The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
First Time Founders: Has Substack Changed Media For Good?
01 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to First Time Founders. I'm Ed Elson. America's confidence in mass media is collapsing. Only about a third say they have any meaningful trust that major outlets report the news fully and fairly, and more than a third say they just don't trust the media at all. Meanwhile, the people who produce that content are facing their own crisis.
Across the industry, writers and journalists are being laid off in waves as legacy outlets struggle to adapt and survive. Together, these shifts have pushed both audiences and creators toward a new home. Millions of readers are seeking voices they can trust directly without an institutional filtering. At the same time, thousands of writers have begun building independent businesses there.
The platform that I'm talking about has already drawn more than 35 million subscribers and it has expanded beyond writing into podcasts and video.
Chapter 2: What is the current state of trust in media?
In the process, it has reshaped the media landscape and accelerated the rise of a new creator-driven era. This is my conversation with Chris Best, the CEO and co-founder of Substack. Chris Best, thank you for joining me on First Time Founders. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. I'm a second time founder. Does that ruin it?
We made an exception for you because we really just want to talk about Substack. Well, thank you. But we'll get to that. We'll get to your story and your career. But I first want to start with just a factual statement about America right now. And that is that trust in media, whatever media is, is at a record low.
So when you poll Americans, only a third say they have any meaningful trust that outlets report the news fully and fairly, and then more than a third say they just do not trust the media at all. You have started one of these new media companies in Substack. What do you make of that statistic, and how does it affect the way you think about your company?
I definitely think we're in a time of profound change in media. And my model of this is it's sort of a technologically driven change.
You know, the internet came along and smashed a lot of the existing business models for media and culture and created these massive new networks that are fantastically profitable businesses without necessarily replacing kind of the economic engine that sustained a lot of this stuff.
And anytime you have a, you know, in history, if you have a major sort of revolution in media or information technology, whether it's the internet or the television or the printing press, you often get kind of a period of unrest or a period of destabilization or a time of cultural churn as we sort of adapt to the new reality. And I think we're in one of those times now.
what happens when you wire the whole world together into one internet and layering onto it. Now you can, what happens when anybody can make all kinds of media with AI, when anybody, it's sort of like a, were in the period of destabilization caused by technological change.
Did you know that that was going to happen when you started Substack? And this is, I mean, really a question of the origin story of Substack. Was this something you predicted and what was the inspiration behind Substack?
This is why I wanted to start Substack. And in fact, I wasn't setting out to start a company when we started. I was setting out to write an essay. I was actually on sabbatical, taking some time off after my last company. And I was writing this essay trying to outline my frustrations with the media economy on the internet along these lines. And I felt at the time that it was already happening.
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Chapter 3: How has Substack emerged as a solution for writers?
Yeah, maybe that's right. But it didn't feel very serious. And, you know, I'd say I think people are going to be willing to connect directly and subscribe to the voices they trust. And people would say, yeah, maybe, I don't know, that's interesting. Probably people will never pay for somebody. And I think just a lot of that has proven effective. you know, to my mind, true.
The thing that was sort of like an interesting curiosity when we started the company, people are starting to feel a lot more viscerally now. And this is why you get these surveys. People are saying like, I don't know if I can express exactly what's wrong, but something is wrong. And I'm hungry for something better. And I think you can look at ā it's easy to be a doomer about that situation.
It's easy to look at it and say, ah, things are ā there are lots of problems and nobody trusts these things and look at these negative effects. I think it's also a time of incredible opportunity. I think it's ā we're in a moment where there's going to ā we're going to be building the new world. Yeah.
And there's not going to be, you don't get a choice of whether or not we get change, but we do get a choice in what kind of change we get. And that's the thing that motivated me to work on Substack in the first place.
Before Substack, you started this company called Kik. You're the co-founder, you're the CTO. Um, you later decided to leave that company and then you, as you say, you ran into starting Substack. Can you just tell us like the, the brief story of starting that first company and then actually how you got Substack off, off of the ground following your first company?
I was the technical co-founder, but my co-founder, Ted Livingston, who was the CEO, it was really his kind of his baby. And I sort of stumbled into that company. I met Ted when we were both in university and we started working on it. Anyway, I won't get too deep into that, but we wound up making this messaging app that got really, really big. Actually, it got really big twice. It got really big.
And then BlackBerry, who was a big player at the time, tried to kill us and almost succeeded. And we built it back up from nothing. got hundreds of millions of users, raised money from Tencent at a billion dollar valuation. It was a crazy, wild experience. I learned a lot about building things that matter. I learned a lot about how much impact you can have making technology if you do it well.
And I also got this abiding belief that there's a lot of power and responsibility in building these kind of virtual places where people increasingly lead their lives online. You know, you can't change human nature It does exist. People are a certain way, and you shouldn't really try, is maybe what I think.
But even so, you can take the exact same set of people with the same strengths, the same flaws, the same beliefs, and depending on how you set up the rules of the game, depending on how you set up the space they inhabit, how it gets communicated, how it all works, you can kind of create a heaven or a hell with the exact same people.
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Chapter 4: What drove the creation of Substack?
But what did you see as different about what Substack was?
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 ā you know, there was a golden age of blogs that was sort of this intellectual infusion. But the problem with it was there wasn't really a business model to back it up. It was things got acquired or things kind of stuffed ads in in a way that didn't really work.
And so you were missing ā you know, if you were an ambitious young person who wanted to ā had something to give the world and wanted to make this a career or make this a business, it was hard to see a way to do it. And there was sort of the legacy media, which was in decline.
And there was kind of this, you know, this new world of social media, which you could potentially get a big audience, but wasn't going to give you a way to... make money doing the work you believe in.
Just to describe the business model of Substack to the audience, my understanding is Substack takes 10% of the revenue that the creators charge when they put up a paywall. And in that sense... The real innovation of Substack to me, to your friend's point, was the business model.
It was to say blogging can be paid for upfront, it can be put behind a paywall, and an economy can be created out of that business model. There will be enough content, enough creators out there with good enough content that people will actually pay for such that this makes sense as a business.
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Chapter 5: What makes Substack different from traditional media?
And, Chuck Klosterman says, one day all of that is going to change. It's too big. Its tentacles are too far. It's so wide. And when it collapses, something that size collapses hard. I'm Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, the show about what happens when media and tech collide. And you can hear my conversation with Chuck Klosterman right now, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
We're back with First Time Founders. I like describing Substack as a city in a world of places because it does feel that that is the way the internet is evolving. And I, as someone who creates content, I find that each place, each platform has different characteristics, different rules, different kinds of people, and different kinds of stuff that resonates.
And I find that I tailor and I switch my language between each platform. On LinkedIn, it's more cordial, more corporate. So grateful for this opportunity. On Twitter, it's a little bit more rage-baity. On Twitter, look at this asshole. Can you believe that anybody actually thinks this? Exactly.
And we're all kind of having to learn how to navigate these languages and how to tailor our messages based on which platform or place you are in. What are the characteristics of Substack? If Substack is a city, who are the people? What are the qualities of that city? What kind of language do they speak?
So I think it's intensely cosmopolitan. We have this, you know, I think of Substack sometimes as like an index fund of culture, right? There's this space for everyone. And whoever you are, your tribe is kind of there. And there's like the good version of your tribe. you know, your subculture, your artistic community, your ideology, your people.
And so your thing is there, there's a home for you there, and there's this richness of 10,000 other tribes, other cultures, other literal geographies, other topics, other kinds of people. It's this, you know, you can have this massive... diversity, intellectual diversity, cultural, you know, subcultural diversity, and it can coexist in peace.
And people can have their, you know, experience these different parts of themselves and different parts of culture in a way that kind of fits together and doesn't get sort of homogenized into one great slurry. There's sort of neighborhoods to Substack with different feels and different vibes. I would say I aspire for it to be sort of the intellectual and cultural capital of the internet.
I think one day it will be at a scale, I don't know if it's literally bigger than the biggest networks, but I think there's no reason it can't become into that echelon in terms of sort of raw population. But I think long before that happens, and even today, there's sort of a sense of, you know, if you think about where the...
where the writers, where the musicians, where the artists, where the statesmen, where the poets, like all of these kind of like the intellectual and cultural elite can kind of like create the best versions of their ideas and thoughts. Increasingly, that is happening on Substack.
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