Substack’s CEO on AI slop, free speech, and taking on YouTube

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I think the kind of work you're doing, I think that deserves to be like a substantial share of culture. I would love to be in a world where we are paying creators, we're helping creators make more than YouTube is helping them make. This week on the show, we've got Chris Best, CEO of Substack, who joined us for a recent Access Live show and launch party in San Francisco. Are you managing up to your boss right now? Can you tell that I'm glazing? I'm going full GPT-4-0 right now. Is it working? We get into Substack's growth, break some news about its AI plans, and get Chris's perspective on where media is headed. To me, slop is not a thing that was made by AI. It was a thing that was made without intention. It's something that you're sort of tricked into consuming that nobody believes in. We also press them on the hardest questions facing the company, from ads to moderation and the charged free speech debate. If you're the subject of kind of bogus defamation claims, we're going to come and kind of like, put a lot of legal weight behind that and make that very costly for the people who are bringing those things. So if Elon sues me, you got me? Yeah. Sick. If you care about the future of media and where the internet is headed, this one is for you. Welcome to Access. We're 33 episodes in with this one today. We launched in September. A lot of the faces down in the atrium are previous guests. And we feel really blessed to be able to do this and have such great guests. Including the star of the show today, Chris Best, the CEO of Substack. He doesn't do a ton of these. Really glad that he agreed to do it. When I was going independent, he and I had a conversation and we were talking through the trade-offs of different platforms and what I was debating. And we got to a point where I was like, okay, I'm going to do Substack, but if I do it, will you please just do an interview with me at some point? And he said yes. So he's a man of his word as well. But yeah, let's welcome Chris. Woo! iPads at the ready. You don't have an iPad, Chris. That's all right. You know, if I knew you were both bad cops, I never would have done this. Well, but we give good cop and then we reel you in. And then we ask the tough questions and you actually answer them. Don't spill the secret, Alex. Shit. Well, we're here to talk about Substack and about you, but, you know, Alex is on Substack. And so I was thinking we could do a quick 360 review. How's Alex's performance? How's Alex's performance on Substack lately? How's the open rate? Oh, you think I'm Alex's boss? Yeah. I'm about to blow your mind. No, no, you are. I've done my research. Alex pays my salary. He can fire me anytime he wants. I'm pretty sure he's my boss. Will you shadow ban him for AI-assisted writing? Is it good or not? I don't know. How many of Alex's subscribers are, like, performative subscribers who don't actually open? Okay, Alex, we're done with this. All right. This is so uncomfortable for me and for Chris. It's all good. I have one more. I have one more funny one. How is it to have one of your main competitors be run by a dude named Tyler Dank? No comment. How could you compete with that? Okay. It's impossible. Okay. But seriously, Chris, I think we're very interested, and everyone here is very interested, in the state of Substack. And I think it's really important. I think we're very interested in the state of Substack. And I think we're very interested in that. I think we're very interested in that. newsletter yeah yeah you know i think there probably is some cap i think what is it it's a lot higher than you would expect maybe this is the thing that i've found and in the world of media in the world of like how people are spending their attention we're like you know we're here and the cap is like here in terms of like the overall audience i think for audio listeners he's making a large gesture with his hands i gotta remember we're a podcast thank you thank you yeah it is interesting to look at the habit for all of the articles and studies about the decline of reading it seems like maybe the form factor just wasn't quite right i mean certainly when you go on a lot of publisher mobile web websites you feel like you're under attack like constantly and maybe that was the problem like you alluded to earlier with the economics of it as well i think that's definitely part of it i mean i used to pitch sub stack this way people would be like why do i need a different place to read long form things and i was like long forms for nerds i would go i would go to anywhere even your former employers i'd be like look at this website how is this and you'd be like attacked by horrible css videos leaping out at you i also think like you know these things the internet like pushes things to the barbell some people are not reading some people are just zooming into tiktoks and like losing their mind and some people are reading more than ever and some people are diving into long form things and deep things and learning things that they never would have been able to before yeah what is working on sub stack is it mostly politics is that the the most engaged content what are the most engaged sectors there are a lot of different categories but i would say the thing that works on sub stack is perspective right if you if you just want to know some facts you can ask claude for that these days and maybe you'll get it right sometimes but if you like the thing that's valuable is like hey i'm trying to figure out what matters i'm trying to figure out what i should pay attention to i'm trying to figure out what i should care about that's why people are coming to your sub stack and that works in politics it works in tech it works in finance it also works in fashion it also works in food it also works in like you know lifestyle and culture and like literary analysis and like a whole bunch of other places you might not expect can you tell us about the reading habits i'm just so curious i remember when i was a reporter back at the verge there was this just cursed technology called chartbeat.com and you could look at how many people clicked on your article but then also how far they made it down the article oh and in all likelihood it was like less than 25 percent and then maybe they read like the kicker at the end did it also tell you who like how you compared to your peers at your employer oh yeah these were little i mean yeah we worked at bi back in the day on the tv there was a tv with and it would move up and down throughout the day yeah yeah i mean what can you tell us about those habits i mean i think one would think that when you are in long form mode you know in ipad mode with one's partner as one is at the end of the day you know maybe you're in a longer session as opposed to like when you're scrolling let's say instagram you see a link in bio like you're not going to do that like maybe when you're in reading mode you read longer i mean what are you seeing with the behavioral trends yeah well i think you know one of the things when we when we shipped our feed we have sort of a short form feed that links out to longer content right so our thing is like hey we've got some things you can check out what's going on it's fun it's fast but we're going to help kind of like help you find something you can actually sink your teeth into that really works and when you when you goal on hey we want to find you something you actually love and value that is still possible and people do still absolutely read the other thing we did that i'm really proud of just referencing the chartbeat thing is of course on substack if you're a publisher you can see all your stats you can see the cause and effect you can see hey i published this how many people saw it how much money did i make who unsubscribed who subscribed but we recently shipped a feature where if you want you can just turn all that off and hide it so you can be in a mode where if you just want to kind of like apply your trade and write your thing just not have to be confronted with the numbers not have to be like so closely tied to the feedback we give you that option as well how the hell is the feed ranked chris because it makes no sense to me it really doesn't like i i see stuff from 2014 in there next to something from yesterday was it good though yeah but then i see the date and i'm like what obsolete irrelevant information yeah how are you guys ranking that thing because it is so deep like mystifying to me i'll tell you what you know we're constantly we're constantly tweaking it and figuring it out the spirit of the thing is the feed is not designed to keep you scrolling the feed is designed to find you something you love how do you algorithmically quantify something i love well herein lies the hard part and you can look at a lot of signals you can look at like hey do i do i sit down and read it right do i read it and do i like it do i go on to do i do i go on to subscribe do i go on to read something else right am i kind of like am i following the down the path of like deeply engaging with something um and the other thing that is one of our ambitions for the feed is you know if you if you write a really great piece wouldn't it be great if people could keep finding it two years later and it's it's hard to get that balance right right like sometimes if you serve something that's from 2014 and it's stale that sucks but you know what some of the things that people wrote in 2014 we keep saying 2014 that's probably too early but maybe it was like 2016 2017 started in 2017 so if it's 24 they could have imported something i guess can you backdate on subs but we do we like we have like a from the archive section we have a from the archive section in the feed because sometimes you've like sometimes something old is still great or sometimes something old is like newly relevant and i kind of think that's cool i think it's great if you have something that can like you know keep keep coming people keep coming back to you because it like has some lasting value i mean i'm interested in how you guys are talking about the company lately and what your focus has been because i think there was a moment if you're studying how substack has been that you were really focused on audience growth the app and there was that tiktok moment where tiktok was briefly banned and the app got a lot of downloads and lately i feel like you guys are talking more about the creators i hear things like we're the platform where if you're a media founder we want you on substack you've got the new podcast with emily sunberg and all those folks esther perel so are you have you shifted the focus of what you guys are are trying to push lately or is that just me i would say that like both of those things are kind of like core missions for us right like the the grand theory of substack is sort of like you know what you read matters the media you consume matters um it's not just the way that you spend your time it kind of shapes how you think it shapes how you see the world shapes who you become and so great writers great podcasters great journalists in our like worldview are heroes right you're the ones shaping the culture you're the ones like deciding what matters and so you know we have this kind of like grandiose idea of creating this intellectual and cultural capital of the internet helping kind of like spark a renaissance and the only thing that saves that from being kind of like pure messianic tech bro bullshit is that you know we're not the heroes of the story in our telling kind of you are are you managing up to your boss right now i am can you tell that i'm glazing i'm going full gpt 40 right now is it working i'm gonna ask you some hard questions in a minute we'll see if it uh if it works i like that turn it on us yeah yeah all right but so here's the like so this is the thing and then you know we want to give you everything you need to like have a fighting chance to like take over the take over the world to matter in the culture and we think that you know we have to build an incredible set of tools and technology and platform and service that kind of like lets you make the thing you believe it and make real money doing it and takes all of the fiddly stuff out of your hands as much as it can and lets you maximally you know use your editorial judgment and we have to build this network that gives you the kind of growth boost that you're getting honestly less and less from everywhere else on the internet there's got to be one place on the internet that actually wants you to discover something deep that actually wants you to make a connection you know not every independent creator can't make that for themselves and they're not always not every platform is hospitable to that and so we we at sub stack see that we have to do both those things i read in a very good newsletter called sources.news that uh what's the url for that again how do you subscribe the uh was it the condé nasce ceo who was saying that they should assume that their publications are going to have zero search traffic that's just insane i mean yeah i don't think about publisher traffic for how many years i mean it was it has been for since the internet started i mean and i don't think about it at all um that's why i wrote 10 articles per day at business insider yeah yeah uh the long tail no it is true you guys are driving traffic and i think that i can see the future in the long tail i think it's going to be faster especially lately i think i'm the thing that i've experienced very viscerally in the last seven months is that when i when i launched i thought most of my income would be subscription and right now it's like maybe five percent so it's vast majority working with brands and what i think is like a tasteful way hopefully but doing um partnerships and running you know like little banners and all that stuff so um that's been my experience obviously people have gone on sub stack and they've had incredible growth out of the gate right i think that happens more in politics is what i've noticed but maybe that's just me so i'm wondering um you guys have been talking about ads for the last few months i really haven't heard you talk about it i'd like to know what your pov on ads are and when they're coming to sub stack one thing i will say is i do think that i believe you i do think that experience is a little bit outside the norm in my experience a lot of people tend to tend to overrate ads i and underrate subscriptions. which is not to say that ads can't make money and subscriptions are everything. But I always try to like, I do think that people, yeah, underestimate what's possible with their subscription revenue. And that having that like core subscription base is this really deeply powerful thing. It's this connection to your audience. It's also, by the way, the advertising business is super cyclical. And, you know, both on just like a day to day, you know, you often have this kind of feast and famine effect, you'll get a whole bunch of things. And then the next day, you won't. And you'll have this longer cycle, where you'll go through like a year or two. Because when the if the market ever turns for a second, you know, everybody's, you know, discretionary ads are kind of the first thing that goes off. So I do think having like both of those sources is really good. And then, you know, our thing is like, look, we want to reward, we want to put you in control, we want to have greater independence, we want to reward depth and quality. We think substantially. And we do think there are some types of sponsorships that also do that. And we have seen a lot of the best and deepest creators on Substack very successfully to having sponsorships, having ads. And, you know, we've we've sort of come to the viewpoint that's like, hey, this is something that we can and should help with. And we want to do it not in a way that's going to like, put us on a treadmill to become the like CSS, like ads flying in. To me, the question is like, how do we do that? And I think that's a really good question. I think we can do this in a way that deepens the value of the subscription, that deepens the value of the relationship, that kind of like reinforces the high caliber brand thing you're trying to make. And yeah, we've got a program where we're building this stuff out. Well, and the way you've talked about the company from the beginning is that the model is aligned with the creator. Ads introduce another constituent, which is the advertisers. Can you do advertising and keep that model that you've said is the foundation of the company? I think that's the crux of this, right? Yeah, I think we can. I think. I think. How do we do it in a way that supports creator ownership? I mean, do you worry that it might have some aggregate effect when people flip on ads and people start to associate that potentially with your brand? Because I feel like it's, you know, there aren't that many places where there aren't ads these days. And I mean, if you're turning on ads, I think Alex's ads would probably be very different if they were programmatic in some way. And that would be probably the kind that would be turned on. You know, the reason they're, I think, so profitable for you is because they're brand deals. Yeah, I don't think we do like a programmatic ad server. That doesn't seem like the Substack way. No. Okay. Well, you at least know that. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Ready to make your own. So one of my favorite trends I've been seeing on Substack and just subscriptions in general is a space that has just been like so sorely empty forever because it couldn't be monetized properly, which is local news. And you recently talked about with Emily Sundberg on the on the open tab series. And you recently talked about the Boerum Bulletin and also the East Side Rag, which is one I'm personally a subscriber to that is just lovely gossip and news and inside scoops on the east side of LA. Are you seeing like a broader shift toward that? Or are those just kind of like a few bright spots? No, we've seen we've seen a bunch of local things spinning up. And, you know, we're always looking for more that we can do. One thing that we've done on this front that I'm really proud of is this program we have called Substack Defender, because one of the things we found when we first started having local news. Publications come on is there is this real problem where people would get sued. Like you'd be like a local news journalist and you piss off the local, you know, businessman or politician and you're doing something totally legitimate. But they, you know, they figure they can like send you kind of a nasty gram on legal letterhead and shut you up. And so we started this this program called Substack Defender that basically is like if you're getting if you're the subject of kind of bogus defamation claims, we're going to come and kind of. Like put a lot of legal weight behind that and make that very costly for the people who are bringing those things. And that was inspired by some of the people who are starting these local news programs, because that's where we found that problem was the worst. Yeah. Sick. Potentially. Asterisk. Depending on exactly what you did. No, but seriously, like if you ever have a problem like that, you should you should check out Defender. So why do you think local news wasn't working before? Because I feel like part of it is a product thing. Part of it is an economics thing. My story here is it's not just local news, right? Like the Internet came along and massively democratized access to publishing, access to information and just like smashed a lot of the business models that used to support media, like what used to support local news. It'd be like the classifieds, right? It's like, you know, ads for local businesses. Well, we've got Google and Craigslist and meta now. I don't think it's like any one thing. I just think it's like the the sort of economic landscape that used to exist. That supports these things. And by the way, supports a lot of other media isn't here anymore. What about video? You guys are leaning a lot into video. And I've heard you say that you think of YouTube as your main competition. That's a big one. You've got all the video podcast stuff. I know you've got more live video support coming. Is video overtaking text on Substack? Is that how you look at it? I wouldn't say overtaking. I mean, I think of Substack. It's about kind of like depth. It's about being able to go deep. It's about having long form. It's about having something that you could, you know, might not fit in the short thing that you can get anywhere else. And I think, you know, long form text very much fits that mode. It's been very successful. I kind of think Substack right now is the place on the Internet for long form text. But I think long form video fits that really well as well. Like the kind of work you do on the podcast. I think having like a thoughtful conversation that you can have the space to go deep. That fits very well with the Substack model. A lot of the top writers on the podcast, the platform have started podcasts, have successful podcasts that are making lots of money. And so we're kind of taking this approach of like, how could we bring the same benefits that we've brought to writers to podcasters? And I think of a podcast in 2026 is basically it's a video podcast. It's on YouTube. It's also on Apple and Spotify. You're also doing the clips like you're kind of doing that whole that that nascent format. What about AI? How are you thinking about AI? There's what about AI? Well, there's a lot. There's there's how people. I what is I haven't heard. Well, there's people. I think a lot of Substackers creators have strong feelings about AI. And you've got, you know, your position on scraping as a platform that and, you know, the creators can toggle that. Right. So I understand that. But then there's also just like Substack integrating itself with AI. Right. Which is my way of saying, like, when is the MCP thing coming? Right. Like, I think there's a moment where Substack becomes a node that AIs can work into. And how are you? How are you thinking about that? We're building the MCP. You're on. You're on the beta list. It's happening. This is the weird thing where, like you, you talk to a platform and you know things and you're interviewing the CEO and you have to kind of pretend that you don't, that you you want him to talk about it. Talk about that. Talk about opening up Substack to AI that way. Well, I'll tell you. I mean, so I had this experience with Notion where I was a Notion user for a long time and I kind of felt no, no offense to our host. I did for a while fall off the Notion bandwagon, a little bit. But recently I've been trying to work with agents, my agents, my agents and work with documents and all of the other places kind of did like a half ass version of this. And the Notion MCP, the Notion, I know there's new command line tools that are incredible, works amazingly. And it's been enough that I have personally like switched back to Notion. And to me, that's like, so if you're somebody, if we're saying, if we're sitting here saying, Hey, we're supporting creators. We want you to be able to use the tools you want to use. Like we have to integrate, we're going to integrate with these things. We're going to make like the best possible version of this. But it seems to me like you're maybe asking not just about, can I use, can I use the MCP? But like, where is this all going? If we live in a world where AI is kind of, you know, doing more and more stuff. Yeah, I am asking that. Also, Notion did not pay any of us for you to say that, but that's very nice of you to say that. It's, it's not, it's genuine. This did really happen to me. Yeah, no, I'm just very interested in when Substack is a thing I can talk to through cloud, like the existing MCPs that you can use in cloud that I think that really changes the platform for creators, and it could be pretty profound, but there could also be a backlash because i think there's a lot of creators on subsec who do not want ai they think it's you know what there's a lot of people in the world who are pretty mad at ai right now and i think it's very understandable because you're if you're on the internet in 2026 you're subjected to a lot of really stupid shit a lot of slop right and to me like i almost think of slop as the foil for Substack. This is the thing that we're against. And to me, slop is not a thing that was made by AI. And you can make that with AI. AI makes it very easy to make. Anybody that spends a lot of time on LinkedIn has known that you can make slop without AI if you want to. There's good stuff on LinkedIn too. But AI did not create this problem. It just kind of massively increases it. To me, the core problem is when you have a system that rewards something, rewards inauthenticity, rewards just making the thing that plays the game. Making something real is kind of a radical act. Making something you actually believe in, making something that's not tuned to feed the audience, making something that's not tuned to feed the audience, making something that's not tuned to feed the audience, making something that's not tuned to feed the audience, making something that's not tuned to feed the audience, making something that's not tuned to feed the audience, making something that's not the algorithm or hit the thing, but making the thing that you actually want is a radical act. And I think a lot of what people are reacting to with AI is AI is just like the visible thing, the mechanism that people are using to make something they don't believe in or to put something out cynically or to put something out programmatically or to put something out that's kind of like maybe they haven't even read or cared about and they're asking you to pay attention to. And I get why people. I fucking hate that. I hate that. I saw a good. There was a tweet the other day that made it perfect for me where it was like some guy was like, you know, that's it. The video models are so good. Hollywood is over. Hollywood is so over. And it was attached to a video of like, it was like a taco pooping out a taquito. And it was very high production value. It was like amazing cinematic HDR. Paint us a picture, Chris. Taco pooping out a taquito. But like the attitude that thinks, oh, that's. That's what fucking Hollywood does is insane. And I think a lot of people who come from our world, who come from tech, can kind of like come at this stuff with a little bit of a maximalist attitude that says, I've been using these tools. They're so cool. I love this. It's going to be able to do so much. Therefore, it's all good. But then you like come out with something that's just like this steaming piece of shit and people are mad about it. People hate it. All to say, I'm very. I think AI is incredible. I think understood correctly. It's an amplification, right? It's an amplifier of what you can create. It's an amplifier of what you can do. It's going to let you realize the creative vision that you have. It's not going to make your life any easier, right? My joke with Substack is sometimes like, we'll do everything for you except the hard part. And I think if we can do that and if we just never use the word AI and you just see things that are, you know, that are genuine and human and great, that's the answer to me. I think we can all agree it's good that people are paying for great quality content now. Which is the best. But even us, you know, you're still stuck trying to grow by clipping things for the feeds where you're competing against everybody else racing to the bottom forever. Is there any advice that you give to new creators on navigating that idea? Because you're trying to build that subscriber base, but you still need to get discovered. I know you have some discovery tools. Is it just that it's a longer timeline now that it used to be for word of mouth and word of mouth is just back again? Back again in that way? Or is there something more strategic you recommend? I think there's kind of two things you can do. And the first one is, it sounds kind of trite, but it's like, make the thing that's actually good. Make something you believe in. Make something that, you know, you would want to watch that you think would be worth somebody's time if they get there. And just get started with that and do it. I think that people can lose sight of that. That thing actually does work. You know, it's not just that, like, making something you believe in is kind of aesthetically better or that it's sort of like some Hallmark thing. I think if you really do that, that's the only way to make something great. And it does still matter, even on the Internet of 2026. If you make something great, like, that gives you this huge leg up. And it really, it's maybe even more rare than it used to be. And then it's also not enough, right? If you just make something great and you're like, I've made the great thing. I'm going to wait for the world to beat a path to my goal. That's not going to cut it either. And so, you know, I recommend to people and we are building tools that will help with this. You know, we would kind of want to make it, you know, my dream for the podcast stuff is like, hey, I show up, I have, I do the hard part. I have the most interesting conversation. And then maybe like the robot can come up with the clip and share it to all of the platforms and figure out the right, you know, it's not doing anything editorial or it's not doing anything where it's like inventing its own content, but it's kind of like helping package my content and put it on. Because you guys probably do this. Like, do you want to sit there and make something great? Do you want to make 40 clips and post it into like six different networks and then like track all of it and do all those things? Like, wouldn't it be nice if you could have a set of tools that just kind of like let you create something and then know how to translate it, you know, both figuratively to all of the different formats, but also literally like translate it into every language. That's a new thing that's going on now too. It's pretty fun. Latest thoughts on free speech on the internet. I know you've had some engagement with this. This topic in the past. Have you, have your thoughts changed on this topic at all? The number one thing before and Chris, the number one thing I still hear about like, oh, you're on sub stack. It's the Nazi bar. I still hear that. I still hear it. And like, have you been hanging out on blue sky? I maybe, and I think there's valid critiques of like mistakes. You guys have also, you've owned up to a lot of them, but there's been mistakes. But also I think people are struggling with like how much of a platform are you, how much memorializing you do even through recommendations. And this is a thing Facebook has been going through since the beginning. I mean, every social media platform goes to this, but you're, I'm curious. Yeah. The, the state of that. Do you, I assume you still hear stuff like that and then you have to react to it. How do you react to it? I think free speech and freedom, the freedom of the press is foundational to a free society. Um, and I think that's true, you know, in the press, it's true on the internet. I'm very proud of the stance we've taken on that. You know, one of the fun experiences we've had is if you're a, there aren't very many consistent defenders of freedom of the press. Usually what happens is it's like whatever, you know, whatever political ideology or whatever party is out of power is in favor of it while they're getting persecuted. And then they like flip around and everybody just like puts on the other hat. And we've been at it long enough now that we've had many people who were initially critical of our stance come to appreciate the fact that that shield kind of worked both ways. Um, it's something we really believe in. I guess like to, to put a finer point on it, I think it's, you know, one thing to host it. Uh, it's another to potentially take a revenue share with it. I mean, are there any sub stacks that, that, you know, you're earning money from that maybe make you feel a little icky or. So you think if they're really bad, we should give them a discount? Oh, it's just like, you know, some of the other platforms have with content that they may be less proud of. They say, all right, we're not going to, uh, we're not going to allow it to spread organically in the algorithm or monetize it. They can't be monetized it or, uh, they can only reach their own followers, that kind of thing. Yeah. How do you feel about that? Like downranking or not monetizing something, but still allowing it because of free speech? You know, I think on sub stack, you know, people are just deciding who they subscribe to. People are deciding who they pay, right? It's not like we have a pot of money that we're deciding who to dole it out to. It's people are subscribing to the things they want. And we think that's important. I think that's right. I think that's. Long term, I think people have, I think people have rightful, you know, feelings about this. And I think they have it about a lot of platforms. I don't think it's just you. And it sounds like this is your hard line. This is like a thing that you, yeah, this is like foundational for you. I think there's also just this idea that like, especially with vibe coding, um, there could be a marketplace for products that could serve people that you don't want to serve. You know what I'm saying? It's like, do they really need to be, uh, included? And I do think you have a choice as a founder, you know, uh, to bring your morals or ethics into it. And your morals are free speech and we're not going to get in the way of people's decisions. Is that, is that fair? Yeah. Okay. That's fair. Um, all right. A lighter topic. Um, that's semi-related, but you recently told Rick Rubin, um, there are a lot of people who would never want to work for Substack and that's an advantage for us. I'm curious what you meant by that. Um, why is someone not a fit to work at Substack? They're on blue sky. No, I don't, I, we just had someone joined from blue sky. It's going, it's going great. Um, blues, the people that work, the people that make, as a total aside, the people that make blue sky did not sit there thinking I'm going to create this cauldron. They wanted to make a cool protocol. And if you talk to them privately, they know they have a problem. I'll just say that. But I think this is the problem with network effects, right? You can build these little pockets of the internet and then it's like, Oh, look what I have. How do I widen this? I think. It's not just us though. I think this is, this is kind of good for any startup. Um, and it's true for like your employees. but it's also kind of true for your customers. It's better to be, if you're making a product, it's better to be something that 10 people deeply love than something that a million people kind of like because it's easier to kind of grow that way. And if you have a clear mission, if you have a clear perspective, we're sitting here, we're in favor of creator independence. We have these beliefs about the world. These are the things that people at Substack are waking up every day to go work in service of. If you're somebody that isn't inspired by that, doesn't like that, there's lots of companies you can work at. There's AI companies doing all kinds of things that are paying gobs of cash. And so I think it's just good for us to kind of wear our hearts on our sleeve about what we're about, why we're here. I think a lot of people find that really inspiring and we love working with them. I wonder, speaking of internal affairs, do you guys have a specific way of working involving long-form content? Because I feel like the strategy docs I've read at any company I've ever worked at are already far, far too long. And so I wonder if there's any way you think about that differently. I'm kind of funny about this. Like I, man, if you write a long doc when it could have been a slack or it didn't even need to be a message, like that feels like a miss. We do write. We write some things publicly. We actually do a fair amount of kind of like, some of our strategy docs are just things that you can find on the blog. It's sort of like our forcing ourselves to write it down and commit to it kind of helps. We do write some stuff internally, but we're not, we don't sort of fetishize it, I would say. We try to be pretty pragmatic and fast. If you look out a few years, what do you want Substack to be from where it is now? I think the kind of work you're doing, the kind of like independent thing you're making, I think that deserves to be like a substantial share of culture. I would love to be in a world where we are, you know, we're in a world where we are, we're paying creators, we're helping creators make more than YouTube is helping them make. I would love to be in a world where like the culture, like the economic engine for culture that we're creating is continuing to like foster the best and most interesting stuff on the internet and making it like a realistic possibility for more and more people to make the thing they believe in. People who might've thought there wasn't a path for them to, you know, have something to say or to make media or do that kind of thing. And then I kind of feel like if we, if we're doing that well, if we're really serving creators, we're helping ambitious media founders, we're helping them like realize the fullest version and make money doing the work they believe in, the effect of that is that Substack can become the intellectual and cultural capital of the internet. Where it's just like all of the best stuff is here. This is the place you can come to find all of the legit people. If you find something great somewhere else on the internet, chances are you can flip it over. It says made in Substack on the bottom. Do you ever see like a map? Do you ever see like a master Substack bundle? Like a, like a way to, a way to, you know, get out of subscription fatigue that people feel? I think there, I think there are interesting ideas within bundling. I do think specifically a master bundle where we're kind of severing the. Netflix basically, but Substack. Like a thing that happened early on was pretty early on, you know, when we were very small, when we just came out of YC, we were looking at Medium, who was huge. And at the time they had the master bundle. It was five bucks a month for all of Medium. And if you go there and you run the math and you run the economics, you're like bundle economics. There's, you know, there's all these reasons why this is good. And the math kind of pencils out and you should have more to distribute. And then the thing we realized is they would publish, they would publish the top earner on Medium each month. And we would look at that and we were, you know, we were a hundred times smaller than them or something. And we were like, wait a minute, we've got people that are making more than that. And they're making more than that every month. That person had one viral hit. And they got a bunch of money and they made this money in one month. And then we've got people who are making more than that every month. And they can be building this thing. They can be like owning this business. It's a different class of thing. You're playing a different game. And the kind of thing it enables you to make is better enough that I think it actually outweighs the economics. That whole, that whole share idea is absolutely crazy in hindsight. The $5 Medium or even, even Spotify. For a while it was like you had to clap. I remember the claps. The more you clapped, the more money they would get. The claps are legendary. It just makes you wonder. I mean, especially, you know, in the world of slop and AI, people are seeking deeper relationships. The parasocial relationships are already everywhere. Like what formats do you think would come next for this? I know, you know, Patreon has always been kind of a bit more format agnostic, but I would very happily pay for some subscriptions to the bands I love, or the artists I love, or this or that. I mean, do you see anything imminent that would be coming next? I love that, you know, and I do see there are some bands that are using Substack in a way that I find very inspiring. Um, if you're, there's, the one I see in my feed all the time is Passion Pit. I don't know if you guys know that. Oh yeah, that's a throwback. I love Passion Pit. Passion Pit's legit. Okay, but back, back one time, we were just talking about the incentives in the Medium Bundle. One other example of this, they're getting better at it now, but the original X monetization, where they were like, we're going to pay you based on how many people go to the replies. What incentive structure does that create, by the way? Yeah. Anyway, sorry, that's my, that's my other pet peeve. Oh, don't even get us started on X with you, Chris. It's like, yes. I want to ask a Medium question. Ask a Medium question. Uh, thumbs up or thumbs down, Medium's famous, how long it takes to read this article? You know, that's, that's a matter of some controversy within the Substack team. I'm, we, we do it now. We have a, we have reading lengths. If, I'm a little bit like, I kind of want word count. I don't know. I'm a purist that way, but I can see both sides. We do have to land this plane, but since you brought it up, um, I'm curious, like how the state of creators making money on Substack. The last stat I heard you say was that more than 50 people are making over a million a year on Substack. Do you have an updated stat on that? It's definitely not 51. I'm not there yet on subscription, but I assume it's grown with others. Um, I don't have the exact number, but I can tell you that it's a lot more than that. Really? Yeah. Okay. I'll just land this plane. What is it going to take? No, hold on. How, how are we going to get your podcast on Substack? That's my, I mean, we're on there. I'm putting it in sources. I think you're, you're asking when is it in the native player and I think you, you need to be better. Uh, sending a fire hose of traffic than YouTube. All right. Where's the camera? Zach, if you're listening, let's, let's get that working. I could, Substack's going to hook us up. Everybody loves a good native player. All right. This is not inspired by the Ezra Klein show, but what are three Substacks we should subscribe to? And you are not permitted to plug your recent open tab guests. Have you guys heard of sources or that or that I'm looking for your like personal stuff. Who's good? Well, I'm, I'm a huge nerd. I love Scott Alexander. I love Codex 10. If you're into the, if you're into that world, you guys subscribe to Jasmine's son. I love Jasmine. Yeah. Jasmine's work is great. Too many good ones. Yeah. I actually, I have one more. Yeah. Go. Um, you often hear with YouTube that lunchtime is YouTube time. Is there a Substack time? Dad's on the toilet. Anytime is Substack time on the train. You have the data in your, you could ask anytime to Substack time. Put that on a t-shirt. Anytime is Substack time. Yeah. Thank you for being game. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you all. Uh, we're going to keep the party going downstairs. Uh, bar's still open. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. And that's it for the interview. Stay tuned after the break for our reactions, exclusive party details, and a conversation about the latest news from Airbnb and Google. The result? Learn more at Accenture.com/spotify. That's new. Ellis, we did it. We had Chris on the sub-stackinator is what I'm going to call him. What did you think of Chris? That was your first time meeting him, right? It was. You know how it goes in the remote age. Everybody's always way taller, way shorter than you expect it. And he was way taller. I imagined him as average height. And he, I think he might've even been taller than you. Yeah. I thought that was a really good conversation. I didn't really know what to expect going in. He had just done the Rick Rubin pod a couple of weeks prior. And he doesn't do a ton of these interviews. He certainly doesn't do them as often as he would like to. I don't think he's done a ton of these interviews. But I think he's done a ton of these interviews. I think he's done a ton of these interviews. He certainly doesn't do them, I would say, in a format like ours where we control the questions and it's very clear that that's the dynamic. But I think we managed to get a lot out of him. I'm just happy I got to make my joke about Tyler Dank. I know. I didn't want you to make that, but you did. For those who don't know, Tyler Dank is a guy who's been in the business for a long time. He's been in the business for a long time. to make fun of selecting to other names. That's true. And Chris Best is also a good name. He's the best. For sure. Not funny, though. Not funny. Sorry. Yeah, I think the highlight for me was obviously, you know, on the Scoopy side, him talking about MCP, Substack, hooking into AI coming soon, breaking that news with us, which may or may not have been the result of his partnerships team reaching out to me about it a couple of weeks prior. Very excited for that. I think that has the potential to dramatically change how creators especially use Substack, which I'm excited about. Well, how? What are you picturing for like your workflow in, let's say, six months time? I mean, a big problem I have is understanding who is subscribing to me, who is on the list. And, you know, it really matters when you're selling advertising like I do, which we talked about in the interview. But there's something to be said about when you connect it into AI and you hook up some other APIs for services that kind of help you infer who someone is based on their email. I could all of a sudden have these incredible audience reports. I could have it automated. And then I could have Substack, you know, via, you know, Claude or whatever, tell me more about what's working, what's not. Basically, my own infinitely customizable dashboard and like metrics analytics. I'm imagining you as Morgan Freeman in Batman with like 58 computer screens. Yes. All your audience metrics at the same time. The dream. And I don't know if they're going to be able to do this via MCP, but I hope they get there is I'm walking the dogs. I've got Whisperflow turned on on my phone. I've got the Claude shortcut. And I'm like, Claude, send the scoop. And then it just publishes. That's what I want. And then you say, Claude, notify me about how much the market moved as a result of my scoop as soon as it hits the Bloomberg terminal. Exactly. That's interesting. Now, I feel like what you're describing is, you know, kind of a low key MCP benefit, which is really just you don't have to deal with the user interface on these companies' websites. Like what you're describing is search and export and just having it available to your AI or to your agent without having them to do some, you know, bespoke first party integration. And it is true that so many websites have just got awful ways. It's true that so many sites have just got awful ways to filter things like audience lists, be able to export your data. And it just cuts out a lot of steps, I suppose, and allows it to always feel like it's up to date. So, yeah, I get it. And we also made Chris squirm a little bit on free speech, did we not? I thought we handled that pretty well. I like that you asked me to ask the hard question. Yes. And then I just kind of dropped free speech, but that wasn't hard enough for you. So then you asked the hard question after that. I was like, oh, I didn't actually expect you to go. This is the beauty of our dynamic is that, you know, you can come in and do that. And then I think it helps kind of set the intention of what we're doing, which is we do want to ask hard questions. We want to ask the real questions, but we want to do it in a way that the guests will actually share something and where it won't completely derail the interview and frankly, make us come across as assholes. And so I think we managed to do that. There was a moment, I think, where you started talking about like, well, what if you just like vibe code something, which honestly, I didn't understand what you were saying there, where Chris looked at me like across you and was like, are we really doing this? Like, he gave me a look of like, this interview is about to like, go off the fucking rails. And but I think we pulled it back in very gracefully. Yeah. Well, I think what I was essentially saying, as I reported, was that I think you can make an argument that a private company is somehow expected or beholden to free speech, essentially, if they have a monopoly, or if customers don't, have anywhere else to go, like, to me, I almost admit, like, feel like it's an admission of some type of monopoly statement. Obviously, you can just have this belief as a founder. But if people have the ability to go to other platforms, whether it's Tyler Dank's platform, or even soon a vibe coded platform, just to be able to send out emails and whatnot, which I think you'll probably be able to make at some point in the near future, as long as customers have the options, you know, the market as always is going to decide, do I actually want to be on? The super free speech platform, or I feel like as a lot of these features get more and more commoditized, obviously, they're building as big of a moat as they possibly can. But you could see a world I mean, you can't like the free speech thing is a political statement in its own way. And that may turn away a lot of people, as much as it might bring some people to you. Yeah. So that's kind of what I was hoping to get addressed. It's not neutral anymore. Well, and I remember when you asked about, well, you're taking 10%. Do you want to take 10%? Of this stuff? And he was like, should I give them a discount? It was like an interesting flip of that question, right? Which they get a lot. And yeah, man, I had people that, you know, I invited to the party who didn't want to come because we had Chris, you know, he's a very polarizing figure. And Substack has had these moments, whether it's with accidentally like sending a push notification to people about like recommending a Nazi Substack or something, which is obviously, I think something they regret. And what I tried to hint at in the in the their general position on kind of letting more go that a platform like maybe blue sky wouldn't necessarily allow, maybe not from a policy perspective, but from a community perspective. And speaking of blue sky, you know, reflecting on this, I feel like blue sky caught a lot of strays in this conversation, which I did not intend. More so the users of blue sky, which are, well, yeah, but blue sky itself. And I, we had an executor from blue sky there. I didn't get to see her afterwards, but if she's listening to this, I just want to say like, I have no hate towards blue sky. I think what I said holds true that they know they have an echo chamber problem, but this is the problem of any platform. And as you and I have covered, you know, social networks for so long is that, you know, your community kind of dictates the vibe more than the policies of the platform itself. Also true. But you know what this, this reminds me is that there used to be an idea that Facebook and others used to say about free speech is that, well, we are free speech town square. Cause that's how ideas spread. Yeah. Right. But now that they're no longer social platforms, like that whole idea just kind of isn't even, isn't even a reason to say you stand for, for total free speech or whatever. I mean, in reality, like you're agreeing to a business partnership with some things that you may morally or ethically disagree with, unless you truly have no, no opinions on that stuff. And I just don't even know what the benefits are these days, especially as, as products like this, just face more and more competition. I think the network effects are the things Substack has going that will hopefully, I think, or not hopefully, but I think just may insulate it from what you're talking about with AI. I've thought a lot about this. You know, people, people ask me all the time, like, I can't believe you're on Substack. Why are you doing that? Or do you condone some of the content on Substack? And they're like, of course I don't, but I don't condone a lot of things on most platforms I'm on. You know, like there's, there's a ton of bad shit everywhere. Look, I think the line for me, is if Substack started recommending Nazi Substacks against me, or somehow, you know, I was getting bundled in with something like that. Then I think it crosses a line. I think what Chris has managed to do so far, even with introducing the feed and the network effects, is that I do feel like I still have control over how my brand, how sources shows up on Substack. The moment that starts to shift, I think he's got a whole other can of worms. And I think he's trying to avoid that. So you're thinking more about brand adjacency than using a platform? Well, I think the moment you try to have this high ground of like, I'm only going to use things that I think are ethical. You should be consistent. And it probably means you go live on a farm. You know, like when you actually start to think about, okay, who owns the things I use every day? You'll become a Luddite. And so I just, I don't really buy that argument. I think it's a lot of virtue signaling. I think it's a way for people to divide people into tribes. Dude, but Nazis isn't such a tough rule. You know, I agree with you in general that like every corporation is kind of corrupt, but there's a spectrum. But this is also just, we don't have to have a bigger thing about free speech, but like, this is also just a worrisome trend I see in America where I think we're forgetting, like, it's important to let people say things that are very offensive because the moment you start to clamp down on that, like it will come for you eventually. Like the ACLU fought for Nazis to be able to protest and say horrible things in public back in the day. And we as like a, especially like an online, super online, you know, techie crowd in our own echo chambers, I think we have forgotten what we sacrifice when we start to say like, oh, this is not allowed. Certainly like things that are illegal or violent or whatever, like that's different, but things that are horrible, but not illegal. Like I, I, I don't condone it. I don't want to be near it. And maybe you could argue that me being on Substack is being near it. And I guess I can see that argument, but I still feel like, yeah, I still, I feel like some have switched away, right. Or a lot of people left Twitter in general. Yeah. And I think that's totally fine. And I don't fault anyone for doing that. I have friends who have done that and we're still okay. Cause I don't, I don't hold it against them. I don't think like, I think they should be able to do what they want to do. It's a free market. I just think it's very dangerous. To start, start telling people, uh, you're, you should get off a platform because of the moral of the owner or whatever. I think it's a slippery slope. But that's a whole nother topic. I feel like we're going down a rabbit hole. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that's just the same conversation as telling a friend that they shouldn't shop at Amazon or whatever. I mean, some people are comfortable with that. Some aren't. I think more than anything, just to kind of close this off, I'm just kind of confused on the strategy of it. What are the goals of it? What is the reasoning behind it? Why is it going to work long term? I mean, if we're saying really offensive stuff, people are going to stop listening. If people start seeing a lot of stuff that offends them recommended on whatever platform that they're on, they're probably going to leave as well. And so, you know, the polarization is kind of happening as long as people have choice. And so that's kind of why I wonder there's a desire to try and satisfy everybody when I feel like that idea has been done for a while now. Yeah. I mean, Chris is going to try, you know, I gained a lot of respect for Chris, not only in the conversation, but just in like witnessing him and doing interactions, like at the podcast. Yeah, I mean, Chris is going to try, you know, and he stayed after, which was awesome. I think Chris is trying to thread the needle as best he can. I'm not saying he's done everything right, but I'd already known him, you know, obviously, but I respected his ability to like take the questions. And even if he didn't always give like a full answer, he wasn't, he never told us like something's off limits, right? Like there was zero like prep calls for this. Like I respect that about him. He seems like a very straight who genuinely cares about the people on the platform and their livelihood and the product he's building. And so I have a whole lot of respect for that. We got to talk about the Dylan Field thing. That was wild. I didn't come up in the interview because we didn't see it. But Dylan Field, founder and CEO of Figma, our second guest ever on Access, came late. I had heard he wasn't going to be able to make it. Figma had earnings earlier in the day. That day. Literally that day. His office is like right down the street from Notions where we were doing the party and the live show. He came in mid-interview, right? We can't see out into the audience very well, but apparently he didn't realize that it was a live recording. He thought it was an interactive thing with the audience. And so he was wearing an Access hat, which like, hell yeah, Dylan, rock that thing. And he tried to walk towards the stage and was raising his hand to ask us a question is what I was told after the fact that we didn't see it. And Dylan, if you're listening to this, I wish Dylan, you would have yelled loud enough so that we could hear you. So that we would have heard you because that would have been such a magical moment to have a former guest, you know, interrupt a live show. Well, so the question for those wondering, he said, you've had the experience of being RLHF constantly by monitors at Business Insider and now other metrics at Substack, which is, you know, what does this stand for? Reinforcement learning and human. Yeah. Reinforcement learning with human feedback. He's making an AI joke. Yeah. Right. How did both of these RLHF methods, make you feel and how did they change your behavior? Did you give him an answer? I tweeted back at him. I don't know if he saw it. I didn't see your answer. I've had, I didn't. I shared that he asked that on social and a lot of people have asked me for my response. So I wanted to wait to give it on this episode. But first, since you already posted yours and I didn't see it, what's your answer? Okay. Here's what I said to the Zoink, one of the best usernames outside of Hamburger. I said at Business Insider when I was there, it was just a year. On the one hand, it was nice to have the transparency into the performance, which I feel like many white collar jobs kind of don't have. There's just always this fuzzy idea of how you're doing in the eyes of your biased boss. On the other hand, it drove a race to the bottom for whatever that monitoring metric was and just started, you know, the whole race to the bottom of how crazy can I make a picture? Like I remember writing an article about Pinterest and I needed a picture. And so I found a picture on Pinterest of Christina Hendricks from Mad Men. That's going to get people to click on the front page of Business Insider, which they did, especially like if your peers or colleagues were giving in more than you, which I think can happen. You know, it's a great, it's a great area. And no one's, people are going to be less happy if you're, if you're not getting any page views at Business Insider than if you're pushing, pushing the boundaries a little bit. So yeah, not a great feeling overall, but hardly surprising in the moment with the economics of news media at that time, which is what they were. Meanwhile, at Substack as a non-Substack poster, but I feel like the economics are very different. And I think it seems clear that building something people want to pay for is about long-term value as opposed to short-term gains. So I feel like the insights probably skew more toward nice to know than must do necessarily like, oh, I need to change my headline instantly because this is my only chance to get in front of people with this story. Whereas maybe if you have not such a great subject line, people still click it because they have a feeling that they're paying for sources.news and they want to know what's in it because that's what they're really paying for. Right. They're not just trying to be entertained for a minute here at a time. So yeah, less about raw top of the funnel page views, more about retention and engagement, which obviously any metrics can drive a race to the bottom and gamification of their own, but healthier with products people pay for, no doubt. Yeah. I totally align with all of that. I totally feel that. I think, I mean, to just say it more simply, the page view world that we both came up in and I spent a lot of time and even up till last year when I went on Substack and went independent, it does make you obsess about everything other than your instincts, right? Because it makes you want to tune everything to the algorithm, tune everything to SEO. And I had some, as you did, some great success doing that, right? But it leaves you a little creatively hollow, right? It doesn't feel like you're I don't know if Substack is the answer. I don't know if the subscription thing necessarily gets rid of all that, but I do agree with you that it makes you think more about longevity. It makes you think about something that's durable and retentive and valuable, right? And I think value can mean a lot of things, but I think what I like about a paid or freemium model, which is really what I have with sources because some of it's free, is that I'm hoping that over time you just find it valuable. It doesn't need to be valuable. To you initially, but I'm hoping you see it over and over. You get a tease in your inbox and then you eventually convert because there's so much alpha, which to be honest, there is, you know, I don't want to pat myself on the back, but a lot of people should be paying for sources. So yeah, no, I love this question. I love the framing of it. And I think it's really important to think about how metrics incentivize behavior and how we feel. And I think about that with the show right? I mean, we talk about YouTube all the time. We talk about changing the structure of the show for the YouTube algorithm. And frankly, I think we can also return a little bit more to our instincts and trust our instincts and bet that the audience will show up and then we have to obviously be right. But there's this dance you have to constantly do between pleasing the algorithm and doing what's right for you. Yeah. So how are you feeling about the party? Just such a mega thanks to Notion for helping us pull everything together in just a couple hours, beforehand. Also, thanks to our friends at Practica with a K over in Lithuania who helped us with the brand. I mean, you know, there were just so many elements of the brand that they created for us, whether it's like the episode yellow circle that we turned into coasters, we finally made the access key chain, the hats, obviously, which seemed to be a hit. We at the end of the night only had, you know, a dozen or two hats left. What else did we have? We had the stickers, we had our drinks that we created, scooped a patini for you and shower thoughts for me, because that's where I have all my ideas. And yeah, it seemed like it was a packed house and everybody had fun. That was great, man. A lot of friends, a lot of people who have supported us in many ways over the years. Very cool of Chris from Substack to hang out and rock the hat afterwards. And I had just a lot of people coming up to me and saying, what a great group. And they liked the format. And yeah, shout out Notion. I mean, Akshay was there and hung out. Which I also appreciated. Ivan, you were missed. We really appreciate you giving us your space. And also I got a shout out Method Communications who sponsored everything and helped us have the DJ and the bar and the food and all the things that made it great. And the photographer, the film photographer that you found, which if you're watching this on YouTube, we're showing photos of the party right now. And yeah, man, really magical moment. It's kind of weird to do a launch party like nine months or whatever into a show. We were on episode what, 33 or something. But we've just been doing this. We've just been hitting the ground running and we both are really busy. And I'm glad we were able to take a moment and at least acknowledge what we've done. Very cool to have the posters of all the former guests around us too in the courtyard. I love that. Yeah. As we say, a lot of the tech leaders of today and tomorrow across big tech and startup world. And it's been really nice, I feel like, to have that mix. It creates a nice, nice cadence. And we'll have another startup founder coming up next week. So before we get too far off the business models of media question, there was actually some massive news yesterday at Google, right? That search page is kind of officially dead. I mean, I know a lot of sites were seeing their traffic decline just precipitously. But is this the nail in the coffin-ish for reliable web traffic? I mean, geez, that's a huge deal. It is. I've been doing my classic. I know Burbank's SFO thing this week. I was at Google I.O. yesterday. I'm at Airbnb today recording this. actually as we speak um yeah google io is interesting um they are you know introducing agents into search where you can say go off and do something and come back and show it to me and then gemini is becoming like open claw essentially uh you know i asked actually i talked to the head of search and not liz but uh nick fox liz is a former guest shout out liz on the show um and they actually think that our kind of stuff will do better in this future that people are going to crave authentic hashtag human content uh so i feel okay i think if you're doing kind of commodity to look for right what i've noticed and i'm also partnering with uh parag argawal the ex-ceo of twitter he's got a very interesting ai agent marketplace publisher startup called parallel that i'm an early partner with that launched this week dude good job that's a good thanks man um i think what they're seeing and what i'm hearing is that the agents are actually exposing the quote long tail of content in a way that was not possible before so you're actually getting as a smaller publisher you're getting more discovery not less it's actually the big guys who are seo farming and doing commodities shit at scale that are hurting and i think what people are craving is like the actual alpha the real human content you're giving me a quizzical face like this doesn't make sense but i think it doesn't the agent just gonna check google the way you would have yeah but if i think i think the theory is that when people are using agents for more things it's going to discover more than a human would have naturally gone out and found because the agent can see everything and what parallel is doing is assigning value to content in a way that the agents can see and is incentivizing agents to ingest and show valuable content that people want to use in their reports what are the metrics that's that's going to be controversial i can't say much because i'm in the program but essentially the more valuable the agent finds your content the more you get paid not necessarily how many people query for your content make yourself legible to ai that's what they're saying at all the coffee shops but otherwise yeah i'm at airbnb today um this has been a very kind of classic sf tech conference week for me saw brian chesky um do his keynote they're making every airbnb the everything app uh you can get groceries in airbnb now because you know why not um but uh i'm gonna see chesky actually a little bit after this try to get him on the pod later but uh yeah that's what i like about their approach is that they're just going absolutely ham on their use case and everything adjacent to it through that lens it's not the everything app it is the travel app and the experience app and so when you go somewhere you're like oh uh i didn't even think about getting a photographer for this friend's trip they're gonna offer that i don't know what the grocery situation is but that's like one of the annoying things when you get to a destination you immediately have to go to the grocery store and you have to remember what you're going to get for these different meals whatever and so i have a note called trip grocery that's like essentials to make sure you get that stuff that's how silly this is perfect for you then you're right and customer number one yeah and so it's on the one hand it's everything and maybe some people like accuse them of doing too much or whatever but i think a lot of that stuff makes a lot of sense i will say airbnb really well done food for you for their conference i appreciate a tech conference that gives people good food hospitality you could say they're good at well as we have been uh we've been talking a lot should we try to land this i think so all right this was a really great interview um it was great doing the live show with you great doing this pod with you man feel very blessed and uh yeah let's uh let's read ourselves out here let's keep it rolling that is it for this week's show thanks to chris to notion to method and everybody else who supported us uh so far and the other night in san francisco if you like this show don't forget to like and subscribe everywhere you get podcasts we are access.show online and you can find us in lovely high definition video especially for this episode would recommend that via at access pod on youtube if you really like this episode we'd love a five-star review or even share with a friend or agent you can find my newsletter at sources.news as a human or have your agent go look at it and uh that'll be the end of this episode thank you so much for watching you could find me at hamburger on twitter and at meaning.company for your startup storytelling needs access as part of the vox media podcast network and the show is produced by hooked creators bye bye booking.com is the easiest way from a day surrounded by noise to a state surrounded by nature that's nice go on book it it's easy booking.com 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