Chris Best

Even Paul Krugman, they told him to blog less, at least according to his substack.

He writes these things, then he has this economics blog that gives him life and he loves doing, and they're like, you have to publish it less frequently.

And he's like, no.

And now he's on Substack and he can write whatever he wants and he's making a ton of money and he's able to do the thing that he actually wants, which increases the variance.

Like it's not always the case that not having your editor makes you better, but I think it makes you more fully yourself and that gets more interesting.

You know, I think Matt Iglesias was one of the editorial co-founders of Vox Media.

As a reader of his, when he came to Substack, it was like Theoden after Wormtongue left in The Lord of the Rings.

Like he de-aged 10 years and regained his vigor and kind of like became more fully himself.

Tell me about Barry Weiss.

Barry Weiss was very interesting.

You know, she was sort of resigned from the New York Times, but after sort of extensive, you know, harassment and mistreatment, at least from what I saw from the outside, we sort of called her up right away.

I was like, you should do a Substack.

And it took a little while, but she started what at the beginning was barryweiss.substack.com.

and sort of, you know, had this place where she could start building an audience.

You know, there are some people who are sort of independent voices who are artists who go like do their own thing and have their own show.

And there are some people who are, I think of as founders, institution builders, people who want to, you know, who believe in institutions to the extent that the existing ones have failed, get hungry to create new ones of their own.

And I love when Substack can serve those people.

And I think Barry was unquestionably one of those people.

She founded that Substack, which became the Free Press, which recently sold for $150 million and has become this, I would argue, a great cultural force.

Yeah, I think this is often, this is how countercultures work, I think, is that you have things that are sort of the, that start out as sort of rebels or challengers from the outside.