The General Podcast
The General Podcast
Podcast Description
The General Podcast pairs founders, operators, executives, and creative minds for behind-the-scenes talk about building. No host and no script. Just craft, conviction, and real conversation between peers.
Produced by The General Partnership.
thegp.com
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast delves into themes surrounding design, product development, and creative leadership, with episodes that highlight the importance of aesthetics in technology and strategies for fostering innovation. Notable discussions include the significance of 'fewer memos, more demos' in operationalizing quality, and the role of taste in product delivery, as illustrated in episodes featuring design leaders like Katie Dill and Randy Hunt.
The General Podcast pairs founders, operators, executives, and creative minds for behind-the-scenes talk about building. No host and no script. Just craft, conviction, and real conversation between peers.
Produced by The General Partnership.
thegp.com
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:
- The inside story of ChatGPT’s creation
- Why frictionless product experiences matter more than technical breakthroughs
- How Substack’s “do everything but the hard part” philosophy for building products empowers creators
- What happens when business models consume products, and how to resist that gravity
- How AI is accelerating Substack’s core bet: that authenticity will always outperform algorithms
- Why AI-generated content won’t replace human stories
- Why “all economics are downstream of culture”
- Why Substack made subscribers portable and what that decision meant for trust
- Why writers should see AI as an amplifier instead of a threat
- 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
Disclaimer
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