Chris Best

I think free speech and freedom of the press are integral to a free society.

Beyond even sort of Substack, I just think it's one of the necessary building blocks of a free society.

And on Substack, because of this, we've always had this value of

independence of giving people the freedom to make the thing they want to make you know we've taken a very strong stance in favor of freedom of the press you know you can't organize crimes or make threats or there's a you know narrowly construed set of things that you can't do but beyond that we try to be very very liberal would you say if it's legal it could be unsubstacked

Not exactly that, but we take a lot of inspiration from the First Amendment, even philosophically.

Actually, some of the early pushback was just nervousness around the new model and the fact that people could go independent and write their own thing without the blessing of

a media company or institution, you know, anytime we've had pushback, anytime we've had criticism, I've sort of taken the mindset of, look, if you can't take the heat, don't go in the kitchen.

It's like we set out to do this thing.

And the only way that it was going to happen without controversy or without criticism is if we didn't succeed.

Yeah.

So I can't complain about it too much.

There's been times when it's been tough.

A very early one was there was sort of discourse around the trans movement, the trans identity issues about how we should categorize those things, what should policy be.

And that's something that's like a very legitimate topic for discussion.

It's something that people have

good faith disagreements about.

It's also something that some people, it's part of their identity.

It's who they are.

It's how they feel.

Things can feel like very personal or feel like attacks in a way that I deeply empathize with.