Chris Best

And so in my little sabbatical time, I was thinking, I should write.

I know how to read.

I know how to type.

I have that good sort of tech bro hubris.

I was like, how hard could it be?

I should write an essay.

And so I started writing that.

You know, that essay that was originally going to be a blog post or whatever, I shared it with my friend Hamish, who's actually a real writer.

And that was sort of the origin.

The core idea is we're building a new economic engine for culture.

The problem as we see it is that it's not, you know, as you say, there was already, the internet came along and it did one revolutionary thing, which is let anybody publish and kind of like unshackle, you know, unshackle the media environment from the gatekeepers.

You know, I like to, I say there are still gatekeepers, but you can't keep the people in anymore.

You can't lock people in.

You can lock people out, but you can't lock people in.

But the problem was that there wasn't, you know, if you are a creative person, if you are a writer, if you're a journalist, there wasn't necessarily a great way to make money doing the work you believe in.

And if you believe that great media, great culture is valuable, you want there to be a way to make money and to have kind of like a social contract that lets you do the work you really believe in.

And in the early days, sometimes people would accuse us.

They'd say to me in an accusatory tone, they'd say, you know, Substack is just blogging with a business model.

And I'm like, you know, that sounds pretty good, right?

Blogging was this really cool – you know, there was a golden age of blogs that was sort of this intellectual infusion.