Chris Best

And that gave us a lot of confidence that we were onto something, even though there was sort of like, you know, that was the biggest thing for a while.

Like it was – there weren't 20 more Bill Bishops we could go get at that time.

But we had this – it gave us kind of like the confidence we were onto something.

And then maybe the second one, yeah, I think, you know, COVID 2020, there was a combination of suddenly everybody has a bunch more time and a bunch more money.

And so there was sort of this great reshift in the economy where all of the online things or all of the virtual things got this huge stimulus and all of the real world things got this huge setback.

And Substack was a really good online thing.

It was something really valuable and meaningful that you could do on the internet.

And there was kind of a...

It was sort of a fever pitch moment for some of those tensions with media.

It was a time where a lot of the best and most interesting independent thinkers were getting summarily turfed, to be honest, from their perches at traditional media places.

You know, Barry Weiss was, you know, pushed to resign from the New York Times in that time.

There was a whole bunch of people that were fantastic on Substack.

We have this story about what's happening in the world and how it could be better.

And that story is not about COVID or stimulus, right?

It's about this, the evolving media landscape and information landscape we all live in, right?

These big mega trends, you know, one version of this is I used to, you know, I think that before the internet, when I was a kid, a real problem you could have is you could get bored.

You could be sitting around and thinking, gee, I have nothing to spend my attention on right now.

And if somebody could give me something free to distract me, that would be a really, really good deal because I'm just sitting here staring at a wall or like, you know, I could read a book or play chess with somebody or turn the TV on maybe.

And then, you know, so the early generation of the internet kind of was a land grab for all of that attention.

And the bargain was, here's something that you can spend some attention on for free that is kind of fun and will stop you from being bored.