Joe Rogan Experience #1855 - Chris Best

(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music)

What's up, Chris? How are you?

Good.

What's going on? (laughs) Have you done podcasts before?

Uh, nothing like this. I've done a few.

Yeah? Okay, cool. Um, so tell me... First of all, tell me, what was the inspiration to start Substack? Like, how did it, how did it come about?

I've always been an avid reader. Uh, my dad was an English teacher growing up. We had books around the house. And I've always thought that what you read matters. Like, it shapes who you are, it shapes how you think, it creates, like, who you are as a person. And so great writing matters a lot. Right? I'm a- s- I- in my other life I do software. Software's this magical thing where you can run- write a piece of code and it does something for a million people. If you write a great essay, a great book, a great thought, you can change who a million people are. And so great writing is this valuable thing. And when I took s- a sabbatical from a company that I'd done, I was like, "I should be a writer. That would be good. Like, how hard could it be? Um, these guys are doing, doing good things." And I started writing what I thought was gonna be, like, a essay or a blog post or a screed or something, outlining my frustration with the state of the media industry, the state of incentives on the internet. Basically, complaining, uh, "Wah, wah, wah. Social media's breaking our brains." You know, this kind of shit. And I sent it to my friend Hamish, who's really a writer, and he told me, like, "Anybody can complain about this stuff. You're not as original as you think. All of my friends who are writers know all of this stuff. The more interesting question is, if all of this is true, what could you do about it?" And that bec- that turned into Substack.

And what year was this?

2017.

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

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

Tissue rejected?

Like, uh, it's an, uh, an analogy. Like, they're getting... Like, an organ transplant that fails-

Oh. Oh.

... kind of thing. They're getting sort of pushed out from the, the places that would have been their home and where they could have done the thing that, that mattered f- to them before.