Name: Why Chris Best Created Substack
Uploaded: 2022-08-11T17:24:30.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why Chris Best Created Substack' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why Chris Best Created Substack' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-11. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- 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, right?
I must, 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 gonna 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 Substack.
And what year was this?
2017.
It was 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.
Like 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.
And in that phase, the things that won were the things that were the most
efficient at gobbling up everyone's attention.
And 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.
And 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.
It's 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.
That's – 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.
And 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, you know.
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 fun, 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's just – it amplifies it and it creates this, like, 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's this super – 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, you know, 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, like, he just needed someone to handle the details of it.
And we were like, great.
We'll do that for you.
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.
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 Substack
or saying that Substack is a bad idea.
What was the argument?
There's been a few – I mean, one that comes up a lot is – well, there's
been a few generations of it.
At the very start, you were asking how we started, the argument was like, no
one's going to pay for anything, you idiots.
Right.
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'd just be like, well, who's your favorite writer?
After they just told me they would never pay for a writer, and then 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 was 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 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 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?
Or would you like to avoid that?
We could avoid that.
I don't want to put anyone on blast.
Okay, let's just talk about, like, subjects.
Like, what would you do?
Like, here's a question.
What if you had, I mean, I think Substack is, like, how many people do you have
on it right now?
How many people?
In terms of writers.
How many people?
There's, like, tens of thousands.
Wow.
It's pretty cool.
It's going.
Yeah, it's wild.
That happened so quickly.
What if you got, like, a Holocaust denier that starts publishing stuff on Substack?
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 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 Substack 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 by censoring them.
So there are people that are on Substack that everybody sort of agrees are
gross.
I mean, I don't know if there's anybody that everybody agrees are gross.
But for any individual, I think anybody that exists could find someone on Substack
that they think is the greatest thing ever.
And they could find someone on Substack that 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, 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, do you ever read those?
Yeah, we can't 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 OnlyFans.
If you're just doing that, there's a place for you.
And we're not, you know, I don't even think, I don't have a problem with that.
I don't think that's wrong, but that's just not the thing that we're trying to
serve.
Thank you.

Why Chris Best Created Substack

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- 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, right?
I must, 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 gonna 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 Substack.
And what year was this?
2017.
It was 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.
Like 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.
And in that phase, the things that won were the things that were the most
efficient at gobbling up everyone's attention.
And 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.
And 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.
It's 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.
That's – 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.
And 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, you know.
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 fun, 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's just – it amplifies it and it creates this, like, 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's this super – 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, you know, 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, like, he just needed someone to handle the details of it.
And we were like, great.
We'll do that for you.
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.
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 Substack
or saying that Substack is a bad idea.
What was the argument?
There's been a few – I mean, one that comes up a lot is – well, there's
been a few generations of it.
At the very start, you were asking how we started, the argument was like, no
one's going to pay for anything, you idiots.
Right.
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'd just be like, well, who's your favorite writer?
After they just told me they would never pay for a writer, and then 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 was 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 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 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?
Or would you like to avoid that?
We could avoid that.
I don't want to put anyone on blast.
Okay, let's just talk about, like, subjects.
Like, what would you do?
Like, here's a question.
What if you had, I mean, I think Substack is, like, how many people do you have
on it right now?
How many people?
In terms of writers.
How many people?
There's, like, tens of thousands.
Wow.
It's pretty cool.
It's going.
Yeah, it's wild.
That happened so quickly.
What if you got, like, a Holocaust denier that starts publishing stuff on Substack?
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 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 Substack 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 by censoring them.
So there are people that are on Substack that everybody sort of agrees are
gross.
I mean, I don't know if there's anybody that everybody agrees are gross.
But for any indi