Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1855 - Chris Best
Uploaded: 2022-08-11T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1855 - Chris Best' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1855 - Chris Best' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-11. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1855 - Chris Best

the Joe Rogan experience train my day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day
what's up Chris how are you good let's go have you done podcast before nothing
like this I've
done a few yeah okay cool so tell me first of all tell me what was the
inspiration to start
substack like how did it 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 doing good
things I started writing what I thought was going to be like a 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
because that turned into substack 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 the
chaos that came about
because of the pandemic and journalists getting cancelled 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 like all that stuff like came about in the first
few years a lot of the
best writers in the world in my estimation we're 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
the places that would
have been their home and where they could have done the thing that that
mattered to them before
what happened how did 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
this 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 to win at
that game create an
incentive landscape that drives everyone crazy yeah the the way to win at that
games 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
the 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 of the other
people that is the the recipe for a
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 the
monkeys are throwing at
each other that's it seems like a 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 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've i took part in a little bit for a while but now i don't
engage at all i
literally i don't read my mentions i i occasionally post things then i just get
the
fuck out of there i 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 i it's just
it 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 uh because in the beginning it was only 140
characters that's great
to keep your jokes succinct and little short little blurbs and try to fun 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 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 um 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
the like you just needed someone to handle the details of it and we were like
great we'll do that
for you we'll like 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 substack or saying that the
substack 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
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 right it's like you know writers on the
internet social media's
bad yeah all sounds good theoretically but i'm never going to pay for anything
never going to work
good luck and the 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 was this weird thing where nobody thought it would work
in the abstract but
it worked once you had something that you cared about um 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
for a bunch of things uh 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 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 um we took a lot of 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 would you like to avoid that um 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 sub stack is like how many how many people do
you have on it right
now how many in terms of writers how many there's like tens of thousands wow it's
pretty cool it's
going yeah it's wild that happened so quickly um what have you got it's like a
holocaust denier
that starts publishing stuff on sub stack we so we have uh terms of service
that we set out that
has a couple of like really strict really uh tightly construed things most of
it's like you can't spam
you can't do these things um we do i mean we we do have a couple things like
there's no porn um you're
not allowed to like advocate for literal violence uh 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 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 um not
because we think those
things are good but because we think that airing them uh is more valuable and
in the long run better
than trying to solve the problem i'm censoring them 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 exist