"World of DaaS"
deep dive into Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) businesses. World of DaaS is a podcast for data enthusiasts, by data enthusiasts, where Auren Hoffman talks to business and technology leaders about all things data - building it, acquiring it, analyzing it, and everything in between.
"World of DaaS"
Substack CEO Chris Best - Building a New Engine for Culture
Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Substack. Prior to Substack, he co founded the messaging service Kik.
In this episode of World of DaaS, Chris and Auren discuss:
- Attention, quality, and gatekeepers in media
- The state of freedom of speech
- Building an audience
- AI as a creative tool
Looking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to WorldofDaaS.com for our podcast, newsletter and events, and follow us on X @WorldOfDaaS.
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Chris Best on Substack at @cb and on X at @cjgbest.
Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)
Welcome to World of DAS. A show for data enthusiasts. I'm your host, oren Hoffman, ceo of Safegraph and GPFlex Capital. For more conversations, videos and transcripts, visit safegraphcom slash podcasts. Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Chris Best. Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Substack and prior to Substack, he co-founded the messaging service Kik. Chris, welcome to World of Das. Thank you for having me Really excited. Now, what do you actually think is in the shortest supply in the media world? Is it information? Is it attention? Is it revenue discovery? What's the shortest supply right now?
Speaker 2:I think the root of the shortness is attention. My model of this is there used to be a period I remember this when I was a kid. You could get bored, you could have time on your hands where you have nothing to do and you wish that you had something to entertain you for free and that would be a great deal. And now, every second of the day, you want to be distracted. You can't. There is no shortage of stuff to fill your time.
Speaker 1:We've got this thing all the time with us you've got this thing.
Speaker 2:Attention is the limiting factor and therefore the shortage is quality. You don't need more stuff. Having another thing to spend a bit of time on in the line for the grocery store nobody needs that. The thing you need to do is to spend your time and your life on things you actually care about and value.
Speaker 1:That makes perfect sense. Now, when you started Substack, Substack originally was the challenger media company, but now you're pretty big. You've got, I think, 35 million subscribers. You've got like 3 million paid subscribers. What does it mean to be a challenger voice when you're larger than most of the legacy media?
Speaker 2:We've never really thought that the legacy media is sort of the reference class when we talk about that shift of hey, everybody's time and attention has been vacuumed up by these massive new technologies, massive new networks. It's not the New York Times that did that. This is Facebook, this is YouTube, this is Twitter, this is TikTok and Substack. Although I'm very proud of the progress we've made over 3 million page descriptions tons of people are reading it. I think it's shaping the culture in real ways. Already we are still a tiny fleck compared to the YouTubes of the world.
Speaker 1:You're comparing yourself to some of these very, very, very large aggregators. In some ways you've been part of this broader decentralization theme in media YouTube's part of that as well where we're kind of like moving away from the gatekeepers and editors toward potentially narrow verticals, different niches. Where do you see both the possible overall big upsides there and some of the possible downsides of that trend?
Speaker 2:I think you're always going to have gatekeepers one way or another. There's more things on the internet than you can ever read, watch, ever pay attention to. There's going to be some process by which you figure out what are you putting into your mind, and I think the technology has come along to change a lot of that, and I see media bifurcating into kind of two futures. One future is where you are renting your attention to a feed whose main job is to get you to spend as much time there as possible, whose job is to be sort of as cheaply compelling as possible, and so the gatekeeper for your attention becomes the TikTok hit me again. Motion. There's still a gatekeeper, the TikTok algorithm whichever algorithm is deciding what you see. It's just doing it in this very efficient way to like bring you this artificial super stimulus that keeps you glued to it.
Speaker 2:I think of that as like the drug future. You're basically wireheading. You're using media like a drug. It's effect on you, you're kind of addicted to it. Maybe you, after scrolling for a while, you think, oh God, what am I doing with my life? I certainly have this experience, and then I want us at Substack to be part of what I think of as the culture future, where the gatekeepers are people On Substack. I still choose who to trust, who to spend my time with. We just think you should be able to choose your own heroes. So, rather than have a set of gatekeepers who are whoever gets employed at the one of three TV networks or whoever's employed at the one local newspaper that has a monopoly, you sort of get to decide who you're choosing to help curate your digital life.
Speaker 1:Substack has a feed now and I've recently started using it as kind of an alternative to maybe some of these other more dopamine feeds. But I assume even in your feed, if you follow enough people, there's some AI editing in there as well.
Speaker 2:Right, there's always this question of what are you servicing? How are you helping people find the things they care about? My take on this is the existence of a feed is not necessarily bad. People talk about the algorithm as this big scary thing, but the problem is not. Hey, there's an algorithm that's trying to find me something that I want to see. The question is what is the objective function of that algorithm?
Speaker 1:If the objective is to stay on it as long as possible, then it's a little different.
Speaker 2:Then it's going to be good for that. Do you want to play a game where the algorithm is working almost against you to get you to spend the maximum amount? Its goal of spend the maximum amount of time on this is not your goal of find things that are meaningful in my life, that I care about. That I value that. Help me be someone I want to be.
Speaker 1:You're trying to get me to discover at least one new interesting piece of content in some way, and then me to engage with that content in a meaningful way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. Substack makes money when you find something that you love enough that you choose to pay for it. That's not a perfect system. It's not the case that magically, by subscribing and paying directly to someone that you like, that doesn't solve every problem in the world, but it does create a dramatically different objective function for everything that we build at Substack. We want you to find things you value. We want you to connect with people that make your life better. Once you subscribe to something and you're paying for it, we actually want to help you keep up with that thing. If you subscribe to something and we say, oh, this thing over here is clickier, that's not actually good for us because eventually, if you're not reading the things you're paying for, you're going to not pay for them anymore, and so we have this sort of incentive to help you read the things that you aspire to read, watch the things that you aspire to watch. I do think that, ultimately, the incentives, the business model that supports these things, matter a great deal.
Speaker 1:On the subscription side, I have a friend who's got a well-known sub stack and they mentioned that when they have very red meat things that they write about politically, they get a lot of extra subscribers, and when they have this more nuanced view of things or they go down a little bit more of an information rabbit hole that they find very appealing, sometimes they even lose subscribers when they do that, and so they have this tension in them to go one way or the other. How do you think this evolves over time?
Speaker 2:It's not perfect. In any system you can have the potential for audience capture where you sort of over-optimize for whatever the thing is that's currently working for you. I think that's actually not as severe in a paid subscription universe as it can be on YouTube or something, where you sort of really get that second by second hit of this is where everybody lost. I take great heart from. I see people who launch paid subscriptions on Substack and then a bunch of people will show up in the comments and say some equivalent of hey, I don't always agree with you In fact, you drove me crazy when X, y, z, but I really appreciate your perspective and I'm paying because I value this thing. I think there's a lot more of that than people realize. Now, is it still true that if you write about interesting stories that lots of people care about, that's going to help you grow and get subscribers? Yeah, that does happen.
Speaker 1:One of the things. You've made a very conscious decision to be much more full-throated, full-speech advocate. Traditionally you'll have, let's say, liberal media censor things that make conservatives look good, or conservative media censor things that make liberals look good, and you've really said okay, we're not even going to censor anything, we're really going to push this through. More than how you've arrived at that decision, how is it going? I imagine there's been internal wars or what are some of the tough ethical decisions you've had to make around that.
Speaker 2:We set out when we started Substack to build. We think of it as a new economic engine for culture. We want to make a place that can be a world scale network that's making a better business model for all of these different people who are going to have their own little thing, their own Substack that they're the boss of, where they have editorial freedom. We always saw freedom of the press as just fundamental to that mission and, frankly, fundamental to free society, and it's been tough. There's been moments where we've taken a lot of heat for it. There's been moments where people have been very mad at us.
Speaker 2:You get people writing critical. I think the New York Times once did a piece that said is the sub-stack economy bad for democracy? You get stuff like this it's going phenomenally well, I would say. It really, really works and the overall mood in the world is shifting felt very different in 2020 than it does now. I think a lot of people who previously had been on the side of hey, we should exercise a lot of moderation, let's say, over what goes on every network have felt things turn against them and have felt the need for places that have a principled commitment to free speech. We see people from all sides of the political spectrum today very much valuing that Substack has been a consistent, principled defender of that. It means that they can trust us. I also think it just works. It's more interesting it's actually better for your political cause in the long run when your critics are not silenced, because if you're able to silence your critics for some period of time it can actually make you go crazy. So I'm tremendously proud of it. I think it's been great.
Speaker 1:Let's say someone is suing someone for libel or something and they're trying to do a takedown. Do they sue the writer to take it down, or do they sue Substack to take it down? How does it?
Speaker 2:work. The deal on Substack is this is your thing. You own the content, you own your relationship with your audience. You have complete editorial freedom. Of course, the flip side of that is if you go and do something illegal or libel someone, you're the one that's on the hook. We can't and won't review everything you publish to make sure that it's not libelous. But then the downside is that if you libel someone, that's on you Also the sort of standard DMCA safe harbor, yada, yada, yada. We have the whole process that everybody has for that. Much more interesting to that to me is there is still a lot of much more common than actual libel is people threatening independent journalists with bogus lawsuits and trying to intimidate them into not publishing. Things Happens all the time.
Speaker 1:And if you work for the New York Times, you have this huge legal apparatus behind you to back you up.
Speaker 2:You have this huge legal apparatus. We've had a program for a while called Substack Defender that helps with this, where we're helping connect people with legal advice to help with this situation where somebody is getting intimidated for something totally bogus. You get a local journalist covering a local politician or business person and they don't like it, and they get a lawyer to write a thing on threatening legal letterhead. That's totally baseless but is very scary to the person getting it. We want to make sure that people have access to good legal counsel in those circumstances so that, in general, if you are thinking about intimidating an independent journalist, whether they're on Substack or not, there's a force pushing back on that. The flip side of editorial freedom is you also are responsible for what you publish.
Speaker 1:I assume there's a lot of copyright stuff where someone puts a picture of a movie or whatever. Then someone says oh, you can't do that, you have to take it down. I'm sure there's a lot of those types of takedown notices that come in all the time, right.
Speaker 2:We respect DMCA notices. So the way this basically works is if you're a copyright holder, you can lodge a complaint that says this is violating my copyright. We have to go to that person and give them a chance to say no, it isn't. If they don't say no, it isn't, then we have to take it down. If they do say no, it isn't, then we can leave it up, and it's up to them. Don't take this word for it, but this is a real thing. Everyone has to do it.
Speaker 1:You're in the US jurisdiction but you have global audience and global writers and I'm sure around the world they have very different content, rules and stuff. How do you deal with each of those things?
Speaker 2:We respect local laws while pushing aggressively for freedom of the press in every way. We can.
Speaker 1:In the US you could write very abhorrent things. You could write pro-Nazi stuff if you want. In the US it's illegal to do that, whereas in France it's illegal to write a pro-Nazi thing. How does that work? If it comes in, do the French people say, okay, well, this is now in France or something and they have their own jurisdiction? Or how does it work on those types of things?
Speaker 2:We respect local laws but push for a robust free press wherever we can.
Speaker 1:I'm sure already there's tons of things that you find personally important that are on Substack and you're like this is absolutely horrible, not just like I don't agree with it, but this is all the way far. How do you personally square that If?
Speaker 2:that weren't true, then we wouldn't actually have this stand in favor of freedom of the press that we have. It wouldn't be free speech. It wouldn't be a free press if it's a free press asterisk unless Chris thinks it's really bad in that case no, I certainly have that. I have things on Substack that I think are terrible. I think basically anybody from any political perspective or walk of life could find something on Substack they think is absolutely beyond the pale, and I just think that's always going to be true. If you're successful at something like this Substack is kind of an index fund of culture, and not just with the things people find crazy I'm always amazed by the variety of niches that are out there, the variety of perspectives, the things that people get into. If it's working well, that's just always going to be the case.
Speaker 1:What are some of your favorite? Super niche-y thing that's out there. Super niche-y thing Because there's some guy who writes about lawnmowers and his love of lawnmowers and super blown up and it's become this very popular, very popular sub stack that people wouldn't know about.
Speaker 2:There's lots of interesting stuff. There's one guy that for a while did reviews of canned fish that a lot of people were reading. I wasn't personally reading that one, but I was surprised. I love canned fish. Are you serious? I think it might be called popping tins dot sub stack. I could be wrong about that.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, I'm writing this down right now. Popping tins, I think that does exist. Oh my gosh, I'm in there. This is like. One of my favorite things to eat is canned fish.
Speaker 2:There you go. I had no idea when else, but Substack I really like. There's one called Experimental History. That's a guy that publishes science, his own rogue science. Basically he's like a renegade psychology researcher, I don't know. There's lots of great stuff. I have recommendations.
Speaker 1:I know tons of people like this. They kind of start to feel overwhelmed with the number of emails and information that comes at them and sometimes they unsubscribe to things, not because they don't like it, just because they're getting too much. And how do you think the future of reading and future of consuming is going to happen If you're in that situation and you feel like you have too much? And how do you think the future of reading and future of consuming is going to happen?
Speaker 2:If you're in that situation and you feel like you have too much, may I recommend the Substack app? It's in the App Store. It's great. I use it. It respects your subscriptions. I think ultimately, at some point, this is just. You only have so many hours in the day. I see Substack's job is to help you spend your time that you spend on Substack in the best way that you can, in the way that you most want to. Having direct relationships with people that you subscribe to can be a big part of that. It can be a good way to curate a slice of your attention. I think you won't always want to subscribe to everything that you like, and that that's okay as well. I think you won't always want to subscribe to everything that you like, and that that's okay as well.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, I think the best thing we can do is just give you more agency in how you spend your time and help you keep up on the things that you actually value, as opposed to just the things that get you to scroll. One more time happened before you existed. It seemed like all the technology was in place. Maybe Stripe wasn't as good back then or something, but it seemed like most of the technology existed before you came around. This has been a problem for a while. Why didn't it happen 10 years before?
Speaker 2:We had this conversation when we were starting the company. It was one of my biggest objections initially when we were talking about doing it. Hey, we're going to make a thing where people can pay for the things they value on the internet and we were kind of like, okay, but if that was going to work, why has somebody not done it yet? We're not inventing email, we're not inventing having an app and taking payments, all this stuff. I think part of the answer is shifting cultural expectations, Both the idea that I actually will pay for something not just it's physically possible to pay for something on the internet, but it's normal and good to pay for something on the internet and sort of this growing dissatisfaction.
Speaker 1:Because by this point, everyone was already paying for Netflix. Everyone was paying for a lot of other stuff Spotify probably already. They already had a decent number of subscriptions for stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're paying for stuff and I think you're getting to the world where you're starting to have that realization that I think lots of people have. That's like hey, I actually have used up all my attention, I'm not looking for things to spend time on anymore. I think if you try to do Substack in 2008 or something, I'm like why would I pay for something when there's all of this free stuff competing for my attention? There's so many more great things to read for free than I ever could. You don't yet realize that you want something better.
Speaker 2:But by the time we started, I think everybody had an infinite array of distraction on tap and was starting to realize that that's actually not how they want to spend their life and spend their attention at least all of it. I love having fun distracting, feeds and stuff. That's great, but if you're spending all your time there, the thing you get hungry for is something better, and so I think that confluence of people being willing to pay and realizing they wanted something better and a lot of pressure on the media in general made the moment for Substack pressure on the media in general made the moment for Substack.
Speaker 1:What are some of the other media-related things that maybe have started in the last 10 or 20 years? What are some of the ones that you admire, that you look to or you've borrowed from, I mean?
Speaker 2:we borrow pretty heavily from all of the big social products. The thing that's different about Substack is the business model and the social contract. We're not innovating on how to render an article or send an article in email, or have an app that has a feed in it or show video and podcasts. All of the mechanics of Substack, I would say, are inspired heavily by the things that have worked across a variety of great products. I find YouTube pretty interesting, inspiring. I think. Of the major networks at scale, youtube is the closest to what I think a great network looks like, in part because it actually does share money with the people that make stuff on YouTube.
Speaker 1:In that case, it's sharing the ad revenue or a piece of the YouTube subscription fee or something like that.
Speaker 2:A piece of the YouTube subscription revenue. It's not all the way to sub-stack, but the fact that they're even sharing the money is a big deal, I think.
Speaker 1:I assume Spotify is similar, where they're sharing 70% of the dollars or something.
Speaker 2:Yes, Although I think even more so than on YouTube. For most musicians, that actually doesn't wind up being that lucrative.
Speaker 1:It has to go through the label and it goes through. Like 20 people get their slice.
Speaker 2:There's not that many people that are making tons of money from Spotify. I think is the reality, but in theory it's a good idea.
Speaker 1:There's different creator economies out there. Some are like gray or there's like the only fan stuff which is people subscribe to, and then they have like upsell motions. Have you ever thought of barring from these other things? And oh, maybe a writer now can engage with you one on one or consult with you, get on the phone with you, or there might be other ways they could engage with their fans.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I actually think only fans is very analogous to Substack, except obviously the content. It is a similar structure of a network, for sure.
Speaker 1:One of the first things you notice when you go to Substack is just the lack of advertisements. It hits you in the face. Was that always the goal to have like an ad-free product? Because I can see there's like an allure. I imagine almost every year in the management team you're having this debate Should we put some ads on, or something like that.
Speaker 2:Like I said before, we think of Substack as an economic engine for culture. The business model is kind of at the core of what we do. The thing about that that really matters is that the creators have a lot of power, they're in control, they have a direct relationship with the subscribers and you're rewarding value rather than just time, where, if you go to Facebook, your attention gets harvested and then sold off as a commodity, almost regardless of what else you're sort of looking at or doing On Substack. You subscribe to something because you deeply value it. You can sort of like reward value and quality. There's a magnitude associated with the value of time you spend. I think that's the thing that really matters. I don't think that that means there can never be any kind of advertising that works. In fact, there are people on Substack today we don't have any tools for this but there's people that have successful podcasts on Substack that put advertising and that works pretty well.
Speaker 1:There's people who have ad units even within their newsletter. Not exactly ad units, but they'll say this is sponsored by this.
Speaker 2:And we don't prevent that. And I think there's good ways and bad ways to do that, but I don't prevent that. And I think there's good ways and bad ways to do that. But I don't think it's the case that all advertising is inherently broken. But I do think there's a specific kind that says, hey, we are going to like aggregate attention and sell commodity ads. I think that thing we've always known that we wouldn't do.
Speaker 1:So, like Coca-Cola wants to do all of your entertainment stuff, or something.
Speaker 2:A is undermining the thing that's actually special and different about Substack, and then B, that puts us in the position of trying to out Facebook Facebook or out TikTok, TikTok. That's not a race that we want to run.
Speaker 1:Obviously, everyone has an ad for their own paid membership in the thing. There are some newsletters that I subscribe to and some that don't even have an ability to be a paid membership. There's no paid option. What are they doing? You gotta talk to those guys. Maybe Substack doesn't get as much value out of them. I'm not sure, but-.
Speaker 2:It's worth noting, by the way, that if you use Substack and you're not charging, it's completely free.
Speaker 1:You can have a podcast, you can do video for any size of audience. We charge you nothing for that. In some ways it's great, because then it just brings more people into the community and makes the community better as well. But those people they might not want to charge for some certain reasons, or they might not feel they have anything special enough to charge for, or they don't write frequently enough, so they're only writing once a month, so they're going to put it out there their best thing. Or they make their money from speaking fees or consulting and not from that type of thing. Can you imagine other ways that you could help them engage, where SubSec could add value and monetize those people in some sort of way?
Speaker 2:I definitely think there's more we could do there. I think there are other lonesome experiments with one-on-one meeting stuff. There's definitely more we can do over time. One thing I do feel is that subscriptions are very, very powerful. There's been so many people that I've talked to who don't want to turn on subscriptions or who think it's not going to work or it's a bad idea, and I know because I talked to them and I've sometimes convinced them to try it. And then once they try it, they go on to make just phenomenal amounts of money, and it often very much helps with whatever else they're doing. It makes their consulting business even better or they're doing other things. It adds this tremendous momentum and signal of value to what they're doing, and so I'm much more excited about getting people to do subscriptions than I am about creating a ton of alternatives right now, just because I think that it's still the case that subscriptions are underrated, even by people who they'd be tremendously good for To me.
Speaker 1:The company has almost some of the same DNA as you is Shopify. They almost have like a very similar mission. They're trying to engage people. A lot of those people start just like on Substack as side hustles, where it's like a thing on the side and then they're kind of trying it out and they make a little money and then sometimes actually grows to be like their full-time income over time. Is that something you guys look at? Obviously they're a little further along than you, but in some ways they're very similar ethos.
Speaker 2:I respect Shopify a ton. I think it's a very interesting comparison to Substack. I think there are some key differences. Shopify was able to get very, very big while being only a brand for the merchant side for most of Shopify's life. If you were selling on Shopify, you knew Shopify, but if you were buying from Shopify, you basically didn't.
Speaker 1:Until recently, until, like ShopPay, no one ever even heard of it.
Speaker 2:It's interesting now that this far in they're getting into ShopPay, they're getting into the app. I think they're finally feeling that thing a little bit. My model of how that works is the ultimate upstream for Shopify. For people who were successful was also actually the Facebooks and the big social networks in the world, but those people were advertising customers and so ultimately the distribution for the demand side of the Shopify network, if you can think of it that way, is like these small businesses or businesses are buying ads and promoting themselves on the internet. So you sort of have this way of getting the demand. That fits in correctly with the big networks on the internet, whereas in Substack's case the big networks are kind of, at best, ambivalent about linking out to news and letting people promote stuff to their audiences.
Speaker 1:It fits in less well and I think even Shopify is now in a world where it looks to me like they are building more of a consumer brand, perhaps for this reason Speaking of like linking out to stuff, to me one of the downsides of things of Substack is that it's kind of this difficulty or fight that X has had with you the Substack links don't unfurl. Is there some sort of way of getting all these different social networks to play nice From like a user perspective? It's horrible when I'm on X and I don't see a link or something like that. It's a horrible thing. How do you move that needle a little?
Speaker 2:bit From my perspective. I mean, we look at the traffic that comes from all these platforms and the truth is that, and especially in Twitter and X's case, it's been declining for years, even before Elon bought it. Twitter has become a smaller and smaller share of traffic.
Speaker 1:They probably always tune the algorithm because they don't want people clicking out.
Speaker 2:That's the thing Outside of the spat that we had. There's no reason why these big social networks want you to go click on a link and find something interesting. This is the fundamental difference between Twitter and Substack. If on Twitter you stumble across an article that's amazing and you click in and you go read, you spend 15, 20 minutes deep reading something that you deeply value and it makes your life way better and you think, oh my God, I'm so glad I found that they just lost a ton of money. That's bad for them. Their metrics are tanking. They think, damn, we wasted all this time reading this thing or watching this long video.
Speaker 1:But one of the reasons I used to love Twitter slash X was that discovery used to be this place where I could discover this new interesting article written somewhere Maybe it was like in the FT or something like I wouldn't have normally seen. It was so great. And then, at some point prior to Elon, I think, they tuned the algorithm so that you never see those things anymore. I think you were seeing them so that you never see those things anymore.
Speaker 2:I think you were seeing them because they were unoptimized, they weren't pushing as hard for the algorithm as they could have. I think it actually had the side effect of helping Twitter be what it is, where you sort of have the elite and the media there, as soon as they started to really push the algorithm. I think this is true of all links it's not just Substack, it's a thing that's really suffering across the internet.
Speaker 1:But it's still weird to me that one of three sites that don't unfurl is Substack. New York Times still unfurls. It's not like Elon Musk likes New York Times that much either. Is there a way of just being like, hey, let's all work together, we should rank all the same, or something? Listen, I would love that. I'd be so happy. Okay, well, when Elon listens to this hopefully he will. I'm sure he's avidly listening right now. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there's been a lot of takes on chat, gpt and what it'll do for bloggers and writers, and it's going to summarize everything when it first came out November 2022, what were your first thoughts on it?
Speaker 2:The moment I had these thoughts was when GBD3 came out, which I think was 2020. I know this because I have a newsletter that I write to my family. That's like pictures of my kids, and I wrote them a thing that was like guys, ai is going to happen. It's going to be a huge deal. Like guys, ai is going to happen. It's going to be a huge deal. I'm a huge believer.
Speaker 2:I think it's going to upset and remake a lot of human creativity on the internet, and there is a good version of that that we can strive for, where all of these amazing tools and capabilities that we're inventing get used to give people creative leverage. So, if you're somebody that has something to say, something to make, something you're trying to create, and AI makes that faster, easier, better and means that this thing that you're creating, you can create something that otherwise never would have existed. That this thing that you're creating, you can create something that otherwise never would have existed. I think that can make a tremendous flourishing of culture and I think that's a continuation and acceleration of a trend that's been happening for a long time, where you don't need to have a video studio anymore to make what is essentially a TV show, and everyone has a TV van in their pocket and everyone can type on their computer and send it out to everywhere on the internet instantly, globally.
Speaker 2:The creative leverage of this stuff is the part that I feel like is very exciting, and then I do also think there's going to be a tendency towards slop. That exists, where you have sort of degenerate incentives and people already have this. I get a ton of spam email right now. That's AI is selling me different services. That's the same as the spam I always got, but it's just higher quality. I think of it as accelerating both halves of the substack equation. It both makes it more true that an individual can go by themselves and make something great. We're going to live in a world where one person can write and create from scratch a feature film or a TV show or any kind of media that you can imagine. The leverage that one person is going to be able to have is tremendous, and on the other side, the idea of I'm drowning in crap on the rest of the internet is going to become even more true.
Speaker 1:If you think of that really good writer at the Wall Street Journal or something before AI, they really valued their editor who made their prose much more tighter and better than maybe another editor wrote this great headline they couldn't think of. Then there was someone who created the art and maybe someone else who created the graphic. Maybe there's a video thing of that Today. That writer can do all those things. Increasingly, it seems like there will be more power to writers in general because they could just write the prompts of what they're looking for. I don't know how you see it. It does seem like they're likely going to be the winners, at least the good ones.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so. I think that human perspective but magnified by magical AI tools I'm very bullish on. I don't think that people are going to subscribe to machine takes. I don't think you want to have just a machine that thinks all this stuff. I think there's a limit to how exciting that is.
Speaker 1:Now today, when I write on Substack, I'll write something first in a Google Doc. I'll write something first in like a Google Doc, then I'll copy it into ChatGPT. I'll say, hey, can you edit this inline? Then I'll maybe go back to the Google Doc, change it. Then I'll, like paste it into Substack Maybe, then maybe make some more edits or something, and then send it out. I can imagine a lot of what you're thinking about doing. It's just more creator tools. So I can start in Substack, do all that stuff there, use all the LIMs within it. Is that where we're going?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and as we build this stuff, we often don't even call it AI anymore. It's just sort of like look, these are tools. We have this video feature where, after you do this podcast, you can upload it to Substack and the stuff's moving so fast. It used to be this very high tech thing, but now this is a thing that anybody can do where it's spin, spin, spin. All right, here's 10 clips of the most interesting moments from this, properly captioned and properly set up, cut to the right screen size, and we just kind of want the product to make everything really easy and automatic, to give you the maximum control, and so you can sort of like have the vision. Making that real just gets easier and easier and easier.
Speaker 1:Now you're a writer. How are you using some of these tools to help you be better?
Speaker 2:I'm not sure I'd call myself a writer. My co-founder, hamish, is really the writer of the crew. I'm a wannabe writer. I would say, okay, well then maybe the tools are even more helpful. I don't know. Yeah, maybe they're more helpful. I'm excited about all of it. I love this stuff. I think you can't always predict what's going to happen. There's a lot of stuff that people are excited about. Most of it is not real yet.
Speaker 1:There's just moments where it's different pieces of it will click from being hypothetical to like really working. One of the things I do is I sometimes just say hey, like make this funnier. And by funnier it means make it from like zero funny to at least dad joke funny, or Seinfeldian which one can do that.
Speaker 2:Is that Claude? Who can make it funny?
Speaker 1:They all do it. Openai can do it. It's great. They come up, they can write great jokes, they can change the tone of it, they can do wordplay, they can make puns, they can do wordplay, they can make puns. They can do all these other types of things within your doc and stuff like that. So for someone who I'm not naturally very funny, I really value that. I can imagine within the Substack tool you could potentially say hey, do like this, or translate it to another language. There are probably lots of different ways you could do things in the future. What have you found that works best if a writer's trying to grow their audience, is it just simply write great content? What other advice do you give to people as they're trying to like grow their popularity?
Speaker 2:I do think write great content, make good things, is by far the highest order. A lot of people are looking for growth hacks and some of the people I know that find the most success on Substack are spending the least of their mental energy thinking about that and spending the most of their mental energy thinking how do I make something that's actually awesome? I think once you have something that's actually awesome, it does help to promote it. It does help to make friends with people and interact with people. We have a recommendation system that really really does work and help. If you're collaborating with people, if you're going on each other's podcasts or if you're sharing each other's stuff, that can really help. By far the most important thing is make something great, which is hard enough.
Speaker 1:For people who are just starting out. What's your general advice to them?
Speaker 2:My biggest advice is just start. It's so tempting Whether you're writing, whether you're podcasting, whether you're making video, whatever you're doing, it's so tempting to think I have to have a whole strategy laid out. I have to have 10 things written and three episodes ready to go. I need to have this, this, this. I'll have it all ready. Then I'll do a giant launch. That almost never works. The thing that I see work over and over and over again is I'm just going to start, I'm just going to go, I'm going to do it. I can soft launch and then I can launch again and I can launch paid. Always, my advice is if you're thinking about doing it, just do it, just go. We make it very easy and it's totally free.
Speaker 1:You've also recently started a podcast and I'm a fan and a subscriber. I really like your podcast. Oh, thank you. What's your process for preparing for an interview? I did a lot of preparation for this one. How do you prepare?
Speaker 2:Oh man, you're way ahead of me. Cbsubstackcom, by the way, I'll plug it. Yes, very good. The thing that I've been doing is just finding people that I really want to have a conversation with and asking them all the things that I am personally curious about. I just released an episode with Noah Smith today that does no opinion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's great.
Speaker 2:We talked about AI slop on the internet. He did a post and I was like I'm very curious about this.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you all the things that I really want to know you read a few of his posts first and then you're like, oh, I got like six questions based on what you read, or yeah, and I'm often just very personally curious, I should say.
Speaker 2:I have no idea if this is actually a good strategy. A lot of the reason I'm doing my podcast is because I'm using the tools and I'm figuring it out, and it's like an exercise in dogfooding for me. Like an exercise in dog fooding for me. So I'm learning about filming a podcast and editing and doing all this stuff. I'm just asking people things that I'm curious about. I asked Noah what does he think an economist view of AI is going to happen for culture on the internet? And I also asked him if he believes in God, because I was curious about that too, and I hope that it creates something interesting at the end.
Speaker 1:And do you write down your questions ahead of time, or are you good enough to just come up with them on the flow or something?
Speaker 2:No, I write them down. It's nice for the guests to give them at least a vibe of like hey, here's the things I think we could talk about. That would be interesting. Yeah, so they can prepare, I'll jot down like yeah, here's a set of things. I'm not in super detail, but just here's the stuff I'm curious about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I did the same for you. I sent over a list and obviously you're totally immersed in like the media, the technology. Besides the general trends that Substack is working on, what gives you like the most optimism looking forward in the future.
Speaker 2:I'm very excited about the AI wave in general, and one thing that, in particular, emotionally gets me is self-driving cars. I live in San Francisco and I'm still every time I see a Waymo going by or I hop into one and it goes. I've spent most of my life seeing tremendous technological progress on screens and on the internet and our screens got better and the things that were on the screens got better. But it was easy to feel for a while like the real world had kind of stagnated.
Speaker 2:When I was just in the city I live in, you start to see cars driving themselves around, I just had this feeling like, oh, the future might come after all. And I still, every time I get in one, I giggle to myself a little bit, and it's interesting to me because there was sort of a hype cycle for self-driving cars where everyone got really excited about them. Then everybody got really over them and then they started to work, and so I have this weird experience where I'll be on the internet and somebody will be like, oh, this is a fake trend that never is not real, it's vaporware, like self-driving cars, and I'm like I took one today. It's great, it's awesome, it's incredible.
Speaker 1:The Waymo ones in San Francisco, I think, still have a human assist that looks over it. Maybe I mean they're not in the car, they're not in the car, but I think there's some human assist that's there in case of emergency or something. When I drive my Tesla and this is only in the last three months, it is now at least 90% of my trips capable of. Every once in a while I still have to take it over or something, but it's getting there where I can do like the full trip door to door 20 miles. It's amazing. I'm so excited that this can happen for everybody soon.
Speaker 2:My son is four years old and I him. When I was growing up, they didn't have spinny cars and only people could drive cars, and he was like no, he wouldn't believe me. He'll never know a world without self-driving cars. You guys call the Waymo spinny cars. He calls them spinny cars, which they do kind of look like.
Speaker 1:Hilarious, that's awesome. All right, this is great. We asked all of our guests two questions.
Speaker 2:What is a conspiracy theory that you believe? I don't know if this is completely a conspiracy theory, but it's maybe an unpopular opinion that I think is true, which is that a lot of education is way overvalued. I read Brian Kaplan's the Case Against Education and Fred DeBoer's Cult of Smart and I think the idea that at a society level, most of the investment we make in education is not actually helping people but is part of a signaling race I think is depressing, but there's a lot of truth to it.
Speaker 1:It seems like we reached peak grad school a long time ago. The ROI for going to grad school for most cases is negative today. For law school outside of the top 10 law schools it's probably negative. For business school outside of maybe the top three or four it's probably negative. Colleges still probably are positive for most colleges, but there's probably already a bunch of majors in some colleges that are negative. Are we reaching peak or do you think there's still more legs in the college to go?
Speaker 2:I don't know. It's hard to forecast what will happen. The thing that makes me excited is just good alternatives. The nice thing about good alternatives is you don't have to fix everything. There's like a crack in the dam. I see this in tech. I think if you dropped out or if you didn't go to college and you're good, the amount that that's going to hold you back in tech, I think is a lot lower than it would be in most industries most of the time. I think there's like a real path for that.
Speaker 1:You got to get in there in the first place, which is the hard part.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying it's like, oh, going to Stanford will never help you with anything, but I do think that the reality of there being good alternate paths and I think the reality of you're going to have crazy AI tutors that can do all kinds of things I'm excited to see the green shoots of different ways of doing things.
Speaker 1:What do you think have been the second order effects of our obsessiveness about education over the last 30 years or so?
Speaker 2:I sometimes worry that it's destroyed childhood. I talk to people who are worrying about what preschool to get their kids in. They have to write the right personal parent essay so they get the fancy college track preschool. I talked to someone the other day who knew someone that got homework from preschool. Where we're pushing their kids to do all of these? They're treating childhood in general like this hyper-optimized competition to win a zero-sum tournament. I think there's a huge tragedy to that, above and beyond just the wasted resources and energy. Maybe this is too downer. I think it would be a lot better to let kids be kids more than we do.
Speaker 1:In some ways, there's the flip side, where it's probably bad for kids and it's also probably bad for their parents.
Speaker 2:It's probably bad for the whole system Totally. It's bad for the kids, it's bad for the parents. It's bad for the whole system but for any individual it's hard to break out of.
Speaker 1:It's hard to break out of. Yeah, it's an interesting thing where every kid's on a travel sports team now and so the parent has to travel from San Francisco to New Orleans on some tournament or they're constantly driving three hours, four hours on the weekend somewhere. They can't play with their local friends anymore in baseball.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying it's always bad, but I do think you can take that stuff too far. And if you feel like constantly you have to win childhood, that feels tough to me.
Speaker 1:That conspiracy theory also goes with our classic last question, which is I think this is a perfect answer which is what is a conventional wisdom or advice? That's generally bad advice, and I assume yours is just education.
Speaker 2:Well it might not be. The interesting thing about the signaling theory of education is, even if you buy all that, it might be individually rational to go to college In a world where you still have lots of credentialism. It could be a giant net loss to society to be requiring a degree, credential for things that shouldn't require it and still individually the correct decision to go and get the degree.
Speaker 1:Especially if you went to Stanford or something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, part of how pernicious it can be. I was going to say something more heretical on this podcast, which is I think lots of people are too obsessed with being data-driven and especially when you're making a product, you have a conflict between data and anecdote. I think you should pretty heavily weight anecdote.
Speaker 1:PMs should be more anecdotal rather than data-driven.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying you shouldn't use data. I think you absolutely want to have a story of the world that can get broken when it contradicts the data. But the idea that we look at the data and that tells us what to do versus we have a human story of what's going on. When somebody comes and tells me their human story of using my product, I think that's often a more important signal than what do the metrics say about that thing.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because the disciplines in a company that are the most data-driven is probably sales and the discipline that's almost the least data-driven in a company is probably engineering. It's almost the exact opposite that you one would expect. Going in Sales is so data and process that a sales leader is really just like a big data scientist who's running a funnel and everything, whereas engineering is so much more art to figure it out. I don't know if you agree with me or not on that. Yeah, I think there's a lot of that. The most data people are sometimes the least use it or something. All right, this has been great. Thank you, chris Best, for joining us World Desk. I follow you at CB on Substack. By the way, I use Substack too, oren, on Substack as well. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much.
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