Chris Best

And so the kind of like the underlying economic incentive that we've created to pull this platform forward pulls us in the direction we want to 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 letting people export their audiences.

The fact that a subscription on Substack is an email subscription.

You get the email address.

You can bring your subscribers or somewhere else.

You can take your subscribers with you when you leave.

At the surface level, you might say, oh, that's bad because you're not locking in your customers and 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 the only reason you're going to stay is that we're giving you enough value and we're making something that's actually good.

We're not trying to lock you in.

And that sort of counterintuitively means that people can invest and trust the platform.

I don't know if it wholesale replaces it.

You know, I think 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 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 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 this woman, Catherine Dee, who writes on Substack who talks about the internet as fairyland or the internet as the astral plane, the internet as this kind of otherworldly place that people can go and 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 –