Chris Best (Substack) x Andrew Mayne (OpenAI) on the economics of culture

Chris Best is the co-founder and CEO of Substack, the platform powering the rise of independent writers, podcasters, and thinkers. At Substack, Chris has reimagined what sustainable media looks like, putting creators at the center.

Andrew Mayne is the host of the OpenAI podcast and was previously the company’s first prompt engineer and science communicator, where he helped shape how people interact with and understand large language models in the earliest days of GPT-3. 3. He’s also a mystery-thriller novelist and the founder of Interdimensional, a company helping organizations deploy AI.

Together, they unpack how technology rewires culture, creativity, and even capitalism—from the birth of ChatGPT to the flood of “AI slop,” from the evolution of media business models to what makes human expression irreplaceable.

It’s a conversation that circles around the economics of culture and the future of originality as creating art becomes more and more accessible. 

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

1. The inside story of ChatGPT’s creation 
2. Why frictionless product experiences matter more than technical breakthroughs
3. How Substack’s “do everything but the hard part” philosophy for building products empowers creators 
4. What happens when business models consume products, and how to resist that gravity 
5. How AI is accelerating Substack’s core bet: that authenticity will always outperform algorithms 
6. Why AI-generated content won’t replace human stories 
7. Why “all economics are downstream of culture”
8. Why Substack made subscribers portable and what that decision meant for trust
9. Why writers should see AI as an amplifier instead of a threat
10. The case for optimism: why artists, technologists, and media builders should embrace our emerging cultural renaissance.

Referenced in this episode:

• Brandon Sanderson’s record-breaking Kickstarter
• The Industrial Revolution
• India’s License Raj
• Avatar 2
• Reboot, the TV show
• Mechanic’s Institute
• Mesopotamia and the invention of the plow

Where to find Andrew Mayne:

• Website: andrewmayne.com
• X (Twitter): @AndrewMayne
• Interdimensional: interdimensional.ai

Where to find Chris Best:

• Substack: cb.substack.com
• X (Twitter): @cjgbest

Where to find The General Partnership:

• Website: thegp.com
• X (Twitter): @thegp
• Substack: thegeneralpartnership.substack.com