Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, associate editor Toby Young

and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay. You can support our podcast by visiting

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Welcome to the Colette Podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay.

In 2018, I got an email from an entrepreneur here in Toronto who had a great idea for a website where

journalists and other writers could create their own newsletters.

All you had to do was generate content and the website would do the rest, including helping you monetize

your writing through subscriptions, generating email lists, and otherwise running the back

end of a small media organization.

I didn't think much of the idea at the time, which tells you a lot about my success as a technology

investor. That guy I had lunch with was Chris Best and the company he founded, substack, is now on a lot of people's lips, especially since it's recently become the new home for prominent writers like Andrew Sullivan, Jesse Single, and here in Canada,

Jen Gerson.

Last week, Chris Best spoke to me from his home in San Francisco about what Substack

is, why it's become successful, and how it fits into the future of journalism.

Here are excerpts from our conversation.

Somebody I know described Substack as an example of writers firing their editors.

Is that an accurate description?

I think that's definitely part of it. The bigger thing is it's

...