Substack CEO Chris Best - Building a New Engine for Culture

“I think the root of the shortness is attention. My model of this is there used to be a period... You could get bored. You could have like 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 absolutely can't."

"I think lots of people are too obsessed with being data-driven. And especially when you're making a product and you have a conflict between data and anecdote, I think you should pretty heavily weight anecdote."

Auren Hoffman (00:03.622)

All right, here we go. 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 Daz. Real 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? All these people.

Chris (00:17.678)

Thank you for having me.

Auren Hoffman (00:33.382)

What's the shortest supply right now?

Chris (00:36.142)

I think the root of the short 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 like 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 absolutely can't. There is no shortage of stuff to fill your time. You've got this thing.

Auren Hoffman (00:51.526)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (01:00.774)

We've got this thing all the time with us. Yeah.

Chris (01:03.95)

And so 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.

Auren Hoffman (01:17.382)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (01:24.038)

Okay, yeah, I think that makes perfect sense. Now, when you started Substack, Substack originally was like 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. Like, what does it mean to be like a challenger voice when you're larger than most of the legacy media?

Chris (01:48.846)

never really thought that the legacy media is sort of the reference class. You know, 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. Right. 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.

Auren Hoffman (01:52.838)

Okay.

Chris (02:14.83)

over three 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.

Auren Hoffman (02:25.638)

Yeah. Okay. So it's more like you're comparing yourself to some of these like very, very, very large aggregators.

And in some ways you've been part of this like broader decentralization theme in media. YouTube's part of that as well, right? Where we're kind of like moving away from like the gatekeepers and editors toward, you know, potentially narrow verticals, different niches. Like where do you see both like the possible overall like big upsides there and some of the possible downsides of that trend?

Chris (03:01.87)

I think you're always gonna have gatekeepers one way or another, right? There's more things on the internet than you can ever read. There's gonna be some process, you know, ever watch, ever pay attention to. There's gonna 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

Auren Hoffman (03:05.542)

Yeah.

Chris (03:31.982)

you know, 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 kind of like the TikTok, like hit me again motion, where you're sort of, 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. I think of that as like the drug future.

You're basically wire heading. You're using media like a drug. It's using it for your, it's effect on you. You're kind of addicted to it. You know, maybe you, after scrolling for a while, you think, God, what am I doing with my life? I certainly have this experience. And then I, I, I want us at Substack to be part of what I think of as the culture future where the gatekeepers are people, right? On Substack, I still choose who to trust, who to spend my time with.

Auren Hoffman (04:15.11)

Yep.

Chris (04:29.39)

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, who you're choosing to help curate, you know, your, your digital life.

Auren Hoffman (04:53.062)

Now, recently, or I don't know how recently, but 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, there's going to, like, if you follow enough people, you're going to have, there's some sort of like AI editing in there as well, right?

Chris (05:15.31)

Yeah, yeah, there's definitely, there's always this question of like, what are you servicing? How are you helping people find the things they care about? My take on this is the, the existence of a feed is not necessarily bad, right? 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?

Auren Hoffman (05:41.702)

Right, if the objective is to stay on it as long as possible, then okay, it's a little different, yeah. Yeah.

Chris (05:46.702)

then it's gonna be good for that, right? And if, do you want to play a game where the algorithm is working almost against you to get you to kind of like spend the maximum amount, like 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 wanna be.

Auren Hoffman (06:02.277)

Yep.

Yeah. Okay. So in some ways you're what you're trying to get me to discover some sort of very interesting, you know, at least one new, interesting piece of content in some way, and then me to engage with that content in a meaningful way.

Chris (06:19.662)

Yeah, I mean, Substack makes money when you subscribe, when you find something that you love enough that you choose to pay for it. That's not a perfect system. It doesn't, it's not the case that magically by subscribing and paying directly to someone, you know, 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.

Auren Hoffman (06:25.734)

Yep.

Chris (06:45.838)

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, 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.

Auren Hoffman (07:18.47)

This is like on the subscription side. I have a friend who's got a kind of well -known substack. And they mentioned that when they have like very red meat things that they write about politically, they get a lot of extra subscribers. And when they have like 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 are always, they have this tension in them to, you know, to go one way or the other. Like, how do you think this kind of evolves over time?

Chris (08:08.589)

Ultimately, wanting to serve an audience something that they value is a pretty good incentive structure. It's not perfect. And I think it's actually not. I mean, I think in any system, you can have the potential for audience capture where you sort of, you know, you kind of like over -optimize for whatever the thing is that's sort of currently working for you. I think that's actually not as severe in a subscription.

Auren Hoffman (08:17.062)

Yep.

Chris (08:35.534)

paid subscription universe as it can be and kind of like a, you know, on YouTube or something where you sort of really get that like, you know, second by second hit of like, this is where everybody, 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 XYZ.

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 gonna help you grow and get subscribers? Yeah, that does happen.

Auren Hoffman (09:19.942)

Now, kind of like one of the things you've made a very conscious decision to be much more full throated, full speech advocate. And, you know, traditionally you'll have, let's say, you know, liberal media sensor things that are make conservatives look good or conservative media sensor things that make liberals look good or, and you've kind of really said, okay, we're not even, we're not, we're not going to sensor anything. We're really going to push this through.

More than how you arrived at decision, like how's it going? Like I imagine there's been like internal wars or what are some of like the tough ethical decisions you've had to make around that?

Chris (09:58.03)

You know, we set out when we started Substack to build, we think of it as a new economic engine for culture. We're like, Hey, we want to make a place that can, that can be, you know, 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 that where they have editorial freedom. We always saw freedom of the press as just fundamental to that mission and frankly fundamental to.

like a free society. And it's been tough. Like 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. You get, you know, people writing critical. I think the New York Times once did a piece that said, is the sub stack economy bad for democracy? And you get, you got stuff like this. It's going phenomenally well, I would say. It really, really works. And I think the overall mood in the world is shifting. You know, we took

Auren Hoffman (10:48.038)

Yeah, great.

Chris (10:55.534)

It 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. It means that, you know,

Auren Hoffman (10:58.726)

Yeah.

Chris (11:25.23)

And I also think it just works. It's more interesting. 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.

Auren Hoffman (11:41.83)

So let's say someone is like suing someone for libel or something, or they're trying to do a take down. Like, do they sue the writer to take it down or do they sue Substack to take it down? Like, how does it work?

Chris (11:57.294)

So you, the, you know, 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, like you're the one that's on the hook. So, so we don't, we, 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, that's on you.

Auren Hoffman (12:00.422)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (12:11.942)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (12:18.118)

Yeah.

Chris (12:23.662)

much more common. And there's also, you know, this sort of standard DMCA, safe harbor, yada, yada, yada. We have that 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, threatening independent journalists with bogus lawsuits and trying to kind of like intimidate them into not publishing things happens all the time.

Auren Hoffman (12:46.374)

Yeah, that happens all the time. Yeah. And if you work for the New York Times, you have this huge legal apparatus behind you to back you up.

Chris (12:53.39)

you have this huge legal apparatus. So, I mean, we've had a program for a while called Substack Defender that helps with this, where we're sort of like helping connect people with legal advice, mostly to help with the situation where somebody's getting intimidated for something totally bogus. You get like 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, you know.

baseless, but is very scary to the person getting it. You know, 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 SubZek or not, there's sort of like a force pushing back on that. But ultimately, yeah, the flip side of editorial freedom is you also are responsible for what you publish.

Auren Hoffman (13:46.47)

There's, I assume there's a lot of like copyright stuff where, you know, someone puts a picture of a movie or, you know, whatever. And then someone says, you can't do that. You have to take it down. Or I'm sure there's a lot of those types of take down notices that come in all the time. Right.

Chris (14:01.838)

Yeah, 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 basically how the DMCA process works. There's not as much of this as you might expect, but it is a real thing that everyone has to deal with.

Auren Hoffman (14:04.038)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (14:20.55)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (14:28.23)

And then obviously like, I mean, you're in the US jurisdiction, but you're a global audience and global writers. And I'm sure around the world, they have very different content rules and stuff. Like how do you deal with each of those things?

Chris (14:45.838)

You know, we respect local laws while pushing aggressively for freedom of the press in every way we can.

Auren Hoffman (14:53.446)

Okay. Cause like in, in the U S you could write very important things. If you, you could, you could write pro Nazi stuff if you want in the U S it's illegal to do that. Whereas in France, like it's illegal to write a pro Nazi thing. and so like, how does that work if it comes in or like, do you, like, do you say, 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?

Chris (15:22.062)

I mean, listen, in general, we respect local laws, but push for a robust free press wherever we can.

Auren Hoffman (15:25.734)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (15:29.702)

Okay. and, and speed up that cause like, at some point, like I'm sure already there's tons of things that are like, you find personally important that are on sub stack and you're like, this, this is absolutely horrible. not just like, I don't agree with it, but like, this is like all the way far to, like, how do you personally square that?

Chris (15:52.654)

I feel like if 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. And 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

Auren Hoffman (16:00.678)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (16:08.102)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris (16:21.71)

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. There's a, there's like a, and not just with the things that are, you know, people find crazy, but it's just like, I'm always amazed by the variety of niches that are out there, the variety of perspectives, the things that people get into. I think it's, if it's working well, that's just always going to be the case.

Auren Hoffman (16:47.462)

What are some of your favorite super niche -y thing that's out there?

Chris (16:54.35)

Super niche -y thing?

Auren Hoffman (16:56.006)

Yeah, like is there like some guy who like writes about like lawnmowers and his love of lawnmowers and it's just like it's still super blown up and it's become like this very popular substack that people wouldn't know about or

Chris (17:07.79)

man, 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 it was.

Auren Hoffman (17:15.494)

my God, I love canned fish. Are you serious?

Chris (17:19.534)

I think it might be called popping tins .subsect. I could be wrong about that, but I think that does exist.

Auren Hoffman (17:22.15)

my God, I'm writing this down right now. Popping tins. my gosh. I'm in there. This is like one of my favorite things to eat is canned fish. Okay. I had no idea. Okay. This is great.

Chris (17:29.166)

There you go. Well, where else but Substack? You know, I really like, there's one called experimental history. That's a guy that does sort of like publishes science, his own sort of rogue science, basically. Just sort of like a, he's like a renegade psychologist kind of, not a renegade, a renegade psychology researcher, I should say. I don't know, there's lots of great stuff. I have tons of, I have recommendations.

Auren Hoffman (17:53.03)

Okay.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've found a ton of, a ton of things. What, how do you like, at some point people like, and I, I know tons of people like this, they kind of start to feel overwhelmed with the number of emails and you know, information that comes at them. And sometimes they even like unsubscribe to things, not cause they don't like it just cause they feel bad. They're just like, they're getting too much. And like,

How do you think the future of reading and future of consuming is going to happen?

Chris (18:28.558)

Well, 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 a very good, you know, it respects your subscriptions. I think ultimately at some point, this is just, you only have so many hours in the day, right? I think I see Substack's job is to help you spend your time that you spend on Substack.

Auren Hoffman (18:33.446)

Yes, yeah, it's great. I use it.

Auren Hoffman (18:43.622)

Yeah.

Chris (18:55.854)

in the best way that you can in the way that you most want to. And I think having direct relationships with people that you subscribe to is going to be a big part of that. It can be a good way to like 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. 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

you know, get you to scroll one more time.

Auren Hoffman (19:28.806)

Why didn't Substack happen before you existed? Like 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. Like why, why didn't it happen 10 years before?

Chris (19:48.27)

You know, 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, it was like, 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, wouldn't, why has somebody not done it yet? Like we're not, you know, 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.

Auren Hoffman (19:55.046)

Huh.

Auren Hoffman (20:05.446)

Yeah.

Chris (20:16.494)

shifting cultural expectations. I think 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.

Auren Hoffman (20:28.486)

Yep. Cause by this point, like everyone's already paying for Netflix. Everyone's paying for a lot of other stuff. Spotify probably already, right? So they're already, they already had like a decent number of subscriptions for stuff.

Chris (20:33.87)

Yeah.

Chris (20:39.022)

Yeah, 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, I'm not looking for things to spend time on anymore that, and I think if you try to do sub stack and like, you know, 2008 or something, people would like, I'm like, why would I pay for something when there's all of this free stuff competing for my attention? And there's all, there's so many.

Auren Hoffman (20:54.822)

Yep. You're trying to up your quality, right?

Auren Hoffman (21:06.182)

Yeah.

Chris (21:08.43)

more great things to read for free than I ever could. So there's sort of like, you don't yet realize that you want something better. 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 like people being willing to pay,

Auren Hoffman (21:29.99)

Yeah, yeah.

Chris (21:37.486)

and realizing they wanted something better. And just a lot of sort of pressure on the media in general made the moment for Substack.

Auren Hoffman (21:48.294)

What are some of the other kind of like media related things that, you know, maybe have started in the last 10 or 20 years? What are some of those that you admire that you look to or you've borrowed from or?

Chris (22:05.582)

I mean, we borrow pretty heavily from all of the big social products. Like I think you look at Substack, the thing that's different about Substack is the business model and the social contract. It's not, you know, 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. Like kind of all of the, the mechanics of Substack I would say are, you know,

Auren Hoffman (22:09.862)

Yeah.

Chris (22:32.398)

inspired heavily by the things that have worked across a variety of great products. I find YouTube pretty interesting, inspiring. Like 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 make stuff on YouTube.

Auren Hoffman (22:52.326)

Yep. Yeah. And that in that case, it's sharing like the ad revenue or a piece of like the, the YouTube subscription fee or something like that. Yeah.

Chris (22:57.934)

a piece of the YouTube description revenue. It's not all the way to Substack, but the fact that they're even sharing the money is a big deal, I think.

Auren Hoffman (23:06.054)

I assume Spotify is similar where they're sharing 70 % of the dollars or something, right? And it's a little bit different.

Chris (23:10.99)

Yes, although I think, but I think it even more so than on YouTube. For most musicians, that's actually doesn't wind up being that lucrative.

Auren Hoffman (23:18.694)

because it has to go through the label and it goes through like 20, 20 people get their slice.

Chris (23:22.03)

There's just a whole, there's a whole, yeah, it's, 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.

Auren Hoffman (23:29.062)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, that's a good, like, I mean, there's these like, there's these, you know, creator, there's different creator economies out there. I mean, some are like more like gray or area like, like, there's like the only fan stuff, which is like, you know, people subscribe to and then they have like upsell motions, like, have you ever thought of like, barring from these other kind of things and, maybe a writer now can

engage with you one -on -one or consult with you or get on the phone with you or yeah I there might be other ways they could engage with their fans.

Chris (24:06.83)

Yeah, yeah, I actually think OnlyFans is very analogous to Substack, except obviously the content. But there's a lot that's, it is a similar structure of a network for sure.

Auren Hoffman (24:13.03)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (24:19.11)

Yeah, interesting. The one of the first things you notice when you go to a sub stack is just the lack of advertisements. It's kind of like the first. It's so it's almost like hit you in the face. Was that always the goal to have like an ad free product? Because I could see there's like an allure. I have probably every I imagine almost like every year in the management team, you're having this debate like, should we put some ads on or something like that?

Chris (24:50.254)

Well, like I said before, we really start with the, you know, we think of Substack as an economic engine for culture. And so we think of the business model. Sorry, I don't know if you can hear the sirens in the background here.

Auren Hoffman (24:57.83)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (25:03.558)

No problem.

Chris (25:06.99)

Substance is an economic engine for culture. And so the business model is kind of at the core of what we do. And 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.

Auren Hoffman (25:27.942)

Yep.

Chris (25:29.134)

So where if you go to Facebook, your attention gets harvested and then kind of like 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 and then that you can sort of like reward value and quality. There's sort of like a, 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. Like, in fact, there are people on Substack today. We don't, we don't have any tools for this, but there's people that have like successful podcasts on Substack that put advertising and that works pretty well. And I don't think it actually necessarily.

Auren Hoffman (26:07.814)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (26:14.022)

There's people who have ad units even within their newsletter, right? They're not exactly ad units, but they'll say this is sponsored by this or, you know, this is this for this.

Chris (26:18.51)

Yeah, and I think

Chris (26:23.086)

Yeah, like we don't, and we 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, you know, it's not that all advertising is inherently broken, but I do think there's a specific kind that says, Hey, we are kind of going to like aggregate attention and sell commodity ads. I think that thing we've always known that we wouldn't do.

Auren Hoffman (26:46.086)

So like Coca -Cola wants to do all of your entertainment stuff or something.

Chris (26:49.954)

Yeah. And because you're just like, A, you're, it is undermining the thing that's actually special and different about Substack. And then B, you know, that puts us in the position of trying to out Facebook, Facebook or out TikTok, TikTok. And that's just not, that's not a race that we want to run.

Auren Hoffman (27:02.342)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (27:06.822)

Yeah, because I mean, obviously everyone has an ad for their own paid membership in the thing, right? Right. But you could see us. I mean, there are. There are some newsletters that I subscribe to and so don't even have an ability to be a paid membership. There's no paid option. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but there are, there are, but they, they get a lot of value out of maybe subject doesn't get as much value out of them. I'm not sure, but maybe they do because they're.

Chris (27:11.79)

Definitely.

Chris (27:22.862)

What are they doing? What are they doing? You gotta talk to those guys.

Chris (27:31.598)

Yeah. And it's worth noting by the way, that if you use Substack and you're not charging, it's completely free. You can host a newsletter, you can publish to your website, you can have a podcast, you can do video for any size of audience. We charge you nothing for that.

Auren Hoffman (27:37.094)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (27:46.15)

Yeah. Yeah. But in some ways it's great because then it just like brings more people into the community and makes the community better, as well. But those people like are probably, they might, they might not want to charge for some certain reasons, or they might not feel they have anything special enough to charge for, or, you know, or they don't write frequently enough. So they're only writing once a month. So they're going to put it out there. The best thing.

out to people or they make their money from like speaking fees and not for consulting and not from that type of thing. Can you imagine other ways that you could help them engage where like subset could add value and monetize those people in some sort of way.

Chris (28:28.654)

Yeah, I definitely, I definitely think there's more we could do there. I think there are other, you know, we've run some experiments with sort of like 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. Once people, 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 like sometimes convinced them to try it.

Auren Hoffman (28:46.182)

Yeah.

Chris (28:59.182)

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 more, even better, or they're doing other things. It kind of like, 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 that I'm 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

Auren Hoffman (29:09.094)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (29:20.966)

Yeah.

Chris (29:28.654)

they'd be tremendously good for.

Auren Hoffman (29:30.886)

What, what to me, the company it's like almost the S has almost some of the same DNA. as, as, as, as you is, 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 a 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 it actually grows to be like their full -time income over time.

Do you, 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.

Chris (30:08.398)

Yeah, I respect Shopify a ton. I think it's a very interesting comparison to Substack. I think there are some key differences. Like Shopify was able to get very, very big while being only a brand for sort of the merchant side. Like for most of Shopify's life, you know, if you were selling on Shopify, you knew Shopify, but if you were buying from Shopify, you basically didn't.

Auren Hoffman (30:25.35)

Yeah, that's right.

Auren Hoffman (30:31.238)

That's right. And people didn't even until recently until like shop paid. No one ever even heard of it.

Chris (30:35.726)

And it's interesting now that this far in, they're getting into shop, Hey, they're getting into the app. They're getting into, I think they're finally feeling that thing a little bit. But my model, my model of how that works is the ultimate upstream for Shopify for people who were successful was also actually, you know, the Facebook's and the, the big social networks in the world, but those people were advertising customers. And so ultimately the like distribution for the

Auren Hoffman (30:56.358)

Yeah, that's right.

Chris (31:03.918)

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 them 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

you know, giving people, letting people promote stuff to their audiences. It's sort of, 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.

Auren Hoffman (31:48.39)

Speaking of like, like leaning out to stuff, like to me, one of the downsides of things like, like of Substack is that like, you know, that it is kind of this difficulty or, or, I don't know, fight that, that X has had with you, where like the shop, where the, the Substack links don't unfurl and stuff like that. like, is there some sort of way of like, you know, getting all these different

social networks to play nice with, with like, from like a user perspective, it's horrible when I'm on X and like, I, I don't see a link or something like that. Like it's a horrible thing. Like how do you, how do you move that needle a little bit?

Chris (32:33.134)

I would love it if there were. From my perspective, I mean, we look at the traffic that comes from all these platforms. And the truth is that it's been, and especially in X's Twitter, in X's case, it's been declining for years. Even before Elon bought it, Twitter has become a smaller and smaller share of where traffic, especially traffic.

Auren Hoffman (32:34.95)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (32:48.262)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (32:52.422)

But it's also probably, they probably always tune the algorithm to like lower and lower because they don't want people clicking out, right?

Chris (32:59.278)

That's the thing, right? It doesn't get 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, 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.

Auren Hoffman (33:32.55)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (33:38.854)

One of the reasons I used to love Twitter slash X was that discovery used to be this kind of place where I could discover this like new interesting article written somewhere. Maybe it was like in the FT or something like I wouldn't have normally seen someone sharing it. It was so great. And then at some point, even like prior to Elon, I think they like tuned the algorithm so that you never see those things anymore.

Chris (34:03.022)

I think you were seeing them because they were unoptimized and 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, right? Where you sort of have the, you know, sort of the elite and the media there. But yeah, as soon as they start to really push the algorithm, even if they, and I think this is true of all links, it's not just Substack, it's a thing that's really suffering kind of across the internet.

Auren Hoffman (34:05.894)

Yes.

Auren Hoffman (34:30.342)

But it's still weird to me that like one of like three sites that don't unfurl is the substack. Like New York Times don't unfurl. It's like, you know, it's not like Elon Musk likes New York Times that much either. Like, is there a way of just being like, hey, like, let's all, you know, work together. We should rank all the same or something. Yeah, yeah. OK, well, when Elon listens to this, hopefully, well, well.

Chris (34:52.462)

Listen, I would love that. I'd be so happy.

Chris (34:58.67)

I'm sure he's avidly listening right now.

Auren Hoffman (35:01.062)

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Now, like, there's been a lot of takes on like chat GPT and what it'll do for bloggers and writers and, you know, where it's going to summarize everything. Like when it first kind of came out, like November, 2022, like what were your first thoughts on it?

Chris (35:24.238)

I had this, the moment I had these thoughts was when GPT -3 came out, which I think it was 2020. And I was sort of, that was that, I actually, I know this because I have a newsletter that I write to my, just like 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. I'm a huge believer. I think it's, it's going to upset and remake

Auren Hoffman (35:30.598)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (35:39.75)

Ha!

Chris (35:54.83)

a lot of human creativity on the internet. And I think there's basically, 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. I think that can make a tremendous flourishing of culture. And I think that's just 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, like the creative leverage of this stuff is the part that I feel like is very exciting. And then I do also think there's gonna be a tendency towards slop that exists where you have sort of degenerate incentives. You get kind of just like, and people already have this, like I get a ton of spam email right now that's like AI's selling me different services. That's the same as the spam I always got, but it's just higher quality.

Auren Hoffman (37:19.974)

Yeah, random content. Yeah.

Chris (37:23.662)

So I think it'll kind of, I think of it as accelerating sort of both halves of the sub stack 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, you know, a TV show or any kind of media that you can imagine the leverage that one person's going to be able to have is tremendous. And on the other side, the idea of there's

Auren Hoffman (37:40.902)

Yeah.

Chris (37:50.158)

I'm drowning in crap on the rest of the internet is going to become even more true.

Auren Hoffman (37:54.246)

Yeah. If we think of like that, like really good writer at the wall street journal or something like, you know, before AI, okay, well they really valued their editor who like made their, made their pros much more tighter and better than that. Maybe another editor where it looked this great headline they couldn't think of. Then there was someone who created the art for their, you know, and maybe someone else who created the graphic. Maybe there was like a video thing of that, like

today that writer can do all those things and increasingly. And so it seems like there will be more power to writers in general because they could just write the props of what they're looking for. I don't know how you see it. Like it does seem like they're likely gonna be the winners, at least the good ones.

Chris (38:45.198)

Yeah, I think so. I think that, you know, that human perspective, but magnified by magical AI tools, I'm very bullish on. I don't think that people are gonna like, you know, subscribe to machine takes necessarily. Like, I don't think you wanna, I don't think you wanna have like, this thing is just a total, you know, it's just a machine that thinks all this stuff. I think there's a limit to how exciting that is. But I think...

Auren Hoffman (39:02.374)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (39:12.902)

No, today, when I write on sub stack, I'll like, I'll write something first in like a Google doc. Then I'll copy it into like, you know, or some, maybe I'll use bar, but often I'll copy it until I chat GPT or something. I'll say, Hey, can you edit this in line? Then I'll maybe go back to the Google doc. I'll like change it. Then I'll like paste it into subs tech. Maybe then maybe make some more edits or something, and then send it out like

Chris (39:27.182)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (39:39.558)

I can imagine like a lot of what you're thinking about doing. It's just more creator tools. So I can like start in sub stack, do all that stuff there. is it, you know, use all the LMS within it. Is that where we're going?

Chris (39:51.662)

Exactly. 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. You know, we built, we have this video feature where, you know, after you do this podcast, you could 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 sort of like spin, spin, spin. All right. Here's 10 clips of the most interesting moments from this properly captioned and properly set up and kind of like cut to the right screen size.

Auren Hoffman (39:57.606)

Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (40:15.846)

Yeah.

Chris (40:20.814)

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 and making that real just gets easier and easier and easier.

Auren Hoffman (40:34.438)

You're a writer, like how are you using some of these tools to help you be better?

Chris (40:41.422)

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. I sometimes joke that we, yeah, maybe they're more helpful. I'm excited about all of it. I love this stuff. I think a lot of it, 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. And then there's just moments where it's like different pieces of it will click from being sort of hypothetical to like really working.

Auren Hoffman (40:43.142)

Okay.

Auren Hoffman (40:47.654)

Okay, well then maybe the tools are even more helpful. I don't know. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (41:11.654)

I found like one of the things I do is I sometimes just say, Hey, like make this funnier. Like, and by funnier means make it, yeah, from like zero funny to, to at least dad joke funny or Seinfeldian. They all do it. Yeah. I mean, open AI can do it. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. It's great. They come up, they can write great jokes. They can make it in a very, like they can create, they can change the, change the tone of it.

Chris (41:11.726)

And I've.

Chris (41:18.222)

And does it do it?

Chris (41:23.202)

Which one can do that? Is that Claude? Who can make it funny? Really?

I think the first time I've laughed...

Chris (41:36.558)

Interesting.

Auren Hoffman (41:38.342)

they can play around, they can do word play, they can make puns, they can do all these other types of things within your doc and stuff like that. So for someone who like, I'm not naturally very funny. I really value that. within that I can imagine. Like if you like within the subtext tool, you could potentially say, Hey, give me, you know, or do like this, or, you know, I don't know, I guess translated to another language. There's probably lots of different ways you could do things in the future.

Chris (42:09.646)

Very cool.

Auren Hoffman (42:10.694)

What have you found that works best if a writer's trying to grow their audience? Is it just simply write great content? Or is there some other, what other advice do you give to people as they're trying to grow their popularity?

Chris (42:29.134)

Do you 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, you know,

Auren Hoffman (42:33.574)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (42:50.662)

Yep.

Chris (42:56.462)

make friends with people and interact with people and have, you know, 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 kind of like sharing each other's stuff, that can really help. But definitely the, by far the most important thing is make something great, which is hard enough.

Auren Hoffman (43:01.83)

Yeah, that drives a lot of stuff, right?

Auren Hoffman (43:10.054)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (43:15.782)

And for people who are like just starting out, like what's your general advice to them?

Chris (43:20.742)

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, and 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.

Auren Hoffman (43:23.75)

Just write something. Yeah.

Chris (43:49.646)

I can soft launch and then I can launch again and I can launch paid. So my, 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.

Auren Hoffman (43:58.246)

Now you've also recently started a podcast and I'm a fan and a subscriber. I really like your podcast. What's your process for preparing for an interview? I did a lot of preparation for this one. Like, how do you prepare?

Chris (44:02.766)

Thank you.

Chris (44:09.742)

You

man, you're way ahead of me. CB .substack .com by the way, I'll plug it. I'm not sure I'm, 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 has no opinion. And I just, we talked about like AI.

Auren Hoffman (44:16.966)

Yes, yes, yes. Very good. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (44:37.478)

Yeah, yeah, he's great.

Chris (44:40.206)

slop on the internet and I was just like, you did a post and I was like, I'm very curious about this. Let me ask you that all the things that I really want to know. I don't know if that's.

Auren Hoffman (44:48.486)

So you read a few of his posts first and then you're like, I got like six questions based on what you read or?

Chris (44:55.406)

Yeah. And I'm often just very personally curious about people. I should say, 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 sort of like a, like an exercise in dog fooding for me. So I'm learning about filming a podcast and editing and doing all the stuff. but yeah, I'm just, I'm just asking things, people things that I'm curious about. I'll ask Noah, you know, 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.

Auren Hoffman (45:01.03)

Yeah.

Chris (45:24.878)

because I was curious about that too. And I hope that it creates something interesting at the end.

Auren Hoffman (45:29.638)

And do you, do you like write down your questions ahead of time or do you, like, or do you like, are you like good enough to just like come up with them on the flow or something?

Chris (45:38.99)

No, I write them down. I feel like 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. So I'll jot down like, yeah, here's kind of like a set of things. I'm not in like super detail, but I'm kind of like, just here's the stuff I'm curious about.

Auren Hoffman (45:50.182)

Yeah, yeah, so they can prepare.

Auren Hoffman (45:59.686)

Yeah, I did the same for you. I sent over a list and stuff like that. Obviously you're totally immersed in the media, the technology. What do you, besides for just the general trends that Substack is working on, what gives you the most optimism looking forward in the future?

Chris (46:03.182)

Totally.

Chris (46:25.39)

I'm very excited about the AI wave in general. And one thing that in particular just emotionally gets me is self -driving cars. I sort of had this feeling, you know, 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, you know, I've kind of spent most of my life seeing tremendous technological progress on screens.

Auren Hoffman (46:44.23)

Yeah.

Chris (46:53.87)

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 that kind of stagnated. And when I was just in the city I live in, you start to see cars driving themselves around. I just had this feeling like, the future might come after all. And I still, every time I get in one, I kind of like.

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 and 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, 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. So I love that.

Auren Hoffman (47:23.334)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (47:36.87)

Yeah.

I mean, the Waymo ones in San Francisco, I think still have like, like a human assist that kind of looks over it and stuff. Yeah, yeah, they're not in the car, but I think there's like some human assist that's like there in case of emergency or something. when, when I like, when I drive my Tesla, like, and this is only in the last three months. it is now like really.

Chris (47:47.758)

Maybe, I mean, they're not in the car.

Chris (47:55.374)

Totally.

Auren Hoffman (48:06.406)

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. And it's amazing. I'm so excited that this can happen for everybody soon.

Chris (48:17.262)

Yeah.

Chris (48:26.062)

My son is four years old and I told him, you know, when I was growing up, they didn't have spinny cars and only people could drive cars. And he was like, no, like wouldn't believe me. He'll never know a world without self -driving cars. He calls them spinny cars, which they do kind of look like.

Auren Hoffman (48:34.31)

You guys call the way most spinning cars hilarious, that's awesome. All right, this is great. We asked all of our guests two questions. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

Chris (48:54.222)

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 think I read Brian Kaplan's The Case Against Education and Fred de Boer'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 kind of like part of a signaling race, I think is

Auren Hoffman (49:00.646)

Okay, this is great.

Auren Hoffman (49:09.67)

Yeah, yeah, he's great.

Chris (49:24.078)

depressing, but there's a lot of truth to it.

Auren Hoffman (49:26.47)

And what like, like at some point we're going to reach or do you think we're going to reach peak college or peak? It seems like we reached peak grad school a long time ago. Right. The ROI for going to grad school is, is, is probably for in 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?

Chris (50:10.414)

I don't know. It's hard to forecast what will happen. The thing that makes me excited is just good alternatives. And the nice thing about good alternatives is you don't have to fix everything. You can kind of just create, there's like a crack in the dam. I see this in tech. Like I think if you didn't do as much, if you dropped out or if you didn't go to college and you're good, the amount of 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. I also think, you know,

Auren Hoffman (50:19.686)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (50:38.406)

Once you get, you got to get in there in the first place, which is the hard part. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris (50:40.782)

You have to get in there. You have to, there's, I'm not saying there's nothing. I'm not saying it's like, you know, 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 sort of green shoots of different ways of doing things.

Auren Hoffman (50:47.398)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (51:04.71)

What do you think have been the second order effects of like our obsessiveness and about education over the last 30 years or so?

Chris (51:13.742)

I sometimes worry that it's destroyed childhood. Like 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 like, you know, fancy college track preschool. And they're, I talked to someone the other day who knew someone that got homework from preschool or were like pushing their kids to do all of these. They're like treating childhood in general.

Auren Hoffman (51:24.486)

Yeah.

Chris (51:42.702)

like this hyper optimized competition to win a zero sum turn some tournament. I think there's a huge tragedy to that above and beyond just sort of like the wasted resources and energy. It's sort of, you know, maybe this is too downer. I think it would be a lot better to let kids be kids more than we do.

Auren Hoffman (52:02.79)

Yeah and in some ways there's like the flip side where it's like probably bad for kids and it's also probably bad for their parents right because they have to spend so much time totally.

Chris (52:14.158)

And it's probably bad for the whole system, right? It's bad for the kids, it's bad for the kids, it's bad for the whole system, but for any individual, it's hard to break out of, exactly.

Auren Hoffman (52:19.686)

But it's hard to break out of cause it's like, they feel like, yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting thing where like every. It's like, it's like every kid's on a travel sports team now. And so the parent has to travel from San Francisco to Norlin's on some tournament into like, and they're constantly driving like three hours, four hours on the weekend somewhere. I'm not.

Chris (52:33.614)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (52:46.982)

You know, they can't play just like they're with their local friends anymore in baseball. Yeah.

Chris (52:50.926)

Yeah, I'm not saying it's always bad, but I do think there's, you can take that stuff too far. And if you feel like you're like constantly, you have to win childhood. That feels tough to me.

Auren Hoffman (53:01.158)

That's bigger. That conspiracy theory also goes with our classic last question, which is, I think this is a perfect answer, which is what is the conventional wisdom or advice that's generally bad advice? And I assume yours is just like, well, it's just it's education. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris (53:14.094)

Well, it might not be. I mean, so the interesting thing about the case against the signaling theory of education is even if you buy all that, it might be individually rational to go to college, right? In a world where you still have lots of credentialism, it could be a giant net loss to society to have 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 is sort of part of.

Auren Hoffman (53:40.518)

Especially if you went to Stanford or something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris (53:42.542)

part of how pernicious it can be. I was gonna say something more heretical on this podcast, which is...

Auren Hoffman (53:47.11)

okay. I want to hear it. Yeah.

Chris (53:52.302)

I don't know what's the way to put this.

Chris (53:58.926)

I think lots of people are too obsessed with being data -driven. And especially when you're making a product and you have a conflict between data and anecdote, I think you should pretty heavily weight anecdote.

Auren Hoffman (54:09.862)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (54:17.254)

And so like PMs should be more anecdotal rather than data driven.

Chris (54:24.142)

Yeah. And I think I'm not saying you shouldn't use data. I think you absolutely want to have, you know, you want to have a story of the world that can get broken when it contradicts the data. But the idea that like we look at the data and that tells us what to do versus we have a human story of what's going on. And when I have a human, 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.

Auren Hoffman (54:26.758)

Of course.

Auren Hoffman (54:51.91)

It's interesting because the disciplines like in a company that are the most data -driven is probably sales and the disciplines almost the least data -driven in a company is probably engineering, right? It's almost the exact opposite that you one would expect going in. Like sales is so data and process that like a sales leader is really just like a big data scientist who's like running a funnel and everything, whereas engineering is so much more art.

Chris (55:07.566)

That's interesting.

Auren Hoffman (55:21.606)

figure it out. I don't know if you agree with me or not on that.

Chris (55:25.614)

Yeah, I think there's a lot of that.

Auren Hoffman (55:27.11)

So it's like the most data people are like the least, sometimes the least use it or something. All right. This has been great. Thank you. Thank you, Chris Best for joining us. I am a, I follow you at CB on Substack. By the way, I use Substack too, Orin on Substack as well. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun.

Chris (55:40.174)

Thank you.

Chris (55:53.102)

Thank you very much.