Inside Substack’s $650M Playbook for the Future of Media (Chris Best & Hamish McKenzie, Co-Founders)
In a world where attention is fragmented and algorithms rule the content landscape, Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie are taking a radically different approach with Substack. Rather than chasing clicks, Substack focuses on a simple yet powerful idea: creators should own their work and make money directly from their audience through paid subscriptions. With over 5 million paid subscriptions and tens of millions of active readers, Substack has turned this model into a transformative force in media.In this episode, Chris and Hamish unpack how they’re reshaping creator economics, navigating AI’s role in creativity, and enabling a new era for writers, from serialized fiction to short-form video.
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Speaker A: If you allow technology to be applied, it makes things better and cheaper. As everybody gets richer, as more things happen, the things that are not touched by technology just get more expensive and take up a bigger and bigger share of the economy. Then you can ask, okay, so what is AI and technology going to do to media? Speaker B: It's as AI slop and AI entertainment takes over the entertainment piece of media, the part that gets more valuable is learning what to want, learning who you want to be, and curating your information sources.
And in that Humans play an outsized role. Speaker C: If we could go with the 10 to 20 year timeframe, I would say this is going to be looked at as the chaos era. This is a moment of transition between major periods in technology, in culture, in the media, creating a ton of volatility, a ton of power redistribution and chaos that is ultimately going to lead to a new kind of order and something better. But in the moment, it feels messy as hell. Speaker D: Hey, I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist Podcast.
You might have heard the saying, the future is already here. Speaker B: It's just not evenly distributed yet. Speaker D: The mission of this podcast is to host deep conversations with the founders, investors, and thinkers who are living in that future to help you see it earlier, understand it better, and capitalize on it. Today I'm speaking with Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie, Substack's CEO and Chief Writing Officer. Substack is arguably the most interesting media company in the world right now. It's become a transformative force in the landscape, creating a new economic engine for culture.
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