesn’t hurt in the long run to be the second mover rather than the first.

There’s an Ancient Solution to Our Modern Crisis of Attention

 There’s an Ancient Solution to Our Modern Crisis of Attention

July 12, 2026

By S.J. Murray

Dr. Murray is a professor of great texts and creative writing at Baylor University.

About 2,000 years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca warned of a crisis of attention. The problem wasn’t caused by smartphones or TikTok; it was because papyrus had become more widely available. As a result, scrolls became plentiful and wealthy readers had access to more texts than ever before.

Seneca observed that the minds of those who read too many scrolls too quickly became restless and unsteady. This kind of mind was less able, he noted, to “stay in one place and spend time with itself.”

The lesson then was no less true than it is now, in our perpetually distracted, screen-addled, multitasking age. When we allow ideas to come and go in rapid succession, we keep our minds too busy and wear them out. Nothing sticks. “One who is everywhere is nowhere,” Seneca cautioned.

Seneca did not have access to modern scientific studies or survey data, but he would not have been surprised by our plight. Professors report that students now have difficulty watching feature-length films, let alone finishing books. On average, we check email 77 times a day, and often it’s not because of a notification — we interrupt ourselves. We’re not even able to focus on our devices: Two decades ago, a given task could hold our attention for two and a half minutes; today, research shows, we make it only 47 seconds on one screen before succumbing to the itch to switch.

Our society tends to view this as a technological problem that demands technological countermeasures: anti-distraction apps that act like digital wardens and lock us out of our other apps; plastic phone jails equipped with kitchen timers; $500 minimalist phones that have the revolutionary feature of having no features at all.

But we’re overcomplicating a very old challenge that is more moral than digital. Seneca rightly saw distraction as a failure of character. We don’t need another algorithm or gadget to stop our minds from running around like unruly children, he would have argued. We need to relearn how to sit still with our own thoughts.

How exactly do you do this? Seneca had some practical advice, which he outlined in his “Letters From a Stoic”: Devote your attention to one idea a day.

For the past 20 years, I’ve practiced a simple discipline inspired by this advice. First thing in the morning, I forage in a book for my one idea. Typically, it takes about three to four pages (less than 10 minutes) to find one. I’m not looking for a memorable quotation or aphorism; I’m looking for a passage that challenges or better illuminates how I see the world.

Recently, for example, I was struck by a tragic realization near the end of Tolstoy’s novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” On the brink of death, Ivan cannot escape the feeling that life has passed him by. And yet he had achieved all the “right” things — the good job, the nice house, the fancy friends. It’s a sobering reminder that social standing and worldly goods are fleeting. Friendship, love, a deep sense of purpose beyond oneself, a connection to the transcendent: These are what matter in the end.

Having found my idea, I took the next step Seneca advises: “to ponder that day and digest.” So I took Ivan’s realization with me while I drank my morning coffee. Three sips in, I began auditing my own priorities. I found myself wondering: How was I nurturing the relationships that sustain me? Learning to love people better was a challenge I needed to face. I committed to reaching out that week to three friends with whom I’d fallen out of touch.

At lunchtime and again during my afternoon coffee break, I pondered Ivan’s question and directed my attention to the life around me. Walking my dog later, I stopped on a bridge over the Colorado River and listened to the birds sing. By bedtime, I wasn’t fretting about the messages piled up in my inbox.

Seneca compared the benefits of deep reflection to the alchemy by which bees transform nectar into honey. In the hive, bees repeatedly pass the nectar they gather among themselves, mixing it with enzymes that alter its chemical composition. Think of the nectar as information and the honey as wisdom. Whereas nectar sours within a matter of days, honey doesn’t spoil — not even after being buried for thousands of years in an Egyptian tomb.

Seneca’s honey metaphor corresponds to what psychologists call deep processing: By returning to the same idea repeatedly, we signal to our brain that the idea is worth moving into the architecture of long-term memory. Each time we retrieve an idea from memory, we also wrap it in new associations (a process known as reconsolidation), which ensures that those ideas remain relevant to our life as time goes on.

That is what was happening as I churned Ivan Ilyich over in my mind throughout my day. My own experiences and thoughts alchemized Tolstoy’s warning into a personal conviction that would start to form part of my character.

I am hardly the first person to appreciate Seneca’s insight that a crowded library is no match for a curated portfolio of deeply assimilated wisdom. Marcus Aurelius tested one Stoic principle a day against the chaos of war. Elizabeth I drew on a well of carefully digested wisdom from Seneca and Cicero to handle the pressures of ruling. Abraham Lincoln owned few books but mastered them all. By reading aloud and chewing on the likes of Aesop and Shakespeare as a young man, he forged a mind he compared to steel: “very hard to scratch anything on” but “almost impossible, after you get it there, to rub it out.”

I thought of Lincoln the other day as I pondered the character called the Autodidact in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel “Nausea.” This strange fellow haunts the local library with the goal of reading every book in alphabetical order. Stuffed with facts but starved for meaning, he embodies the belief that volume of information is a substitute for depth of understanding.

By anchoring each day in a single idea, I’ve spent 20 years trying to avoid the Autodidact’s hollow fate. I no longer chase the endlessly receding horizon of staying informed. I’ve traded the anxiety of the shallows for the untapped wisdom of deep waters.

We are often told that more information is the answer, but Seneca knew better. Wisdom is found not in the nectar we gather, but in the honey we take the time to make with it.