First Time Founders: Has Substack Changed Media For Good?

Ed Elson speaks with Chris Best, co-founder and CEO of Substack. They discuss how the company stood out against competitors, why video has become increasingly important to its audience, and where the media industry is headed next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 1:55Ed Elson?

  Welcome to First Time Founders. I'm Ed Elson. America's confidence in mass media is collapsing. Only about a third say they have any meaningful trust that major outlets report the news fully and fairly, and more than a third say they just don't trust the media at all. Meanwhile, the people who produce that content are facing their own crisis. Across the industry, writers and journalists are being laid off in waves as legacy outlets struggle to adapt and survive. Together, these shifts have pushed both audiences and creators toward a new home. Millions of readers are seeking voices they can trust directly without an institutional filtering, and at the same time, thousands of writers have begun building independent businesses there.

• 2:39Ed Elson?

  The platform that I'm talking about has already drawn more than 35 million subscribers, and it has expanded beyond writing into podcasts and video. In the process, it has reshaped the media landscape and accelerated the rise of a new creator-driven era. This is my conversation with Chris Best, the CEO and co-founder of Substack. Chris Best, thank you for joining me on First Time Founders. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. I'm a second time founder, does that ruin it?

• 3:10Ed Elson?

  We made an exception for you because we really just want to talk about Substack. Well, thank you.

• 3:17Ed Elson?

  But we'll get to that. We'll get to your story and your career. But I first want to start with just a factual statement about America right now. And that is that trust in media, whatever media is, is at a record low. So when you poll Americans, only a third say they have any meaningful trust that outlets report the news fully and fairly, and then more than a third say they just do not trust the media at all. You have started one of these new media companies in Substack. What do you make of that statistic? And how does it affect the way you think about your company? I definitely think we're in a time of profound change in media.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  And my model of this is it's sort of a technologically driven change. You know, the internet came along and smashed a lot of the existing business models for media and culture and created these massive new networks that are fantastically profitable businesses without necessarily replacing kind of the economic engine that sustained a lot of this stuff. And anytime you have a, you know, in history, if you have a major sort of revolution in media or information technology, whether it's the internet or the television or the printing press, you often get kind of a, um, a period of unrest or a period of destabilization

• 4:42Speaker 04

  or a, a time of cultural churn as we sort of adapt to the new reality. And I think we're in one of those times now. I think we're still, we're still reeling and sorting out the, what happens when you wire the whole world together into one internet and layering onto it now you can, what happens when anybody can make all kinds of media with AI, when anybody, it's sort of like a, we're in the period of destabilization caused by technological change.

• 5:11Ed Elson?

  Did you know that that was going to happen when you started Substack? And this is, I mean, really a question of the origin story of Substack. Was this something you predicted and what was the inspiration behind Substack?

• 5:25Speaker 04

  This is why I, why I wanted to start Substack. And in fact, I wasn't setting out to start a company when we started. Um, I was, I was setting out to write an essay. I was actually on sabbatical, taking some time off after my last company. And I was writing this essay, trying to outline my frustrations with the media economy on the internet along these lines. And I felt at the time that it was already happening. Like I felt, you know, I could look at. You know, I would talk to people in 2017 and say, you know, I think Facebook and Twitter are driving us crazy. And people would kind of go, ha, ha, ha, yeah, but maybe that's right. But it didn't, didn't feel very serious. And, you know, I'd say, I think people are going

• 6:05Speaker 04

  to be willing to connect directly and subscribe to the voices they trust. And people would say, yeah, maybe, I don't know, that's interesting. Probably people will never pay for somebody. And I think just a lot of that has proven, you know, to my mind, true. The thing that was sort of like an interesting curiosity when we started the company, people are starting to feel a lot more viscerally now. And this is why you get these surveys. People are saying like, I don't, I don't know if I can express exactly what's wrong, but something is wrong. And I'm hungry for something better. And I think you can look at, it's easy to be a doomer about that situation. It's easy to look at it and say, ah, things are, there are lots of problems and nobody trusts these things. And look at these, look at these negative effects.

• 6:49Speaker 04

  I think it's also a, a time of incredible opportunity. I think it's, we're in a moment where there's gonna, we're going to be building the new world. And there's not going to be, you don't get a choice of whether or not we get change, but we do get a choice in what kind of change we get. And that's the thing that motivated me to work on Substack in the first place.

• 7:09Ed Elson?

  Before Substack, you started this company called Kik. You're the co-founder, you're the CTO. You later decided to leave that company and then you, as you say, you run into starting Substack. Can you just tell us like the, the brief story of starting that first company and then actually how you got Substack off, off of the ground following your first company?

• 7:33Speaker 04

  I was the technical co-founder, but my, my co-founder, Ted Livingston, who was the CEO, it was really his kind of, his baby. And I, I sort of stumbled into that company. I met Ted when we were both in university and we started working on, anyway, I won't get too deep into that, but we, we wound up making this messaging app. That got really, really big, actually got really big twice. It got really big. And then BlackBerry, who was a big player at the time, tried to kill us and almost succeeded. And we built it back up from nothing, got hundreds of millions of users, raised money from Tencent at a billion dollar valuation. It was a crazy, wild experience. I learned a lot about building things that matter.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  I learned a lot about how much impact you can have making technology if you do it well. And I also got this abiding belief that there's a lot of power and responsibility in building these kind of virtual places where people increasingly lead their lives online.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  You know, you can't change human nature. It does exist. People are a certain way and you shouldn't really try, maybe what I think. But even so, you can take the exact same set of people with the same strengths, the same flaws, the same beliefs. And depending on how you set up the rules of the game, depending on how you set up the space they inhabit, how it gets communicated, how it all works, you can kind of create a heaven or a hell with the exact same people. And so the act of sort of creating these online worlds, I think is kind of tremendously powerful.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  And if you do it sort of with the conscious aim of making one that's good for the people that live in it, you can make something really great. And that was probably, that was sloshing around in my head. As I say, I wasn't, after I left, I was taking some time off. I was just doing all the things that you don't normally do when you're running a high-growth company, like see friends and family and read books and learn to fly airplanes and indulge hobbies. And I've always been an avid reader. Um, my, you know, dad's an English teacher, grew up in a house full of books. And I've always believed that what you read matters and the media that you consume in general matters. It's not just, you know, people watching this podcast.

• 9:59Speaker 04

  It's not just how they spend a good fraction of their life. And even if that's all it was, that would be good enough. But the, you know, the stories and ideas you put into your head change you. They shape how you see the world. They change your experience of your own life. Uh, you know, what you read and what you watch changes who you become. And so great writing and great culture is this deeply valuable thing. And so in my little sabbatical time, I was thinking, I should write. I know how to read. I know how to type. I have that good sort of tech bro hubris. I was like, how hard could it be? I should write an essay.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  And so I started writing that, you know, that essay that was supposed to be a, really going to be a blog post or whatever. I shared it with my friend Hamish, who's actually a real writer. Uh, and that was sort of the, the origin.

• 10:52Ed Elson?

  There were blogging sites before. People have written stuff and posted it on the internet for a long time. Um, what was the core idea of Substack? Because, you know, you could go on Blogspot and find people writing stuff. Um, you could find people writing stuff online and on the New York Times. I know it's a slightly different setup, but what did you see as different about what Substack was?

• 11:20Speaker 04

  The core idea is we're building a new economic engine for culture. The problem is, as we see it, is that it's not, you know, there, as you say, there was already, the internet came along. And if you, it did one revolutionary thing, which is let anybody publish.

• 11:37Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  And kind of like unshackle, you know, unshackle the media environment from the gatekeepers. You know, I like to, I say that there are still gatekeepers, but you can't, you can't keep the people in anymore. You can't lock people in. You can lock people out, but you can't lock people in. But the problem was that there wasn't, you know, if you are a creative person, if you are a writer, if you're a journalist, there wasn't necessarily a great way to make money doing the work you believe in. And if you believe that great media, great culture is valuable, you want there to be a way to make money and to have kind of like a social contract that lets you do the work you really believe in.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  And, you know, in the early days, sometimes people would accuse us, they'd say to me in an accusatory tone, they'd say, you know, Substack is just blogging with a business model. And I'm like, you know, that sounds pretty good, right? Blogging was this really cool, you know, there was a, there was a golden age of blogs that was sort of this intellectual infusion. But the problem with it was there wasn't really a, a business model to back it up. It was things got acquired or things kind of stuffed ads in in a way that didn't really work. And so you were missing, you know, if you were some, if you were an ambitious young person who wanted to, had something to give the world and wanted to make this a career or make this a business, it was hard to see a way to do it. And there was sort of the legacy media, which was in decline.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  And there was kind of this, you know, this new world of social media, which you could potentially get a big audience, but wasn't going to give you a way to make money doing the work you believed in.

• 13:16Ed Elson?

  Just to describe the business model of Substack to, to the audience, my understanding is Substack takes 10% of the revenue that, that the creators charge when they put up a paywall. And in that sense, the real innovation of Substack to me, to your friend's point, was the business model. It was to say blogging can be paid for upfront. It can be put behind a paywall and an economy can be created out of that business model. There will be enough content, enough creators out there with good enough content that people will actually pay for, such that this makes sense as a business.

• 13:58Ed Elson?

  I feel like that was the innovation that no one seems to think would work. And yet here we are and it's working incredibly well. And within just a few years, there were half a million paid subscribers and obviously that number has grown dramatically since.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's well over 5 million now.

• 14:15Ed Elson?

  Well over 5 million. Would you say that that is? That was the real innovation. It was you saying, actually, you can put this behind a paywall.

• 14:27Speaker 04

  The paywall is maybe not the core of it, but it is the economic bargain. And it's, look, I think when you, great companies in my mind, come from the fusion of a really grand, ambitious idea for the world, paired with like a modest but achievable first instantiation of that idea. And the big idea for this is like, look, you can have a different social contract for media and culture. The idea that this stuff is valuable and the idea that, you know, you should be willing to pay real money for something that is as meaningful for your life as, you know, a great essay, or a great podcast, or a great book, or a great community, or, you know, any of these things.

• 15:11Speaker 04

  That's actually a very big idea. And once that engine starts to go, this is what you're seeing in the Substack app now. The Substack app is the best place on the internet. It's still very small compared to, you know, the other sort of at-scale social networks, but it's, you know, some of the best and smartest and most interesting, most creative things are happening there because of this different economic model. It's kind of like, there's like a, you know, a social contract and a philosophy behind it. But at the time, you know, when we started, nobody thought that anybody would ever pay for anything. I had this parlor trick, because I would describe this idea for Substack to people, and they would say, ah, that sounds nice. It would be cool if writers got paid, but, you know, no one's ever going to really pay for something on the internet. That's not how it works.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  Like, I would never, people would tell me, I would never pay for some person on the internet. And my parlor trick is I would say, well, who's your favorite writer? And they'd say, you know, so-and-so. I'd be like, would you pay five bucks a month for them? And they would say, well, yeah, for them, for that person, I would. But that's different because they're really good. I've grown to trust them. They've got this, they've got something, you know, there's something about that person that they love. They wouldn't do it in the abstract, but they would do it in the specific. And that kind of told me, okay, we're actually at the moment where this is ready to happen. Like, it's, lots of people doubt that it can happen, but you can actually, it can work. And, you know, we had sort of like the very initial...

• 16:42Speaker 04

  Version of this was, you know, paid email newsletters made simple. Right. That's kind of like the MVP kernel that fully, you know, is the, is the first full realization of the big idea that unlocks for writers. And for a long time, I think people who wanted to copy Substack, including, you know, Twitter and Facebook and lots of other people, they, they mistook the thing that was working about Substack as that, as the, the surface level thing. It's like, ah, it's, you know, email newsletters are the secret or, you know, this thing is the secret, but it's, it is actually the underlying economic model and the philosophy that makes it go.

• 17:20Ed Elson?

  When was the moment that you realized you had something great? And I, I will just conjecture. Substack was on my radar during COVID.

• 17:32Ed Elson?

  I would hazard a guess that that was the moment, but when was it for you?

• 17:36Speaker 04

  There's a few moments that stand out in my, in my memory, but I'll give you two. And the first was actually when we launched the very first customer. There's a piece of received wisdom that, you know, among professional gamblers, they tend to have started out with a big winning streak at the start of their career.

• 17:54Speaker 04

  And of course, if you think about it for a second, that's not because, you know, the reason for that is because people who start their career as a professional gambler with a losing streak actually don't go on to become professional gamblers. It's just a selection effect. It's like, oh yes, that's, that's how, that's the origin story of these things. And I feel a little bit like that because our first customer was this guy, Bill Bishop, who had been writing a new, an email newsletter about, you know, China for an international business and government audience for ages. He was perfect. There was probably like five people in the world that were the perfect first customer for Substack and he was one of them. And he had been thinking about charging for his work. He'd been inspired by Ben Thompson, but he kind of couldn't be, you know, didn't want to futz around with all the technology. So he was sort of this perfect first customer and I, we like hacked together the first

• 18:39Speaker 04

  version, uh, you know, I built this little website and plugged it into Stripe. And I remember launching on his first day. Uh, and like six figures rolled in like within hours and I was kind of sitting there at my computer being like, I can't like, this seems really good. I can't, I don't know what I expected, but this is way more than that. And we sort of, you know, we had this really big first success at the gate. Uh, you know, we, we got into Y C. Uh, we sort of had this, you know, this, the very first thing we tried was this massive success. And that gave us a lot of confidence that we were on to something, even though there was sort of like, you know, that was the, the biggest, that was the biggest thing for

• 19:22Speaker 04

  a while. Like it was, it was, it was, there, there weren't 20 more Bill Bishop's we could go get at that time. Uh, but we had this, it gave us kind of like the confidence we were on to something. And then maybe the second one, yeah, I think, you know, COVID 2020, there was a combination of suddenly everybody has a, a bunch more time and a bunch more money. And so there was sort of this great re-shift in the economy where all of the online things or all of the virtual things got this huge stimulus and all of the real world things got this huge setback. And Substack was a really good online thing.

• 20:03Speaker 04

  It was, you know, something really valuable and meaningful that you could do on the internet. And there was kind of a, it was sort of a fever pitch moment for some of those tensions with media. There was a time where a lot of the best and most interesting independent thinkers were getting summarily turfed, to be honest, from their perches at traditional media places. Um, you know, Barry Weiss was, was, you know, pushed, pushed to resign from the New York Times in that time. There was like, there was a whole bunch of people uh, that were fantastic on Substack.

• 20:35Ed Elson?

  The way that everyone moved away from these traditional outlets was pretty incredible. I think Barry Weiss is, is a good example of that.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  It was like moved away. A lot of them were, a lot of them were pushed out.

• 20:48Ed Elson?

  Literally pushed out. You said something there as well that. The amount of money that people had in their pockets, likely because of stimulus, and then also people are not spending on concerts and they're not spending on going out to bars anymore. Like, people were relatively richer during COVID than they are now than they were before, would make you think that Substack was a COVID blip. And we saw this with a lot of businesses, that they only really made sense during COVID because of the way the world worked during COVID. But that's not what happened. Substack was a

• 21:26Ed Elson?

  COVID phenomenon that maintained its momentum and has only grown since. How did that happen? What is going on there? I mean, how do we explain that, just looking back through the history of this business?

• 21:42Speaker 04

  We have this story about what's happening in the world and how it could be better. And that story is not about COVID or stimulus, right? It's about this, the evolving media landscape and information landscape we all live in, right? These big mega trends. You know, one version of this is, I used to, you know, I think that before the internet, when I was a kid, a real problem you could have is you could get bored. You could be sitting around and thinking, gee, I have nothing to spend my attention on right now. And if somebody could give me something free to distract me, that would be a really, really good deal. Because I'm just sitting here staring at a wall, or like, you know, I could,

• 22:24Speaker 04

  I could read a book or play chess with somebody, or turn the TV on, maybe. And then, you know, so the early generation of the internet kind of was a land grab for all of that attention. And the bargain was, here's something that you can spend some attention on for free that is kind of fun and will stop you from being bored. And we solved, I think we solved boredom. You know, there's no second of your life where you have to not be looking at or thinking about something interesting now if you don't want to. But that meant that now, now we live in a world where your attention is actually your last, your, your scariest, most valuable resource. It's literally your life, right? It's literally the things

• 23:09Speaker 04

  that you're putting into your mind. It's, it's how you're spending your days. It's who you're becoming. And so- If there's a way that you could spend that on something that you value more, and that helps you become who you want to become more, that has newly become incredibly valuable. And if there's an economic engine and a social contract and a set of technology that can unlock you to spend your limited time on this earth, you know, paying attention to things that you actually value and becoming who you want to become. And for a creative person, if you can do the work you actually believe in, if you can make something that you think is great and make money from it, that's the real underlying value. And that, that story is true and important.

• 23:53Speaker 04

  And the fact that, you know, the COVID sort of accelerated and threw some gas on it for a while. It wasn't something that only started to work because of that, and it wasn't something that stopped working once that ended.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  We'll be right back.

• 24:16Scott Galloway?

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• 27:36Ed Elson?

  We're back with first time founders. After COVID, by around 2022, you start to incorporate other features beyond just writing. You start experimenting with video. You start experimenting with microblogging. You call it notes and people generally understand these as tweets or posts. So it almost becomes a form of social media. And it seems that it is kind of trending in that direction. Do you think of Substack as social media?

• 28:14Speaker 04

  I think it's fair to describe it that way. I think of it as what should come after social media. But I think that that, you know, we are making that thing. And the, you know, notes and the Substack app. The reason this matters is because we sort of realized at a certain point, hey, Substack is giving you as a, as a writer or creator, these tools to, you know, connect directly with your audience and to make money and to do the thing. And that if you're somebody who already has a huge following, you can kind of, you know, pull that audience and bring it to your Substack. And that's really good. And now you're set up in this wonderful way. But if you are somebody who aspires to do that, the most important thing is how do you grow? How do you find an audience?

• 28:58Speaker 04

  How do people get a chance to fall in love with you in the first place? So that they realize they might want to pay. This is why I like the paywalls, like the last thing. A lot of people who are very successful on Substack paywall very little. It's really about pay, am I making something that actually reaches people that they find deeply valuable? And the way that it was working was that the way that writers and creators on Substack would grow is they had to go to all the other social media platforms. And that's a problem for two reasons. One is because now you're still downstream from the incentives on those platforms. But if we're saying, hey, we want to create an alternative to the attention economy. But if you want to participate in it, you still have to be really, really good at Twitter. There's a contradiction there.

• 29:39Speaker 04

  And the other thing is that, you know, those other platforms don't necessarily want you to be able to connect directly with your audience and take them with you. Right? If, you know, we got in a big spat with Elon around the launch of Notes and he briefly banned mentioning the word Substack and crushed the links. But other, like even, you know, Mark Zuckerberg spent five years mad about the sort of fallout from the Cambridge Analytica thing and sort of, you know, turned, heavily turned down the dial of politics on Facebook. And that's, you know, that's a fair thing to do. But if you're a political journalist who wants to grow on Facebook, that's really tough for you. And so there's all of these other networks that creators, writers depend on. We want them to be able to use them to their maximum.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  But unless there's one place that actually shares their interests and makes money when they make money and believes in their success and thinks that they should own their connection to their audience. Like if we could create a place like that, that would add so much value. That would, you know, and that would start to become this, this place on the internet where you could go and choose to take back your mind, choose to, you know, spend your time on the stuff that you actually, you actually value and find interesting rather than just the things that distract you. I would say it's an obviously valuable thing to do and a really hard thing to do. And it actually took us a few years to get it going. And there was a lot of, you know, we, we built this app and we experimented with all the stuff and we kind of eventually got it to the place now where it's, you know, it's

• 31:07Speaker 04

  the right balance of there's short form, you know, discussion stuff flying around. There's long form stuff in there. Those two things like feed off and drive each other and it's a really good experience.

• 31:19Ed Elson?

  It's such an interesting paradox of media, what you're describing there where.

• 31:25Ed Elson?

  We prefer the incentives of the paywall and the subscription process because it seems to just lean in favor of quality. It's like if you like what this person is putting out, then you'll pay for it. And it incentivizes the creator and the writer to put good stuff out there that people want to pay for. Then social media comes along, and I mean, this has existed for longer than just social media, but social media really turbocharged the ad model, which basically said, it's not really about the quality of the work you put out, it's about how much it can attract attention. So can you be extremely rage baity?

• 32:08Ed Elson?

  Can you make people feel something aggressive? Can you say something with a really catchy and provocative headline? Can you, are you willing to put sexual content out there? Are you willing to sell sex as much as we're seeing on Twitter and other platforms? All of these things that grab attention but are not optimized for quality, which is why social media has become the hellscape that I believe it is, and we'll get into whether you agree with that too. But you run into the problem as a creator where, and you're experiencing this with Substack, putting things behind a paywall does not get the message out there. It makes it harder to grow your audience.

• 32:51Ed Elson?

  And so you are now facing that, hence why you are implementing these more social media minded tools such as videos, such as notes, which is very similar to Twitter. And there's a sense in which Substack is kind of becoming the thing that maybe it wasn't supposed to be. How do you think about that?

• 33:12Speaker 04

  I would separate video, by the way. I mean, this is, we're on video right now. This is an interesting long form conversation. You know, maybe there will be clips of it that are part of a short form video.

• 33:21Ed Elson?

  Yeah, we're gonna clip you up saying very different things.

• 33:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, make me say something embarrassing. I can do that on my own.

• 33:30Ed Elson?

  The Elon part, we'll clip that.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  Here's how I would think of this is what you actually want is a balance. Right? You know, I think of some of the short form stuff, some of the jokes, some of the whatever. Some of that stuff is, I think of it as, you can think of it as fun. Right? And if you take a social media machine and you're kind of like, dial the fun up to 10 million at the expense of everything else. Yeah, you can get something that's distorted. You can get something that kind of becomes this, this drug, this hellscape. That is a real thing that can happen. But the solution to that is not to become anti fun. Right? You know, we don't want Substack to be the eat your vegetables platform.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  Right? If, if, if I said, hey, you know, and it's not even a paywall thing, actually. The paywall is a different question, you know, even for people who are paywalling stuff. We say, take your most accessible stuff, put it outside the paywall. That's how you grow. But even just, you know, if the only thing I ever do is write 10,000 word treatises, that if you really get into it, it's the most valuable thing in your life. But it's sort of hard to get into. That's a hard thing to kind of like get people into. Because how do they find out about it? How do they, you know, people aren't always looking to dive into something deep, like people, you want to give something to people that actually can be fun, can be light, but then is helping you get into something that you deeply value and helping you discover something you deeply value. Those things have to work together.

• 35:00Speaker 04

  This is why Twitter in its heyday was so great, was you did have this light, fun, quick discussion, the quick, interesting, fresh stuff. But then people would be talking about real things. You'd have long form articles, you'd have things that were happening in the world. And I think you can, you can create something much more powerful if you put those things together and keep them in balance. So it's not a question of, you can never have something that's fun or engaging or sensational, but that's just, that's one part of the mix. Like if you're cooking food, you don't want to say, hey, make the, the most bland. Purely healthy, you know, keep you alive, subsistence slop. And you don't want to say just sit there and eat cotton candy by the handful. It's like you want a balanced meal.

• 35:44Speaker 04

  You want something that's solid and healthy, but tastes good. Like, that's, that's how I think about it.

• 35:49Ed Elson?

  Yeah, earlier you had mentioned, I mean, when you started Kik and then going on to Substack, you were talking about how you learned about setting the rules of the game. You learned about human behavior. You learned about how social networks develop and how people interact. And that it's all about setting the rules of the game. And you said that setting those rules is the difference between heaven and hell. And I think that that's probably quite true. We've seen platforms where the rules of the game have been set up such that they do turn into hell in a lot of ways. And hell might be very profitable, but few people would disagree with that statement when it comes to probably,

• 36:33Ed Elson?

  I mean, certainly we'd say Fortune, maybe, maybe, maybe you'd say X, maybe you'd say Instagram. It has certainly has some hellish qualities to it. I guess the question with Substack, because Substack, I think I would agree with you, is more of a heavenly space in the sense that there's higher, it's operating on a, on a, on a higher level of quality. It's more civil, it's more respectful, there's a level of fun that is being had. But it's not, it doesn't feel like the Hellscape Rage Bay center that I think a lot of other, other social media platforms are.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Thank you, that means a lot.

• 37:09Ed Elson?

  I'm glad. And I guess the question being, is that because the people on Substack are different? Or is it because of the rules of the game? Because they seem to be two different things. The people who are on Substack are generally writers, people who are interested in putting thoughtful content out there. But maybe there's something about the way you built the product and the way you set the rules that facilitated that.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  Those things are related, by the way.

• 37:39Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 37:39Speaker 04

  Like, these things that, you know, these things develop a culture and a momentum of their own. People are not immutable. They, you know, they in culture to a, to a space they're in. And when I say the rules, what I'm, I'm talking, I'm not talking about like, you know, what's the moderation policy or what's the, you know, terms of service or something? I'm talking about something a little bit deeper. I'm talking about kind of the underlying. Uh, the underlying game, the underlying economic incentives. Okay. If you're a, a social media platform who makes all of your money from, uh, you know, a super efficient platform level ad exchange.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  And your business model is essentially aggregating attention and then selling it as a commodity to the highest bidder. You've built a system where you can, you know, if I'm that platform, I can value your time, but I can't really value what you value. Or at least that's not part of my economic equation. And so if I am, if I go then build a, let's say a feed algorithm, and I'm running experiments and I'm trying to say, hey, what's, you know, how do I want this to work? What's going to be good? What's going to be bad? You know, how do I make my business successful?

• 38:59Speaker 04

  I'm going to optimize for how can I get as much of your time as possible? Kind of regardless of how much you value it, like I, I might say, hey, I want you not to regret the time you spent, but in terms of raw economic reality, it's your time that matters. Right. When you take that equation and you kind of like, do the things that actually optimize that business, you end up pulling in these directions that create these, you know, hellish is probably the, is the extreme way to put it, but these, you know, these traps, these, these, these negative sort of spirals as a consequence of the underlying business model and the economic incentive.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  It's not because the people are bad and, you know, you, you might even put in rules or you might even put in systems to try to like mitigate that. You might say, oh, I want to dial down some of this problem or I want to do this thing to make people feel better. But you, you've got this underlying problem where the, the economic incentive that drives your business is pulling in a way that is at odds with the human beings who are using the platform you make. And so the approach we've tried to take at Substack. And once you're in that position, it's impossible either way, I think, right? Like, if you say, hey, making a great product, you know, great in this, in this developed multiplayer way, or be a successful business, there's no good choice there because, you know, even if you choose to make a great product at the expense of being a successful business,

• 40:26Speaker 04

  now you're not gonna like, you're not gonna matter, you're not gonna be able to grow and, and make the thing. And so the underlying theory of Substack is, look, let's try to align these things better. We're gonna set up a situation where people, you know, people are only gonna pay for stuff on Substack if they actually care about it and value it. And then we, as a platform, are only gonna make money when the writers and creators make money. We take, this is why we take a, a percentage fee, because it's like, for every dollar Substack makes, the creators make nine, right? It's, it's, we can literally only succeed as a business if we are helping people make money, do the work they believe in, and then those people can only make money if they're, if they're making something that's really good enough that, you know, people are, are choosing to pay for it.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  And so, you know, when we, you know, we still have a short form content, we still have a feed with an algorithm, but when we run an experiment and we're, we're asking, like, how do we make this algorithm better? If we run a test that says, hey, we got people to spend more time and scroll more and see more things, such that if you were serving ads, they would have seen more of them, but they read less, or they spent less time watching a long form thing. For us, that's a loser, because we know that finding you something that you deeply value is, is the way to get you to fall in love with it, that you might pay. And so the, kind of like, the underlying economic incentive that we've created to

• 41:54Speaker 04

  pull this platform forward, pulls us in the direction we wanna go, and makes us, kind of yokes us to having to serve the actual people who are using it. Another thing we do that's like this is, is, you know, letting people export their audiences, right? The fact that a subscription on Substack is an email subscription, you get the email address, you can bring your subscribers from somewhere else, you can take your subscribers with you when you leave. At the surface level, that might, you might say, oh, that's bad because you're not locking in your customers and they can, you know, you're giving them the option to leave, but what it actually does is it means that Because you know you can leave, you can trust Substack. You can come here and you know that, you know, the only reason people you're going to stay is that we're giving you enough value and we're making something that's actually good.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  We're not trying to lock you in and that sort of counterintuitively means that people can invest and trust the platform.

• 42:45Ed Elson?

  I asked you earlier, is Substack a social media platform? And you said, yes, but it's the thing after social media. Is the ultimate goal of Substack, would you say in your mind, of all things, go to plan? Does it replace Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and the large social media platforms?

• 43:08Speaker 04

  I don't know if it wholesale replaces it. You know, I think there are, there are things about each of the platforms that are valuable and there are things that we're not trying to replicate. You know, something I tell the team is like, you know, we're not, we're not going to out TikTok TikTok and we shouldn't try, right? Like, we're not, we're trying to do something that's fundamentally different than that. And so I wouldn't say that we're, you know, if, if Substack is maximally successful, therefore there's no Instagram anymore, or therefore there's no X anymore, or anything like that. The way that I think of it is, I don't know if you've ever, there's, there's, there's this woman Catherine D. who writes on Substack, who talks about the, the internet as fairyland

• 43:51Speaker 04

  or the internet as the astral plane, the internet as this kind of otherworldly place that people can go and that, you know, that, that touches real life, but is not quite the same and that you can risk bringing bad things back from. There's sort of a, it's a, it's a, it's kind of a place. It's a place where people are spending more and more of their life and they're leading more and more of their life. They're, they're having the, you know, it's the world of ideas, it's the world of media. I, I kind of think of it as, you know, it used to be that the internet was not real life. Then the internet, the internet became real life. The third step is real life is the internet. What happens on the internet starts to, to reach back out and reshape our world.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  And I think of Substack as like a place on the internet. Substack is like a city in the astral plane of the internet. And it has these properties, right? It's a place where you can, you can be free and independent, right? You can, you can own your plot of land. You can start your business. You can have your, you know, your own space in this, in this great city. And you can do it as you, you know, do with it as you see fit. You can have creative freedom. You can do the work you really believe in. You know, you can make this culture. And then there's sort of like a, you know, the more and more time people are like putting their time and energy and money and creative efforts

• 45:18Speaker 04

  and attention into this, this kind of city that works in a different way. It's creating culture. It's creating a real alternative to some of the other ways that people feel online. Where a lot of the places people spend their time online, I think, just feel like, you know, a slot machine or feel like going to a casino or feel like kind of plugging into a drug and, and just sort of stepping away from their life.

• 45:42Ed Elson?

  If you're not going to, if you're, sorry, if you're not going to out TikTok, TikTok though, are you essentially yielding that? And we can go with the city analogy too, that TikTok will always be a larger city than Substack because for all of its vices, it's the most addictive.

• 45:58Speaker 04

  I mean, larger, larger in what way? I mean, there's.

• 46:01Ed Elson?

  In population, in users.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  Maybe in population, probably maybe in time spent in economic value. I don't know about that. You know, I, I, I wrote this piece called The Two Futures of Media where I think, and I think this ties into kind of like the AI world where one view of media is to view it as a, as a drug, basically. It's like, hey, media, the point of media is. How I feel in the moment when I use it, right? It's an escape. It's a, it's a, it's a thing that I do to just like change my current feeling or mental state. And I think that that thing is very real. It's a real purpose. It's something that people really want.

• 46:45Speaker 04

  And there is like a, there is kind of a natural conclusion of that, that pulls towards, you know, if you took TikTok and then you said, okay, well, it's all going to be AI generated. So it's even more compelling. And then it's going to be, you know, you, it sort of like naturally pulls towards wireheading. You know, the science fiction concept of wireheading? It's basically like, what if you could have a technology that just directly stimulates the pleasure sensor of your brain? It's kind of like a, you know, like a technological drug that you just kind of like press and makes you feel happy. That's going to be real. Like that's, there's going to be, there already is a big segment of the world that wants that thing and is using that thing. And there's money to be made in creating that thing. And we are not going to replace that thing. We're not going to play the same game as that thing.

• 47:31Speaker 04

  What I think we can do is we can give people a real alternative. And we can say, there is a different, you know, you can take back your mind.

• 47:39Speaker 04

  The point of media is not only to get what you want, it's to learn what to want. It's to participate in culture with other people. It's to act back on the world. I think ultimately that thing is, is, can be in the moment, less compelling, but in the long run is much more compelling. And I think there's a flywheel effect where as more people choose that, as you've can kind of see what happens when people choose that. And as those people get sort of richer and better lives, you could create a real alternative. And I don't think that it will be necessarily economically smaller than the bad version.

• 48:18Speaker 04

  We'll be right back.

• 48:27Speaker 02

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• 50:35Ed Elson?

  We're back with first time founders. I like describing Substack as a city in a world of places because it does feel that that is the way the internet is evolving. And I, as someone who creates content, I find that each place, each platform, has different characteristics, different rules, different kinds of people, and different kinds of stuff that resonates. And I find that I tailor and I switch my language between each platform. On LinkedIn, it's more cordial, more corporate.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  So grateful for this opportunity.

• 51:11Ed Elson?

  On Twitter, it's a little bit more rage baity.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  On Twitter, "Look at this asshole. Can you believe that anybody actually thinks this?"

• 51:17Ed Elson?

  Exactly. And we're all kind of having to learn how to navigate these languages and how to tailor our messages based on which platform or place you are in. What are the characteristics of Substack? If Substack is a city, how, who are the people? What are the qualities of that city? What kind of language do they speak?

• 51:42Speaker 04

  So I think it's intensely cosmopolitan. We have this, you know, there's, I think of Substack sometimes as like a, an index fund of culture, right? There's this, there's this space for everyone. And whoever you are, your tribe is kind of there and there's like the good version of your, you know, your subculture, your artistic community, your ideology, your people. And so your thing is, is there, there's a home for you there. And there's this richness of 10,000 other tribes, other cultures, other literal geographies, other topics, other kinds of people.

• 52:25Speaker 04

  It's this, you know, you can have this massive diversity, intellectual diversity, cultural, you know, subcultural diversity, and it can coexist in peace. And people can have their, you know, be, experience these different parts of themselves and different parts of culture in a way that kind of fits together and doesn't get, doesn't get sort of homogenized into one great slurry. There's sort of neighborhoods to Substack with different feels and different vibes.

• 52:53Speaker 04

  I would say I aspire for it to be sort of the intellectual and cultural capital of the internet. I think it'll be, I think one day it will be at a scale, I don't know if it's literally bigger than the biggest networks, but I think, I think there's no reason it can't become into that echelon in terms of sort of raw population. But I think long before that happens, and even today, there's sort of a sense of, you know, if you think about where the journalists, where the writers, where the musicians, where the artists, where the statesmen, where the poets, like all of these kind of like, the intellectual and cultural elite can kind of like create the best versions of their ideas and thoughts.

• 53:36Speaker 04

  Increasingly, that is happening on Substack, where you see something really good somewhere else on the internet, you kind of flip it over and it says, you know, made in Substack on the bottom. And it becomes this place where it's like, if you want to, if you want to go to like the real world of ideas, this can be, this is like the home for it. And that's sort of, that's the, you know, that's when I think of, we're not trying to out TikTok, TikTok, we're trying to like out Substack. That's the sort of the core of it.

• 54:00Ed Elson?

  It makes sense to me that that's where you land on it. That's what it is to me. There are different places on the internet, and if you want to go to the intellectual place, that place turns out to be Substack, which opens up so many different opportunities, I feel like, for your business, because the big question for advertisers is they're all just trying to figure out what kinds of people are where. And that, to me, is, is, is a big deal. Or, I mean, and it goes beyond just advertising. It's like, if we're trying to figure out what is the economy of the internet, we need to figure out what are the different neighborhoods and what are they actually looking for? And if you can identify that there is a giant population of people who identify as intellectuals, that's value. That's an audience, that's a group of people that you can kind of understand, and then

• 54:45Ed Elson?

  you can start to sell products and services to, which to me opens up so many different opportunities for Substack, which is why it's interesting how you guys have developed all of these new tools like podcasting, video, notes, like it's more of a social media app now. One thing that you guys are investing in, which I think is a great move, because I've been bullish on this for a while, is live streaming. Tell us about why you're getting into live streaming.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  Okay, the reason we're getting into video in general. Is because I think that this this medium is very important. And there's, you know, a sense in which video has become the lingua franca of large parts of the internet. And especially, you know, this thing we're doing now, where you have sort of a long form. The part that fits really well with Substack is where you have sort of a long form thoughtful conversation where there is like a, you know, I think of a long podcast as in some ways the same kind of thing as like a long essay. Right. It's something that takes a bit of, it takes a bit of investment. It can be a bit challenging. It can be more deeply, you know, it's literally long form. You can go deep on ideas.

• 55:57Speaker 04

  That thing can be this deeply valuable intellectual thing or cultural thing or, you know, thing that's fun and elevated in other ways. And then there's like this, you know, there's the clip as the kind of fundamental unit that helps that thing spread. That's like, here's how we can like, you know, here's how you can take this thing and reach out and grow and like, show it to people and have them discover it and give them like a little hook to go deeper. It's an important medium on the internet. It's something that a lot of, you know, podcasting and video is something a lot of writers want to do, a lot of people who do, who want to want to express themselves in that medium that even aren't necessarily writers. It's important.

• 56:38Speaker 04

  And then live is kind of this very magical way to do that thing in a really direct and authentic way. I think there's kind of going to be this interesting barbell effect with a lot of the AI stuff that's happening where it's kind of like, you could make something that's sort of like maximally can self consciously unreal. Or you want to make something that's like the most real it could possibly be, the most human it could possibly be. And both of those poles are going to be really good. And then everything in between is going to be less and less good. So something that's kind of like, you know, sort of, sort of human, but sort of fake.

• 57:18Speaker 04

  And just having a like, having a live conversation with somebody is this really honest, earnest thing. It's not polished. It's not perfect. It's not even edited yet. If you're literally watching it live, it becomes this very direct thing that people can make. And then we're investing in, you know, the set of tools. This is the other property of the city. It's kind of like technologically advanced. It's giving people those, those tools that are indistinguishable from magic.

• 57:45Speaker 04

  You know, the same way that for a writer on Substack, you would come and type into this box. And if the thing you type is actually great, which is really hard, but if you can actually write something that's worth caring about and worth reading, that's so valuable, you shouldn't have to think about anything else, right? Come and type into this box. And if the thing you type is great, you're going to get rich and famous. That's kind of like the, that's sort of the, the core thing I want to be able to deliver for people. You shouldn't have to be a nerd or hire a team of nerds. You shouldn't have to figure out all these other things. You should be able to just create the thing you believe in. And if you can focus all of your energy on making it great, then it can, you know, the, the, the technology can handle the rest. I think we're, we're going to be there with video very quickly.

• 58:29Speaker 04

  And so part of Substack Live is literally you're doing a live stream. But part of it is we have this automatic production stuff that's cutting it into a usable YouTube video, a usable podcast, long form podcast thing, a usable set of, you know, well chosen, highly like well edited clips. And so if you're somebody that has something to say, you can kind of show up on Substack and say it, people can tune in live and it turns into this sequence of media that can work. It's sort of like doing the grunt work of taking your magical creation and turning it in and translating it into all the usable forums, maybe even literally translating it, by the way, we're in a world where Star Trek translation, it can just be in you in every language is suddenly possible.

• 59:14Speaker 04

  And so we're kind of pulling the thread on this vision and I'm very excited about it.

• 59:18Ed Elson?

  One of my beliefs about media and the way things are trending right now is that I feel that most trends can be kind of reverse engineered to the fact that Americans and the global population are just unprecedentedly lonely right now because of technology, the fact that we're spending 70% less time in the past decade with friends, the value of one in 10 Americans say they have zero close friends at all. And what I have found is that the internet has become sort of the, the most visceral reflection of our craving and our desire to simply interact with other people. The people and it seems to me that the most successful forms of media are the forms of media

• 1:00:00Ed Elson?

  that are offering that interaction up. So if you're watching CNN, sure, you're you get to like watch some people talk on the TV, but you don't get to talk with them and you don't get to talk with anyone else about what they're saying. Whereas if you go on YouTube, you get to interact with people in the comments and talk about what they said, what was stupid, what was funny, what was interesting. And then if you're doing a live stream, you get to interact, watching it live, and then comment on it with other people at the same time. And it basically feels as though the way media is headed is just whatever platform can most realistically replicate the experience of just living, like just interacting with other people, just like being actually in a

• 1:00:45Ed Elson?

  conversation. And if you can replicate that on a digital platform, then you have a win. Do you think that's right?

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  There's a big core of truth there. I think people are lonely. I think the way that you get to interact with others, the way that you get to be a part of and act back on the community, the world of ideas is very important. I think, yeah, places, the aspiration I would have for Substack is twofold here. The first is what you're saying. Yes, I think the, you know, there's these communities, when you have these like, within the city, you have like the space, each Substack is its own world, there's its own kind of community with walls, it has its own identity, its own world. And that like comment section, people make friends there. People get to know each other, you know, people become friends in real life because of somebody they met in the blog comments, like that's a thing that increasingly happens. And so I think, you

• 1:01:35Speaker 04

  know, part of it is, yeah, creating the part of the digital world that actually lets you live and interact in a human way and doesn't reduce you to a passive consumer, but lets you be part of a community and act back. That's really important. I also think, you know, that third phase, like the internet becomes real life, right? I've been to meetups that Substackers have, and you'll have somebody that's, that's a, you know, a blogger, and they show up at a bar in San Francisco, and there's 100 people there, treating them like a fucking rock star. And you have this like this real set of people that have formed around this shared idea or interest or community, you know, the, the, the places where the internet

• 1:02:20Speaker 04

  can then spill back into actual real life, where it's not only a substitute for seeing people in person, but can cause you to see people in person. I think that's really important and valuable, too.

• 1:02:32Ed Elson?

  People, specifically young people, are reading less than ever before. No one really reads, among Gen Z at least. And actually, young people are getting stupider. So math scores are in decline, basically, since we put computers in our pockets. Literacy rates are going down. Young people are literally getting stupid from the amount of time that they're spending on TikTok, watching YouTube, watching reels, et cetera. Like, our brains are actually atrophying. Do you think that Substack could help offer a solution to this problem?

• 1:03:13Speaker 04

  I do. And I do think the problem is real. I think it's easy to overstate it. I think there's sort of a sense in which every, you know, every generation turns around and says, kids these days are failing in these ways and they're rotting their brains. And, you know, I think you could have said that about TV when, for my generation and the generation before. And it was probably true to some extent. You know, the way I look at it is, we're not going to turn back the clock on these things. You, you, we're not going to put the toothpaste back in the tube and not have the internet anymore, not have phones anymore, not have networks that connect everyone anymore. I think even if you could do that, you, you shouldn't want to. And the question becomes, you know, what's the version of using this stuff that's actually good? What's the version of it that's

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  not just compelling in the moment, but is actually helping me live the life I want to lead, become the person I want to become, you know, help create the community and the society I want? And I think that hunger is there. I think young people want that as much as ever. And one of the things that you can do to help, to help is to, to create a real alternative. And to say like, you know, I'm not, I'm not saying stop scrolling TikTok, but sometimes try this other thing. Sometimes come watch this long form thing or be part of this comment section that's going deep on something or, or, you know, read a, read a short blog post. I do think people are hungry for that stuff. And if you bring it in a way that's Good and new and authentic, it works.

• 1:04:43Ed Elson?

  Chris Best is the CEO and co-founder of Substack. Chris, really appreciate your time. Thank you.

• 1:04:48Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:04:54Ed Elson?

  This episode was produced by Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research associates are Dan Shalana and Kristen O'Donoghue. And our senior producer is Claire Miller. Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from Prof G Media. We will see you next month with another founder's story.

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