Chris Best

Yeah, the thing that really appealed to me then, it was around independence.

It was around the idea that, you know, in the early days it was really writers because that was sort of that initial, you know, Hamish was a writer, I'd been trying to write.

It was this writer-focused thing.

I don't think the idea is actually not only for writers, but I felt that the people who were the most interesting to read had this kind of, like,

outsider nerd thing.

And if you could free them to pursue their obsession or pursue their vision to the utmost,

It would allow the creation of new culture.

And in order to free them, you had to give them a business model that actually worked for them.

You had to have a strong presumption of freedom of the press, but also you had to make it simple enough for a person to actually use.

And one way to look at Substack early on was like, hey, come and type into this box.

And if the things you type are actually great, which is really hard, by the way, almost nobody can do it.

But if you can do that one thing, if you can type something great, you know, to put it reductively, we will make the rest magically work for you.

You will get rich and famous if you can type this thing that's great, which is hard enough.

Yeah, I would say so.

At least in the sense that really good new ideas are always countercultural or there was... It always starts as the counterculture.

Yeah.

I mean, the things that were not countercultural weren't as ill-served.

Like there was lots of outlets for the main culture, I suppose.

Yeah, and that part was not an exciting blog post to write, but it sort of triggered, I saw that as, oh, we could make this tomorrow.

There's something we could do here that would work.