Chris Best

We're not trying to lock you in.

And that sort of counterintuitively means that people can invest and trust the platform.

I don't know if it wholesale replaces it.

You know, I think there are things about each of the platforms that are valuable and there are things that we're not trying to replicate.

You know, something I tell the team is like,

You know, we're not going to out TikTok TikTok and we shouldn't try, right?

Like we're not, we're trying to do something that's fundamentally different than that.

And so I wouldn't say that we're, you know, if Substack is maximally successful, therefore there's no Instagram anymore or therefore there's no X anymore or anything like that.

The way that I think of it is.

I don't know if you've ever – there's this woman, Catherine Dee, who writes on Substack who talks about the internet as fairyland or the internet as the astral plane, the internet as this kind of otherworldly place that people can go and that touches real life but is not quite the same and that you can risk bringing bad things back from.

There's sort of a –

It's kind of a place.

It's a place where people are spending more and more of their life and they're leading more and more of their life.

They're having the, you know, it's the world of ideas, it's the world of media.

I kind of think of it as, you know, it used to be that the internet was not real life.

Then the internet became real life.

The third step is real life is the internet.

What happens on the internet starts to reach back out and reshape our world.

And I think of Substack as like a place on the internet.

Substack is like a city in the astral plane of the internet.