Chris Best

I'm going to do this first step to start making this better.

And I think as soon as you do that, you are lost.

Either you're in control or the mob is in control.

And as soon as you like let the mob start to be a little bit in control, it's like it devolves and devolves and nothing satisfies it.

And so we, one of the things that we did, you know, and it feels this way in the press and it feels this way when you get these social media things is as painful as it was, we did just sort of hold firm.

We wrote a few essays in advance outlining our philosophy about, you know, free speech and freedom of the press and why we were doing what we're doing and why things were the way they were.

And we can sort of consult back to, you know, what we had written with cooler heads.

And then a lot of what I think of as our success was just,

not giving in, like not getting tilted, just being like, yep, everyone's mad.

The people who are our customers, who are concerned, we'll talk to and we'll empathize with them and tell them what we're doing.

But we're not going to abdicate our responsibility or our judgment to the critics in the press or to the critics on social media.

I think that saved the company, basically.

I think being willing to stand up in those moments feels hard.

But maybe this is the advice I would give to somebody going through that is like, stick by your principles.

If you're going to get smashed, get smashed for doing something you believe in because that's worth it.

First of all, you can use Substack just like a normal podcast host.

So you can create a Substack.

You can publish, you know, upload an audio file.

It can distribute that to Apple Podcasts and to Spotify.

We can also auto-publish to YouTube now.