Chris Best

**Chris Best** (0:23)
I've always believed that the things you read and the media you consume in general are not just how you spend a big chunk of your life, it changes you. And so great writing and great culture in general is this deeply valuable thing.
And so now I was like, I should write. How hard could it be? I would love that. I have ideas, I know how to type, like I'm a programmer, I love reading. And I started writing what I thought was gonna be an essay or a blog post or a screed of some sort, like detailing my frustrations with the media economy on the Internet. Kind of just complaining in broad strokes. Look, the Internet came along, smashed a lot of the business models that used to sustain culture, and hasn't really, I mean, it's created a lot of wonderful things. There's been a lot of promise, but it hasn't yet replaced, especially like the economic engines that made those things go.
In a way, that was satisfactory to me. And I was just kind of whining. I was going off and saying, wah, wah, you know, Craig's List killed the Classifieds, and maybe Facebook is not an unalloyed good. And I sent it to my friend Hamish, he's actually a writer, and he let me down very gently.
He's like, these are all good points you make, but it's 2017, and you are not quite as original as you think you are. Like other people may have noticed that some of these trends are going on. But he's like, here's how you could make this essay you're writing better. You should add a section that just says, so what do you do about it? How could this be different? It's easy to complain. It's easy to say, here's everything that's wrong. It's much more interesting, though, it would be more interesting as a reader to have a theory of, well, what could a new and better thing be? And we started arguing, basically. And that argument turned into what became the core idea for Substack.

**Rick Rubin** (2:22)
And what was the core idea?

**Chris Best** (2:23)
The core idea is that the writers and the people who make the culture are the heroes. And they need independence. In order to give the thing they have to give to the world, they need the freedom to make the things they want to make. And they need people to make money. And not just make money incidentally, but to be able to make money doing the work they believe in.
And that if you can create those conditions, not only will it appeal to the best writers, the best makers, the things that will get created will be different and better.

**Rick Rubin** (3:04)
And then from writing that, what was the moment of, okay, I'm going to build this as opposed to just a theoretical solution to a problem?

**Chris Best** (3:15)
Yeah, we were arguing about the thing. And I've always felt that if you sort of need two things to have a really worthwhile idea in technology, you need to have sort of what I think of as the science fiction vision, a sort of a grand important idea for how the world could be different that actually matters. And you need to have sort of a humble beginning. You need to have a first step that you can actually take soon to be able to make progress towards, I think. You don't have to know how it connects, I don't think. You can have this kind of foggy city on the hill, and then you can have this next thing that you do. You have to have some belief that you're going in the right direction, but you don't have to know where the rest of the path lives. And as we were arguing, we sort of realized, we were developing this grand science fiction vision, this idea that you could make a new economic engine for culture. I mean, ultimately, to me, it's like, I think you could power a renaissance. Not as in we would be the ones to do it, but by giving kind of like the tools that the creative class need, you could actually create something that really meaningfully changed the world. And we had this very simple place to get started, which was this idea of a paid email newsletter.
And there was already people that were doing this in the world. There was this guy, Ben Thompson, who wrote a thing called Stratechery, that was like a tech business newsletter. He was writing this thing from his bedroom in Taiwan, making millions of dollars a year, sending out this email that people paid for.