Why Chris Best Created Substack

So tell me, first of all, tell me what was the inspiration to start Substack? Like how did it come about? I've always been an avid reader. My dad was an English teacher growing up. We had books around the house and I've always thought that what you read matters. Like it shapes who you are, it shapes how you think. It creates like who you are as a person. And so great writing matters a lot. In my other life I do software. Software is this magical thing where you can write a piece of code and it does something for a million people. If you write a great essay, a great book, a great thought, you can change who a million people are. And so great writing is this valuable thing. And when I took a sabbatical from a company that I'd done, I was like, I should be a writer. That would be good. Like how hard could it be? These guys are doing good things. I started writing what I thought was going to be like an essay or a blog post or a screed or something outlining my frustration with the state of the media industry, the state of incentives on the internet, basically complaining, wah, wah, wah. Social media is breaking our brains, you know, this kind of shit. And I sent it to my friend Hamish, who's really a writer. And he told me, like, anybody can complain about this stuff. You're not as original as you think. All of my friends who are writers know all of this stuff. The more interesting question is, if all of this is true, what could you do about it? And that turned into sub-stag. And what year was this? 2017. It's really perfect timing for when everything started getting really heavy in terms of censorship and also the chaos that came about because of the pandemic and journalists getting canceled. And there was so much weird stuff in terms of what you were allowed to write about or not allowed to write about. And then, of course, the Hunter Biden thing, the laptop, all that stuff came about in the first few years. A lot of the best writers in the world, in my estimation, were getting kind of tissue rejected from the places where they would have been before. Tissue rejected? Like it's an analogy. They're getting like an organ transplant that fails kind of thing. They're getting sort of pushed out from the places that would have been their home and where they could have done the thing that mattered to them before. What happened? How do you think that, like what steps fell into place that caused all this? My theory on this is that it's a combination of natural human affairs, right? Like there's human nature. People act in certain ways. There's dark tendencies that come out when you get people together at scale colliding with the consequences of the first generation of the internet revolution, basically. The way that the first generation of the internet played out was this massive land grab for human attention. So first of all, the computer and then even more so the smartphone kind of gobbled up all of the slices of people's lives that were just sitting there. People used to get bored and then the smartphone came along and that just didn't exist anymore. In that phase, the things that won were the things that were the most efficient at gobbling up everyone's attention. So you had this sort of, the game that everyone played was like get everyone's eyeballs and the things that you do to win at that game create an incentive landscape that drives everyone crazy. Yeah. The way to win at that game is be outraged or get people outraged. Yeah. The way to win at Twitter is be bad in a lot of ways. If you don't want to do it, somebody else will. Be bad. Well, I mean, bad in some like be outrageous, be the ultimate tweet as I've found out myself sometimes is not the thing that everyone agrees with or even the thing that everyone hates is the thing that maximally divides people. The thing that most separates the people that are in your tribe on your side and makes them kind of like cheer and at the same time spits in the face of the other people. That is the recipe for a successful tweet because that's the incentive landscape that makes Twitter succeed. Yeah. It's just I go on Twitter once a day, maybe twice a day just to see what kind of shit the monkeys are throwing at each other. It seems like a mental institution sometimes. I see people arguing over things and things that are trending that have zero impact in my life. I don't understand why people are putting so much attention to it, but it seems like the recreational outrage that comes about because of Twitter is one of the most addictive things I've ever witnessed. People take part in. I mean, I say people, I took part in it a little bit for a while, but now I don't engage at all. I literally, I don't read my mentions. I occasionally post things and then I just get the fuck out of there. I just think it's too, it's just too poisoned. Yeah. You're a wiser man than most. Well, I just see it. I see it in other people. I see what it does to people. It's just, it's very strange because I never thought Twitter was going to become that. I always thought Twitter was just like some innocuous thing. When it first came around, it was silly. A lot of comedians loved it because it was a great little, because in the beginning it was only 140 characters. It's great to keep your jokes succinct and short little blurbs and try to find funny things to say. But then it just became some strange way for people to expose their mental illness. Yeah. And none of that stuff is new. None of the bad things that people do on social media are a new facet of humanity. It amplifies it and it creates this false reality that everyone sees that slowly drives us crazy. So how difficult was it to A, start Substack and then B, get journalists to come on board? The hardest part of starting Substack was convincing ourselves that it could work. Because it started as I was literally writing this essay and Hamish and I were talking and we just came across this idea of like, what if we let writers go independent themselves? What if we let you start your own thing? You get the email addresses, you own everything. People can pay you directly. Now you're getting hired and fired by your readers. It sounded too simple to possibly work. We're like, if this thing could work, somebody would have done this already. It seems stupid. But we kind of talked each other into it. And I'm a tech nerd. I'm a product guy. Hamish is not that he's a writer. He knows that world. And we kind of both thought that it could work. And so we just sort of like slowly talked each other into it. He had a friend who was a writer who like needed it right away, basically, had wanted something like this and became our first customer. A guy called Bill Bishop writes cynicism. It's a newsletter about China that everybody in business and government reads. Why did he need it right away? Well, he I mean, he so he'd had this newsletter that he'd been writing for free and paying for the privilege of sending. That was just like what the hell is actually going on in China for anybody who needs to actually know. And, you know, lots of business people, government people all over the world would read it. And he's been like, I should charge instead of paying to send this thing out, I should charge people for this, obviously. But I couldn't figure out how to get the, you know, wire up the payment with the sending and that like, he just needed someone to handle the details of it. And we were like, great, we'll do that for you. We'll we'll do everything for you except the hard part. And then so you got him. And how did you get the word out? Like, how did it how did it start to really become a player? A lot of it was we started with Hamish's friends, like people who he knew, and we would just go and talk to them. And especially early on, a lot of it was just telling people about this, why we were doing this thing and what we thought was wrong, and how this fairly simple platform we were building could help. And if people bought this, like believed in the things we were saying, then they would think, oh, maybe I'll try this. And it really started with just great writers that Hamish knew or the people that we brought on knew. And we just were like, here's what we're doing and why. Do you guys get resistance? Because I know there were some people that were writing bad things about sub stack or saying that sub stack is a bad idea. What was the argument? There's been a there's been a few. I mean, one that comes up a lot is there's been a few. There's been a few generations of it at the very start. You're asking how we started. The argument was like, no one's going to pay for anything. You idiots. Right. It's like, you know, writers on the Internet, social media is bad. Yeah, all sounds good theoretically, but I'm never going to pay for anything. Never going to work. Good luck. And I had this parlor trick where I'd run on people. I just like, well, who's your favorite writer? After they just told me they would never pay for a writer. And I'm like, who's your favorite writer? They'd say, oh, it's so and so. I'd be like, would you pay five bucks a month to like get their stuff directly? And they'd be like, yeah, I probably would. But that's different. It's that person. It's this thing. And so we sort of there is this weird thing where nobody thought it would work in the abstract, but it worked once you had something that you cared about. So we kind of crossed the like, it's never going to work thing and then immediately got into the it's working and it's bad time for a bunch of for a bunch of things. Probably the most prominent of which is we started with this really strong commitment to free speech. If we think that we're making a platform for writers that is, you know, can be a positive force in our intellectual climate. We just think that's table stakes. That's something that's an important principle. And we came up in a time that not everyone believes in that at all. We took a lot of shit for a bunch of a bunch of different times for well, why do you let this person send emails to people that want to get it from them? Like specifically, like, can you say like what writers were problematic? Would you like to avoid that? We could avoid that. I don't want to put anyone on blast. Let's just talk about like subjects. Like, what would you do? Like, here's a question. What have you had? I mean, I think the sub stack is like, how many, how many people do you have on it right now? How many in terms of writers? How many people, there's like tens of thousands. Wow. Pretty cool. It's gone. Yeah, it's wild. That happened so quickly. Um, what have you got? It's like a Holocaust denier starts publishing stuff on sub stack. We, so we have a terms of service that we set out that has a couple of like really strict, really tightly construed things. Most of it's like you can't spam, you can't do these things. We do. I mean, we do have a couple things like there's no porn. You're not allowed to like advocate for literal violence. There's a few things that that are sort of just like bright lines that are intended to be kind of like a really high bar and allow for space where there's a lot of shit on sub stack that we ourselves disagree with and find awful. We try to take, you know, we think that kind of the old school ACLU approach on this is correct, right? Where they're protesting to like help the Nazis have their free speech rights. Right. Not because we think those things are good, but because we think that airing them is more valuable and in the long run better than trying to solve the problem. I sense right. So there are people that are on sub stack that everybody sort of agrees are gross. I mean, I don't know if there's anybody that everybody agrees are gross, but for you guys for any individual, I think anybody that exists could find someone on sub stack that they think is the greatest thing ever and they could find someone sub-stack they think is terrible. And we take that as a sign that we're doing it right. So no porn. What are the other ones? I'd have to look it up. It's like yeah, I think there's a doxing thing. There's like a advocating violence. There's a few like kind of things that just break the edges. Do you allow erotica? Like if someone published like Bigfoot porn. Yeah, we can read those. Our genius our genius take on this is that we disallow porn, but we allow erotica and it turns out that's like a that's a non-trivial thing. But the intention is like look, there's already only fans if you're just doing that. There's a place for you. And we're not this. You know, I don't even think I don't have a problem with I don't think that's wrong, but that's just not the thing that we're trying to serve.