#1855 - Chris Best

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience. What's up, Chris?

Chris Best (0:14)

Good.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Have you done podcasts before?

Chris Best (0:19)

Nothing like this, I've done a few.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

Yeah, okay, cool. So tell me, first of all, tell me what was the inspiration to start Substack?

Like, how did it come about?

Chris Best (0:32)

I've always been an avid reader.

My dad was an English teacher growing up. We had books around the house, and I've always thought that what you read matters. Like, it shapes who you are, it shapes how you think, it creates, like, who you are as a person. And so great writing matters a lot, right? I must, in my other life, I do software. Software is this magical thing where you can run, write a piece of code, and it does something for a million people. If you write a great essay, a great book, a great thought, you can change who a million people are. And so great writing is this valuable thing. And when I took a sabbatical from a company that I'd done, I was like, I should be a writer. That would be good. Like, how hard could it be?

These guys are doing good things. I started writing what I thought was gonna be like an essay or a blog post or a screed or something, outlining my frustration with the state of the media industry, the state of incentives on the internet, basically complaining, wah, wah, wah, social media's breaking our brains, you know, this kind of shit. And I sent it to my friend Hamish, who's really a writer, and he told me, like, anybody can complain about this stuff. You're not as original as you think. All of my friends who are writers know all of this stuff. The more interesting question is, if all of this is true, what could you do about it?

And that turned into Substack.

Joe Rogan (1:54)

And what year was this?

Chris Best (1:56)

2017

Joe Rogan (1:57)

It's really perfect timing for when everything started getting really heavy in terms of censorship and also the chaos that came about because of the pandemic and journalists getting canceled. And there was so much weird stuff in terms of what you were allowed to write about or not allowed to write about. And then, of course, the Hunter Biden thing, the laptop, like all that stuff, like came about in the first few years.

Chris Best (2:23)

A lot of the best writers in the world, in my estimation, were getting kind of tissue-rejected from the places where they would have been before.

Joe Rogan (2:32)

Tissue-rejected?

Chris Best (2:33)

Like, it's an analogy. Like they're getting, like an organ transplant that fails kind of thing. They're getting sort of pushed out from the places that would have been their home and where they could have done the thing that mattered to them before.

Joe Rogan (2:47)

What happened? How do you think that, like what steps fell into place that caused all this?

Chris Best (2:55)

My theory on this is that it's a combination of natural human affairs, right? Like there's human nature. People act in certain ways. There's dark tendencies that come out when you get people together at scale, colliding with the consequences of the first generation of the internet revolution, basically. The way that the first generation of the internet played out was this massive land grab for human attention.

So first of all, the computer, and then even more so the smartphone, kind of gobbled up all of this slices of people's lives that were just sitting there. People used to get bored, and then the smartphone came along and that just didn't exist anymore. And in that phase, the things that won were the things that were the most efficient at gobbling up everyone's attention. And so you had this sort of, the game that everyone played was like, get everyone's eyeballs.

And the things that you do to win at that game create an incentive landscape that drives everyone crazy.

Joe Rogan (3:55)

Yeah, the way to win at that game is be outraged or get people outraged.

Chris Best (4:00)

Yeah, the way to win at Twitter is be bad in a lot of ways. And if you don't want to do it, somebody else will.

Joe Rogan (4:06)

Be bad.

Chris Best (4:08)

Well, I mean, bad in some, like be outrageous, be...

The ultimate tweet, as I've found out myself sometimes, is not the thing that everyone agrees with or even the thing that everyone hates. It's the thing that maximally divides people. The thing that most separates the people that are in your tribe, on your side, and makes them kind of like cheer, and at the same time, spits in the face of the other people. That is the recipe for a successful tweet because that's the incentive landscape that makes Twitter succeed.