The Substack Podcast

In this special edition of Model Behavior—our series that asks top thinkers, writers, and creatives how they consider and use AI—Substack founder Chris Best speaks with legendary music producer Rick Rubin. Rick writes The Creative Act: Thoughtforms & Innerworks on Substack, where he shares reflective insights and practical creative exercises drawn from his approach to art and awareness.
Rick had questions for Chris about Substack’s decision to introduce the Pangram integration, a tool that lets readers check whether text was likely written by hand or with AI assistance. Chris, in turn, took the opportunity to ask Rick where he lands on AI in his own creative life, from writing to music. Along the way, they get into which genres AI music might be most successful in, the story of the discarded wah-wah pedal that helped define Jimi Hendrix’s sound, Rick’s slow conversion to Nine Inch Nails, and a sci-fi scenario where every album and film could be made for an audience of one.
What follows is a lightly edited version of their conversation.
Chris Best: I’ll be honest about where I am on AI writing, AI generation, and AI creative assistance: I don’t know what any of the answers are yet. This stuff is hitting the world like a tidal wave, and I don’t think anybody knows exactly what to think. There’s such a wide range of perspectives. And I’m building a platform, so I don’t want to wait until every answer is figured out before we make it good. I’d love to hear where your head is at.
Rick Rubin: It’s so early. We have no idea how AI will influence writing, or whether it will ever be good, or what its strengths and weaknesses will be. It’s a brand-new tool, like fire for the first time. Fire is dangerous and can burn down your house, but do we pretend it doesn’t exist, or make it illegal? I don’t know. It’s very powerful, and it can do a lot of things.
I’m curious about it, and I’m interested in interacting with it to understand it. But I don’t have a good grasp of how it works or where it’s strong or weak. Most of the time, the results I get back aren’t satisfactory. Even for something as simple as a Google search, I don’t feel great about what I’m getting. That said, it’s a cool new tool that keeps getting better, and I believe at some point we’ll find a really good use for it.
Chris: In the software industry, we’re already there. My co-founder and CTO Jai [Jairaj Sethi] has gone from sitting at a screen typing all day to managing a fleet of robots. He says, “Hey, fix this. Hey, make this good” and gets back a video of the thing working. It’s transformational in software, which is different from creative work.
Rick: If there were a machine that could tell how much of your coding was done with AI’s assistance and that were somehow vilified, what would you do?
Chris: I see two perspectives developing very loudly online. One is a shrieking anti-AI view: this is the devil, and anybody who so much as touches it is ritually impure. The other is that AI can do no wrong, it’s already the greatest, it should do everything, and if I send you a message that’s AI-generated and you have complaints, it’s because you’re a Luddite who just doesn’t believe hard enough. I know people I love and respect in both camps. But I think a lot of people are in the middle, working to figure it out, grateful that we’re trying something.
If I use your fire analogy, we’ve got a powerful new tool that gives people incredible superpowers. It lets you do things you never could have done before, and things you could have done before much more easily, which makes new things possible with fewer people. It also gives you amazing new ways to be annoying on the internet. The overwhelming feeling, for me and I think for others, is that we’ve created an avalanche of stuff that isn’t coming from any particular perspective. It’s not that those people shouldn’t be allowed to do that. The question is what I want as a reader, or as someone trying to find good things, and what expectations I should have.
Rick: But isn’t finding good things a human reaction? If an AI tells me something was made using AI but I like what I read, what does that mean? Does it matter?
The reason I like the artists I like is that I’m interested in their point of view. It’s not because they sound a certain way. It’s because they see the world a certain way. AI doesn’t have a point of view, so it can’t show me one. It can make something sound like something else, but it can’t give me a point of view, and in music that’s what I’m always looking for.

Chris: Something has been happening to me online, and to a lot of people I know who are discerning readers and are very pro-AI. I’ll start reading something, and a few paragraphs in, it seems interesting. Then I realize, with no Pangram and no tool of any kind, that it’s another one of these. There’s a bit of an Invasion of the Body Snatchers feeling. I think, why am I spending my time on this? I signed up to get somebody’s perspective, and now that I realize it’s fully generated, something in my reaction switches. It discourages me from reading that piece, and it discourages me from fishing in that same pond.
Rick: That’s good information, and you got it without the device. What you learned is that this writer writes in a way that seems like it’s using AI, and whether it is or not, it’s not for me, so I’ll look elsewhere. That sounds healthy. The bigger issue is when there’s a rating system, and how that changes the way we interact with the material.
When you first told me you were bringing on this service, I thought you’d see a rating at the top of each article telling you the percentage. I thought you might even up-regulate things made without AI and throttle things made with it, even if they were good. That raised all these questions about what we’re trying to get to.
If the reader gets to choose whether they see a score, that seems okay to me. I’m less offended by that than by a rating on every article, which is what I thought it was going to be.
Chris: We definitely wouldn’t do that by default. That’s how the Pangram browser extension works for people who use it. I have zero interest in telling people what they can and can’t write or what tools they can and can’t use. That’s central to Substack’s philosophy. It’s up to the reader to decide what they value and what they want to spend time with. We can add some value by helping readers make that choice in a more informed way. We would never say, “You’re not allowed to write about politics,” but I would absolutely give readers a filter that says, “Today I don’t want to read about politics.” Maybe it’s an imperfect automatic politics detector. If I’m subscribed to what I’m subscribed to, that’s great, but when I’m out browsing and foraging, I have my own biases and desires, and I should be allowed to use my own agency to choose what to spend my attention on. That feels important to me.
Rick: If the reader could select a button that says, “I only want to see non-AI material,” that seems okay. It has to do with the reader having the choice.
Chris: We’re not stapling anything onto anything you don’t want. As a writer, you can opt out. As a reader, you can go and find out, and maybe if you’re browsing and discovering, you can choose to see less AI-generated work and prefer human work. Or you might do the reverse and say, “I love this AI stuff. Show me the best of it.”
Rick: All slop all the time.
Chris: Or maybe, to your point, it’s not slop. The most important limitation of Pangram and all AI detectors isn’t false positives. It’s that the thing they’re detecting isn’t whether something is slop or good or has a human perspective in it. They only detect the last mile: did the final form of this text come out of the machine or not?
There’s a feature of the modern internet, and you see it on LinkedIn, where most of the content that’s completely generated isn’t deep, thoughtful work crafted with care. It’s somebody saying, “Toss something off for me” or “Write 10,000 viral posts and make my thing go.” I think people are developing a visceral dislike of that, partly because of the experience they have everywhere else online. After we shipped this feature, LinkedIn took away their “Rewrite with AI” button and added a “Report as AI slop” option. Snapchat announced it wouldn’t allow AI video in its main Discover feed. Platforms are navigating what people want and care about even before we know the philosophical answers.
Motown was a kind of music factory at one point. It wasn’t the artist spilling their guts. I can’t name a record made that way that speaks to me, but it speaks to a lot of other people. I think of them as two different worlds: music made by the artist, and a commercial world of music that’s more about making something popular. I haven’t played that game, but I wouldn’t take it away from anyone.

Rick: I don’t use AI for writing, and I don’t use it for music, but I’m not closed to the possibility that it could be a useful tool at some point.
Chris: Have you tried AI for music?
Rick: I’ve only seen a demonstration of Suno, and it wasn’t to my taste.
Chris: Right. It sounds superficially slick, but there’s nothing underneath.
Rick: The reason I like the artists I like is that I’m interested in their point of view. It’s not because they sound a certain way. It’s because they see the world a certain way. AI doesn’t have a point of view, so it can’t show me one. It can make something sound like something else, but it can’t give me a point of view, and in music that’s what I’m always looking for.
Chris: That strikes me as the deep philosophical question underneath all of this, and I don’t think we can solve it as a platform feature. It’s true in writing as well. Will an AI be a better writer than a human? In a narrow sense, that seems pretty likely: you can make it sound like something else, or make it sound good. The question is whether an AI can replace having a point of view, and where the line falls between those two things.
Rick: There are also different genres of music where the rules are different. The music I like tends to be a singer-songwriter spilling their guts. But K-pop is hugely popular, and it’s made in a more cookie-cutter, manufactured way.
Chris: My kids like KPop Demon Hunters. If there were an AI version, they’d probably like it.
Rick: People like it, and it may not be so different from AI in the way it’s created. Motown was a kind of music factory at one point. It wasn’t the artist spilling their guts. It’s a different thing. I can’t name a record made that way that speaks to me, but it speaks to a lot of other people. I think of them as two different worlds: music made by the artist, and a commercial world of music that’s more about making something popular. I haven’t played that game, but I wouldn’t take it away from anyone.
Chris: Could you imagine a world where you couldn’t tell the difference just by listening? Would you still think they’re two different things?
Rick: Absolutely, I can imagine that. In the end, you either feel it or you don’t. There are people who make music on the feeling side that I like, but 99% of it I don’t like either. If a song got through that was made in a different way, that wouldn’t be a negative for me. When the drum machine came along, a lot of musicians said, “If you use a drum machine, you’re not doing music anymore.” There was a huge movement when people left analog for Pro Tools: “Sellout, that’s not how we do this.” Sampling was another big change. I can’t say one is right or wrong. It’s just another tool.
There’s a story about the ’60s band Love, with Arthur Lee. Their lead guitarist, Johnny Echols, told me that Vox came out with a new machine called the wah-wah pedal. It was one of the very first guitar pedals. Vox gave it to a few key professional musicians to try, including Echols, who was a great studio musician, and a guitarist named Jimmy James, who played with Little Richard. Jimmy James wasn’t really Little Richard’s guitar player. He was his driver, but he could play, and when Little Richard needed a guitarist, he sometimes played. The pitch for the pedal was, “This will make your guitar sound like a trombone,” because a trombone mute goes wah, wah, wah, and the pedal does the same thing to a guitar.
Echols took the pedal and threw it in the garbage. He thought, “If I want to learn how to play trombone, I’ll play trombone. I don’t want a pedal to make my guitar sound like one.” A year or so later, a friend in San Francisco called and said, “There’s an amazing new guitar player named Jimi Hendrix who just came from England. You’ve got to see him. He’s playing tomorrow night.” So Echols and his friends drove up to San Francisco, the show started, and the guy who walked out onstage was Jimmy James, the driver for Little Richard.
Echols had thrown away the box. Jimmy James, now Jimi Hendrix, adopted it. Echols said the entire sound of Jimi Hendrix was based on that new box. Hendrix was curious enough to experiment with it, and he became Jimi Hendrix, while Echols kept playing the way guitar had been played before.
I think that’s somehow related to AI. I don’t know exactly how, but there’s a new technology, and we don’t yet know what it can be. We tend to think in terms of all or nothing, or substitution. I’m not saying that. I’m asking whether this tool could help a great writer become an even better writer. We don’t know yet. I think it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater to put a big X over it too soon, when it may have incredible uses, as it already does with code. I don’t know what they are yet, but I’m certainly not afraid of it. With any new instrument, you can make bad sounds, and then someone figures out how to do it well.
Here’s an example from my own taste. For a time, I never liked electronic music. Someone told me I’d like Nine Inch Nails, when their first independent record had just come out. It sounded like industrial music, and I’d heard industrial music and didn’t like it. Because it was wrapped in the technology of a kind of music I didn’t like, my first instinct was that it wasn’t for me. It took about a year before I realized it was one of my favorite bands. The technology went from a negative to a positive once I recognized how phenomenal the songwriting and singing were. I thought it was slop at first because it was just machines. It felt too easy and didn’t have the human touch. Then I understood the power of the songs and the lyrics, and I saw them live and felt the energy, and they became my favorite group. It’s hard to judge these things too quickly. There will be a use where you’re happy to have it in your toolbox and it makes things better. I don’t know when that’ll be.
Chris: So here’s what I hear you saying, and I find it interesting. This is a new tool, and the chance that it can make something great at some point is pretty high, so we should be open to that possibility. A lot of what gets made right now may not be good, and it’s reasonable to say, “I don’t want any industrial music in my playlists when I’m discovering new things.” But we should guard against that hardening into a prejudice.
Rick: Exactly right.
Chris: Because there’s a lot of bad slop on LinkedIn. But if we close our hearts completely to AI writing, AI music, and the rest, we risk becoming the lesser Jimmy who threw away the wah-wah pedal.
Rick: We’d be missing an opportunity. One of the beautiful things about AI is that it democratizes the landscape. If you weren’t a great writer before, or you were afraid to pick up a pen, maybe getting comfortable with AI lets you express yourself in a way that wasn’t possible. Many more people may get to share their creative selves, maybe not so successfully in the beginning, but that’s better than being afraid to share what you think is beautiful, which is where most people are. Most people will tell you, “I’m not creative.” At some point, most people had someone tell them, “You can’t sing” or “Better if you didn’t do that” or “You’re not good at sports,” and they shut down. This is a tool that lets people who’ve shut down experiment in areas they’ve never considered. I’m excited to see what they come up with, because those are voices that would otherwise be silent.
People are hungry for something grounded and communal. It’s why they’re going to church and why people are reading the Bible. It’s the most in 70 years, especially among young people, and I think it’s a reaction to social media.

Chris: Can I give you a sci-fi scenario and get your reaction?
Rick: Please.
Chris: Imagine the AI gets so good that you’re reading things and thinking, “This is better than everything else. I get the human perspective.” You’re listening to music and thinking, “This is way better than Nine Inch Nails. This is the greatest thing.” Whatever media you consume, the AI has made it the best for you, and you’d choose it every time over the alternative. And here’s the catch, if it is one: all of it is completely personalized. The AI is making a feature film just for you every time, an album just for you every time, and you’re off on your own island experiencing a world of ideas and cultures, while every other human you know is on their own island experiencing something perfect for them. Am I describing utopia?
Rick: I don’t know. It’s like a dream. We all have our own dreams, and I don’t know that it would be better if we all shared the same ones. The idea of personalization is interesting, and I’m not against it. I think we’ll always have the choice, though maybe there will be a point where we choose personalization the way someone might always choose the vegetarian menu.
Chris: The dream comparison is the one I’ve used in my own mind when people share their AI text with me. It feels like someone describing their dream. Your own dreams are very interesting to you. When someone else describes theirs at length, you think, why are you telling me this? There may be people who can do it well, but usually it’s hard to care.
That, to me, is the big question. I think a purely personalized world has something dystopian about it. Maybe not for everything, and I wouldn’t want zero of it. It’s great to have personalized music in certain situations. But a world with no shared culture, where you aren’t participating in a larger world of ideas, pushing and pulling and acting back on the world, feels like we would have lost something important.
Rick: I agree, and we’re already kind of there without AI. When I was a kid, The Godfather came out, everyone I knew saw it, and then it won the Oscar for best picture. This year there will be 10 movies up for an Oscar, and you haven’t seen any of them. I haven’t. No one you know has. That’s not AI. The culture has bifurcated into this on-demand world, where you don’t just watch the three networks. You pick, and you binge-watch the thing you like.
Chris: So AI might not be a difference in kind, but a massive acceleration. Instead of a niche film that only a few people watch, you’re off in your own complete dreamland.
Rick: But things often have to go very far in one direction before the pendulum swings back. Vinyl is more popular than it’s been since it was the only format. People are hungry for something grounded and communal. It’s why they’re going to church and why people are reading the Bible. It’s the most in 70 years, especially among young people, and I think it’s a reaction to social media. Social media is so devoid of connection to anything that people are hungry for something real, or something timeless.
AI tools are in their infancy, and while the norms around their use and disclosure are evolving rapidly, we think it’s important to ask writers, creators, and thinkers about their work, their businesses, and how they intersect with where technology stands today. In Model Behavior, we’ll continue to ask candid questions about the tech industry, AI pet peeves, and how AI is affecting writers’ sense of identity and livelihoods. From anti-AI purists to power users, we’ll get into the prompts they choose, their tool stacks, or their 100% analog workflows. More soon.



This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

Hunter Harris is the creator of Hung Up, the twice-weekly Substack newsletter where she takes a forensic lens to our culture’s obsessions and her own. She says she and her audience of nearly 200,000 subscribers share the same “disease”—insatiability—and that they’re bonded by a specific tunnel vision: her willingness to write a dozen pieces about A Star Is Born or spend time tracking down the marriage license of Taylor Swift’s publicist, if that’s what curiosity demands. Hung Up is part cultural criticism, part late-night group chat, and an ongoing argument for why pop culture matters. Her chat, where paid subscribers debrief everything from season premieres to their own lives, has become one of the most devoted, lore-dense places on the internet and serves as a master class in how to turn an audience into a social world.
Harris grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she watched melodramas with her aunt, crime capers with her dad, and, at 12, wrote a letter to the local film critic disputing his review of The Other Boleyn Girl. In this season finale of Open Tab, she sat down with Substack’s head of new media, Hanne Winarsky, to talk about studying journalism (and thinking she might break the next Watergate), her four years at New York magazine’s Vulture, and launching Hung Up on Substack in 2020. They met at Trees Lounge inside the Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, one of Harris’s home theaters, sipped tequila gimlets, and filled in the rest.
Hanne: So you have subscription revenue as your core, but you also have a podcast, you do TV writing, you still do some freelance for legacy media, and you do some brand stuff. How do you think about the whole mixed-revenue stream, the business of Hung Up?
Hunter: The newsletter is my job. Everything else feels like something fun, something I feel curious about. But I do feel very seriously that people who read the newsletter are customers, and I am fulfilling my contract with them. I just think it’s the most disrespectful thing in the world to be like, “Okay, maybe it’ll come out, maybe it won’t.” Before I owe anyone else work, I owe them work—the readers. And then the brand stuff is just kind of fun. Sometimes it’s like working a different muscle. Like I’ll edit a TikTok and want to kill myself, because my thumbs are too big and my nails are too long to open CapCut. The podcast started as: I just want to have something with my best friend. And it all kind of feels like an ouroboros, where I’m talking about the same thing again and again. But there are people who read the newsletter but don’t listen to the podcast, and vice versa. And the TV stuff is maybe my dream. But if I could write my own series tomorrow, I would still keep the newsletter, because in the middle of the night I’m like, “I love a girl’s emotional support inner wrist tattoo,” and I need a place to say that.
Hanne: You’ve described yourself as having insane tunnel vision. That when you get one of these obsessions, you can really, really follow it. Why do you think that works for you and your audience?
Hunter: I think we just both have the same disease: being insatiable. I think that’s it. Part of it is growing up as an only child, where I just had to entertain myself a lot. And so I maybe will spend more time with something than other people did. The tunnel vision thing really came from one of my old editors who was like, “You have really bad tunnel vision.”
Hanne: Was it a compliment or an insult?
Hunter: No, it was an insult. She meant it. But then I was like, “Oh, yeah, I totally do.” In every part of my life.
Hanne: What’s the most embarrassing obsession that you’ve ever had tunnel vision about?
Hunter: Charlie Puth. I went through a big Charlie Puth phase. He really was the pop prince. Like, he should have been Justin Bieber of the next generation. And then there was one time that I went to see him in concert at Radio City, and I was singing along to every single song and did not mute my camera. And so everyone heard me singing along. One of my friends still talks about it to this day.
Hanne: How do you think about how much of yourself to bring into a celebrity profile?
Hunter: I think, none. In an ideal world you can get a sense of my curiosities, but it’s not about me. Whenever I read a profile that feels like too much about the writer, I’m like, okay, but what did George Clooney have to say?
And then there’s a real romance when you’re preparing for one, where you read everything about this person, everything they’ve ever said, and then you go into the interview and they are disappointing, just because you’ve built them up in your head. But that disappointment should not show up in the piece. There’s a real moment where you have to become very dispassionate. It’s almost like a breakup, because you really have to break up with your idea of someone and just tell the story as it happened.
Hanne: Is the disappointment because you’ve added something into the picture? Or is it always the same, that they’re more human than you thought?
Hunter: I think it’s just that they are human in general. It’s hard to get to know someone like Julia Roberts and be like, “Oh my god, she’s real. She’s a real person.” It’s honestly like when you go out on a date with someone. A little bit of air has just left, because now you’re real in front of me. You know when someone exists on a page for so long and then it happens, and it’s like: okay, we’re just two people talking.
Hanne: A lot of your writing in Hung Up weaves in your personal experience and relationships. What’s the internal thermometer about when you allow your personal life into your writing?
Hunter: The newsletter is written by me. At first I thought I wanted my friends to contribute and all of that. And then pretty quickly I was like, no. This is mine. I’m just such a perfectionist, I have to have my eyes on every single thing. I’ve grown to love that about the newsletter. I’m a star student, star employee, but a terrible boss. And I’m the only person deciding everything, which is nice.
Hanne: What’s your writing process actually like? You’ve mentioned a number of times that you wake up and you just have to write about something.
Hunter: Basically, yeah. I have a note in my phone of ideas that I think about when I wake up or when I go to sleep. Day to day, I’m quite strict about the scheduling. I have to be up, walk my dog, showered and at the desk by 9:30 at the latest. Then I’ll have a little lunch break, and in the afternoon when I can’t write anymore, I’ll watch a screener or go see a movie. And then I have a big burst of energy around 6, 7, or 8 p.m., and I’ll move locations, sit at the coffee table, and write there.
Hanne: You’re also doing the companion podcast for [the HBO medical drama] The Pitt. That seems like a slightly different muscle set.
Hunter: Something that I like about the newsletter that I hadn’t really considered before is that when I write something, everyone knows it’s coming from Hunter, who’s a Black woman, who’s 31, who lives in Brooklyn, who has a dog that’s a schnoodle but she won’t say that. She will say that she has a poodle mix, because schnoodle sounds insane.
When I was writing for Vulture, writing for a magazine, you don’t always have that context. There’d be times where I’d make a joke about SZA and someone would be like, “Oh my god, this white man is talking down to this Black woman.” It plays differently. With The Pitt podcast, it’s the first time in a while I’ve felt some of that, where people who listen don’t know anything else about me. I am myself, but I’m also kind of on my best behavior, because people might not get every one of my jokes.
Hanne: It sounds a little more like being on a stage than being in the living room hanging out with your Hung Up crew.
Hunter: Totally.
FOOTNOTES
Trees Lounge—Unexpected bar within Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.
The Other Boleyn Girl—Panned by the Tulsa World critic. Defended by a 12-year-old Hunter.
Vulture’s Gossip Girl recaps—introduced a Hunter to writing about pop culture on the internet.
The Zendaya cover story for GQ
Charlie Puth—Underrecognized “pop prince” and subject of Hunter’s most “embarrassing” tunnel vision.
The Pitt—Hunter co-hosts the official companion podcast to the hit show.
Ouroboros—Ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail. Hunter says her newsletter, podcast, and brand work exist in a loop.
Ask Polly—Written by Heather Havrilesky. Hunter’s North Star on Substack. “I could never be so raw, vulnerable, and also kind of moody and mischievous on the page.”
Friends with Money—Nicole Holofcener film in which all the characters are, in Hunter’s words, “absolutely rancid.”
Incredible movie about eating in bed—Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, and a bowl of carbonara in Heartburn, based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Nora Ephron.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. New episodes of Open Tab drop weekly through June. You can watch on YouTube, listen wherever you get your podcasts, and always find the full series here on Substack.



This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

In this week’s Open Tab, Australian-born, New York–based muckraker Lachlan Cartwright sat down with Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie to walk through two decades covering media, money, and power—from The Sun and the New York Post to executive editor of the National Enquirer, where he went from breaking news to becoming an anonymous source in one of the biggest political scandals of the decade. His New York Times Magazine cover story on the catch-and-kill operation that protected Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein took a year to write and earned him multimillion-dollar legal threats in the process. These days he runs Breaker, the twice-weekly media newsletter and podcast he founded after years of people telling him to strike out on his own—it’s tabloid flair paired with the standards of the broadsheets and, as he puts it, a healthy appetite for fun.
Hamish: You’re a newshound, a scoop-getter, a news-breaker, and a tabloid journalist of sorts.
Lachlan: Allegedly.
Hamish: Cut from the cloth of an old-school type of reporter. And that’s kind of special in today’s world, because lots of people are just random opinionators and mouthers-off.
Lachlan: I’m an old-school newshound. Some would say a muckraker. I spend a lot of time meeting and greeting and ingratiating and sourcing. I always say I’m only as good as my sources, and that’s how I get scoops—being out and about, going out into the world and finding out new information. And then coming back, standing it up, tapping it up. And as we would say, putting it in the paper, which is now a newsletter.
Hamish: You were the number two editor at the National Enquirer, and through your work there you discovered that they were essentially paying for stories so that they could kill those stories on behalf of some powerful figures: Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein.
Lachlan: That’s correct.
Hamish: Tell me, what was it like to write that story and have it out in the world? Because it was complicated, and it involved so much personal stuff and was a big risk for your journalism career.
Lachlan: And legally a big risk, because I was under, and still am, a nondisclosure agreement. That piece was easily the hardest piece I’ve ever had to write, and it wasn’t fun to write it. It’s fun now to have written it and to talk about it. I remember being at the ASMEs, the magazine awards, and it was right around the time that the indictment had come down against Donald Trump, the hush money indictment. I saw Jake Silverstein, the editor of the Times Magazine, there. I didn’t know him. I said, “G’day, mate. I think I’ve got a cracking yarn.” And he said, “Well, let’s follow up, and we’ll meet about it.” I sit down to write it and I thought, “I can’t do this.” I was getting out old files and I was looking through text messages to re-create scenes, and, as I write about in the piece, my father died suddenly during when all of this was happening. I just thought, I can’t go over this stuff again. It’s just too much for me. And for months, I just couldn’t get anything on the page. It actually took me a year to write. Willy Staley [story editor at the New York Times] said, “Why don’t we do this in chapters? You’re good at writing your column, your newsletter. Why don’t we write this in chapters?” And I finally had the confidence knowing that I didn’t have to file 10,000 words, I just had to file a chapter at a time. I sat down and I wrote the first chapter, and I thought, “Okay, I might be able to do this.” It went through the machinery of the Times. They go [para]graph by graph and give you the colonoscopy of fact checking. They call everyone, and they re-report basically the entire piece out. But it took a year for the whole piece to come together. And it’s easily one of the proudest moments I’ve had when it did finally publish and the whole story was out there.
Hamish: Can you explain for the average person what catch-and-kill actually looks like?
Lachlan: It wasn’t a term I was familiar with when I took the gig as executive editor of the National Enquirer. The first year was run-of-the-mill tabloid fare: Jen and Ben. True-crime yarns. Not Pulitzer Prize–winning stuff. But there were yarns we broke that moved the needle.
It was towards the end of that first year where I had a tip from a very good source who calls me on a Sunday and says, “Weinstein is being questioned over a groping allegation in Tribeca, and I can get you the girl.” I immediately called [National Enquirer editor in chief] Dylan Howard and I said, “I’ve got a cracking one here.” And Dylan just immediately said, “Who’s the source?” Something tweaked in me—Why are you just immediately going to that question, as opposed to how do we get this story across the line?” And it was the next day that the Daily News broke it.
After that, Dylan came into my office and said, “We need to offer her a five-figure amount for her story.” And I was like, “We had the scoop yesterday and we didn’t need to pay her. And now you want to give her money to get her story.” And I just remember thinking, “Something’s off with this whole thing.” She doesn’t want paying. She wanted to get the story out. We had the story yesterday.
Hamish: Why did you start Breaker?
Lachlan: You were telling me for years to strike out on my own as an independent media. You were at me for years. And guess what? You were right.
Hamish: Thank you.
Lachlan: At the time, I thought you were mental when you were like, “What are you doing at legacy?” And you were the bloke who kept saying—because you’ve got to remember, The Daily Beast had a newsletter called Confider, which turned out to be an industry must-read—“Why are you doing this for these people? Strike out on your own.” And you said that to me again when I went to the Hollywood Reporter. Which you were right. I should have just gone straight from The Daily Beast and struck out on my own.
I was freelancing, writing for Vanity Fair and THR and The Ankler, and I thought, I could keep freelancing or I could try and create something myself. And getting back to my late old man, he was 41 when he started his business. And this was right around that same age. And I thought, “F**k it. I’m entrepreneurial. Here is this opportunity to go off and do it.” What’s the worst thing that can happen? I could lose my life savings.
Hamish: But people respect you more for having done it, even if it doesn’t work out. You are actually improving your career prospects by being entrepreneurial in the first place, by showing you’re willing to do something bold and taking on that risk.
Lachlan: Look, my history has been a series of punts, of gambles. Moving to London at 22 and not knowing anyone. Nailing that and going to New York. But it’s been a series of punts, and most of them have paid off in a weird kind of way. And I think the news gods respect that, if you do take a punt. And starting Breaker was a punt. It’s easily the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m working harder than I’ve ever done—16-, 18-hour days, seven days a week. But I’m creating something that, from the readers I speak to and the subscribers I interact with, is special. It’s something that if it’s not out by 8:30 p.m. on a Tuesday and Thursday, they’re texting me, “Where is it? What’s going on with Breaker?”
Hamish: You were starting this company with a partner. It didn’t work out for whatever reasons. What was that aspect of it like for you?
Lachlan: We had a business that wasn’t growing, so that was problematic for obvious reasons. I’m in a runway situation. I have a certain runway of money, and if this business isn’t growing, I’m in a pickle. And that pickle is me sleeping rough. Things got very real. We had to have a real conversation, and that conversation resulted in him going off in one direction and me having to think very carefully about: how do I propel this business forward?
I said to myself, “I have to resurrect this, and I have the fall to do it. The clock is ticking.” And I thought three things. One, you have to put on a killer event. Two, you have to relaunch the pod with a stellar lineup. And three, you have to break stories that are impactful and consequential. If you do all three, you save the business. If you don’t, we are fucked. And guess what? Fear is one hell of a motivator. The second season of the Breaker pod, we launched with Joe Scarborough, we had Tina Brown, Janice Min, Jeff Fager, David Remnick. A stellar lineup. We went from being in dive bars to two-star Michelin restaurants. I then broke a number of massive yarns, including breaking the Air Puck story—the deal that Puck was acquiring Air Mail. I broke a Murdoch yarn that CNBC picked up. And I put on one hell of a downtown media party. The New York Times came and covered it, wrote a style section piece. And that three-pronged approach saved the business. It led to a wave of subscribers, it led to a wave of revenue, and it led to me getting to Christmas and thinking, “We’re good. We’re going to hit profitability by year one.” And we were able to announce just the other week that Breaker is profitable. And mate, there was a time I didn’t think we were gonna make it. There was a time I’d wake up in the middle of the night and paint the bathroom, 50 shades of puke. [Now] I can sit here in front of you and say, “I have a profitable business.”
Hamish: What do you think your dad would think of you in this situation?
Lachlan: I do think about what he would think, and he would get a kick out of it. I wish he was around to see it. He went off every day at 6 a.m.to Greensborough, in Melbourne, where his accountancy business was. He started his practice repping plumbers and tradies and ended it repping CEOs and footy stars. And I look at that as the trajectory of Breaker. I’m starting off small, and I have high hopes. And mate, I’ve had a ripper run. It’s not time to go at all, it’s f*****g far from it. It’s inspiring to me to think back to those last words that he gave me, which were “Do something you love. Just go off and f*****g do something you love.” And I love what I do every day. I meet the most amazing people. I get to tell the most amazing stories, and I’m very lucky.
FOOTNOTES
Tom & Jerry’s—Lachlan’s longtime haunt. 288 Elizabeth St., New York City
Breaker—Lachlan’s twice-weekly media newsletter and podcast covering what’s happening in media, power, and culture in downtown Manhattan and beyond.
Sulzberger barbecue—exclusive annual gathering hosted by the New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger in upstate New York. Where the Breaker fedora made its debut.
Yarn—a story, a scoop, a tale worth telling.
The National Enquirer—Lachlan was executive editor under Dylan Howard. Owned by American Media Inc. (AMI).
Dino the doorman—The AMI source who claimed Trump had a love child, passed a polygraph on secondhand information, and was paid $30,000 for a story that never ran. The first catch-and-kill Lachlan says he witnessed firsthand.
National Enquirer Shielded Donald Trump From Playboy Model’s Affair Allegation—Wall Street Journal story for which Lachlan was a key anonymous source. He fed the reporters the term “catch and kill” as cover. It ran four days before the election.
What I Saw Working at the National Inquirer—NYT Magazine exposé published in April 2024. Lachlan was under a 13-page NDA while he wrote it.
Jake Silverstein—Editor of the New York Times Magazine, whom Lachlan approached cold at the National Magazine Awards after the Trump hush money indictment came down.
Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, and Ronan Farrow—reporters who blew the Weinstein story open in 2017. Their work is what prompted AMI to send Lachlan the legal threat that backfired and convinced him to start talking.
Graydon Carter’s Air Mail—its acquisition by Puck was one of Lachlan’s Breaker scoops.
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology—Where Lachlan studied journalism, after completing a taxing entrance exam whose results were published in the newspaper. His mom drove to a 7-Eleven the night before to get the early edition.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. New episodes of Open Tab drop weekly through June. You can watch on YouTube, listen wherever you get your podcasts, and always find the full series here on Substack.



This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

Joanna Coles has spent her formidable career at the center of media: London’s Fleet Street in the ’80s, New York magazine, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and eventually the chief content officer role overseeing Hearst’s entire global magazine portfolio. She knows intimately what legacy media organizations have looked like at every stage of their life cycle and spent years “managing decline” from the inside. Two years ago, as Chief Creative and Content Officer, she helped take over The Daily Beast and bring it to Substack, where it now operates a suite of newsletters and podcasts. She also writes PRIMAL SCREAM with Joanna Coles, her own publication covering politics and power and where she co-hosts and sends out The Daily Beast Podcast to an audience of over 70,000 subscribers. Joanna invited us for a cup of tea and a slice of cake at Tea & Sympathy, a West Village institution that has been importing British calm to Manhattan for over 30 years. There, she and Substack’s head of new media, Hanne Winarsky, talked about the golden age of the glossy mag, the two questions Cosmo readers have never stopped asking, and what life looks like on the other side of the old media order.
Hanne: For somebody growing up today in journalism school who might not know what old newsrooms were like, what was the culture?
Joanna: Well, I mean, first of all, they were incredibly noisy because you had typewriters. And I am not exaggerating when I say that you would get seven pieces of paper, seven pieces of carbon paper. You would put it into the typewriter, and you would have to think very carefully about what you wanted to say, because if you made a mistake, you had to either rip the whole thing out and start all over again or you had to correct it seven times. And you would have what was called Tipp-Ex whiteout, where you had to cross it out. So there was more planning ahead of what you were going to write. It was fantastically noisy. Then computers came in, and half the newsroom, largely men, would say, “Well, I’m not going to use a computer. That’s ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong with a typewriter.” And of course, those people just disappeared out of the newsroom. But it was a very fun, lively culture, and you felt like what you were doing was important, because it was a way of getting information to people. And it was tribal, so people read The Guardian, and that was their tribe. They read the Daily Telegraph or the [London] Times, and that was their tribe. And now of course, we’re inundated with individual voices coming at us, which you don’t really have a sense of their tribe necessarily. Of course, you know, there are lots of newspapers still going, but it’s not quite the journey that was curated for you by the older editors.
Hanne: It was presumably pretty male-dominated at the time, those newsrooms?
Joanna: It was very male-dominated. I worked on Fleet Street when I was working on the Daily Telegraph, the legendary Fleet Street. So you had the high courts at one end, you had St. Paul’s [Cathedral] at the other, and in between you had the big British newspapers. And so at the end of the day, all the journalists would roll out of the various papers and congregate in two or three pubs, the best of which was called El Vino, which is still there. But the crazy thing about it was—and this was in the ’80s—that women weren’t allowed to order or pay for drinks.
Hanne: That’s unbelievable.
Joanna: Isn’t it? Of course, now I look back on it through the lens of, you know, feminism, and think: how outrageous. But at the time, me and the smattering of girlfriends I had in the newsroom were like, “Well, this is great.”
Joanna: When I was editor of Cosmo, we got two questions all the time, consistently the entire time I was there, and this is probably going back through time immemorial, through Helen Gurley Brown’s days, which were “How do I have an orgasm?” and “How do I ask for a raise?” Every month, my monthly mailbag, those were the two dominant questions. So those were the two things we were trying to answer.
Hanne: So it wasn’t changing the direction, actually. You were listening to what was already being asked for and leaning more into that.
Joanna: Well, I’m assuming those questions came in before I was there. And it wasn’t “How do I give my husband or my boyfriend an orgasm?” It was like, “How do I have one?” And then it was like, “How do I make more money?” Because there was a sense in which women understood they were probably being underpaid—which they were—and they wanted to have the power to ask for something, and be successful at it.
Hanne: When you left Hearst you said, “My route is being recalculated.” What did you mean?
Joanna: The impact of digital on a magazine company was enormous, and I was, in essence, doing what a lot of editors were doing, which is managing decline. And I have managed decline well. We had declined, in terms of market share, probably less than other people. But at a certain point, there’s a moment when you want to start leaning into growth and doing something fresh. And I had been at Hearst for 12 years, and it felt like, oh, there’s a gap in the clouds here where I can sort of take off. My kids were older, and I’d had an absolute blast, but it wasn’t going to last. You know? I think everybody in magazines knew there was a train driving straight at you called digital, and it was going to mow you down, and it was much less fun than it had been.
Hanne: If you’ve worked hard at a professional career you always have moments where something is changing direction in a way you didn’t expect, or perhaps you did but you weren’t ready for. And I love that idea of leaning into it instead of just accepting it.
Joanna: It’s very easy to get stuck. You see people get stuck all the time, and then you see it’s too late for them to change, and you can’t get out. And so I had a moment in the clouds when I could get out. I had a fantastic time at Hearst. I loved working there. But these are hard jobs, and you can’t build the railroad fast enough to keep the train from mowing you down. Or at least that’s what it felt like in the moment.
And now these magazines don’t exist, you know? They just don’t—the physical product, for the most part, doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s not as luxurious, and it’s not needed as much because it’s impossible to compete with the phone. The phone is a fabulous device. These people that say, “Oh my god, the phones.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” The phone keeps us connected. It’s fantastic. There’s so many ideas in there. I can do everything on my phone. It’s incredible. And so to keep sort of running after the phone with an old magazine, sort of saying, “It used to be better in my day”—it’s not true. The world has changed. And you want to be part of that change.
Hanne: When you look at the media landscape today, where do you see the most innovation happening?
Joanna: Well, I think the most innovation is happening on platforms like Substack and YouTube, because people are figuring out what works, what people tune in to. And people are feeling more confident in their voices, I think, which means we hear from a lot of voices that we don’t normally hear from, because they’re mediated by media. And some of them are alarming, and some of them are really interesting, and I love the fact that you can get your own audience by having an authentic voice.
[Before] there just weren’t these places for individual voices to go, and so they were trapped within an old media ecosystem that couldn’t pay them enough, that wouldn’t give them direct connection with the reader. And now we have this incredible set of platforms where you get direct connection with the audience. And you get to do what you’re good at without the heavy hand of corporate America squashing you down, which is often what happens.
Hanne: Do you find your voice changing now that it’s on Substack, that you’re unleashed in a different way?
Joanna: A little bit. For me, Substack is a bit like early Twitter. I was a big adopter of Twitter at the beginning. I absolutely loved it. It felt like you were having a conversation with writers. You could discover all sorts of new voices. And since Elon Musk’s taken over, it’s just completely changed. You get this kind of endless negativity coming in, which doesn’t even feel real. It’s not relevant to me. It doesn’t feel real or useful. Whereas Substack, actually, you feel like, “Oh, I can have a conversation with this person. I love the way this person writes. Oh, I can reach out directly to them.” So you have this sense of a real directness of content, which is kind of high.
FOOTNOTES
Tea & Sympathy, 108 Greenwich Ave., New York—Cozy British tearoom and shop owned by Nicola Perry and her daughter, Audrey Kavanagh-Dowsett who produces and publishes the shop’s interview series on Substack.
Ginger cake—served warm with custard.
The Junior Yorkshire Post—where Joanna published her first piece at age 10, for which she was paid £2.
The Spectator—where Joanna began her journalism career in 1984.
Fleet Street—London’s historic newspaper row. Home to the Daily Telegraph, where Joanna worked in the late 1980s, along with most of the major British national papers.
El Vino, 47 Fleet Street—Storied wine bar, still open.
Emma Tucker—editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal. She and Joanna covered the same IRA bombing in their early 20s.
Helen Gurley Brown—Cosmo’s transformative longtime editor. Joanna: “She really re-created the modern template for a magazine. Vanity Fair wouldn’t have existed without Helen Gurley Brown, I don’t think.”
E. Jean Carroll—longtime Elle magazine advice columnist. Writes Ask E. Jean.
Michael Wolff—author of Fire and Fury and three subsequent books on Donald Trump. Writes HOWL. He and Joanna co-host a podcast three times a week.
Andy Borowitz—longtime New Yorker satirist, later let go. Now writes The Borowitz Report on Substack.
The Bold Type—scripted TV series on that was loosely inspired by Joanna’s career.
New episodes of Open Tab drop weekly through June. You can watch on YouTube, listen wherever you get your podcasts, and always find the full series here on Substack.



This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

We sat down with writer, editor, photographer, and futurist Kevin Kelly at the Interval at Long Now in San Francisco’s Fort Mason. Part cocktail bar, part science-centric museum to the future, the Interval houses an eight-foot-tall model of the solar system, artwork by the musician Brian Eno, and prototypes for the Long Now Foundation’s most ambitious project: a clock being built inside a West Texas mountain, designed to keep time without intervention for 10,000 years. Kevin serves on the board of the organization, which believes that a civilization seriously anticipating a long future would think and build very differently.
Kelly is also the founding executive editor of Wired, where he spent the better part of the 1990s helping people understand technology as culture. Before that, he was a key editor and publisher at the Whole Earth Review and a central figure at the Whole Earth Catalog, the legendary tools-and-ideas resource that shaped a generation of independent builders and thinkers from the late 1960s through the 1980s. He is the originator of the “1,000 true fans” theory—the idea that a creator with direct access to their audience needs only 1,000 people willing to buy anything they make to sustain a living—one of the most practically influential ideas in independent media. In his conversation with Substack’s head of new media, Hanne Winarsky, he talks about his journey through tech and media and the subjects he writes about for his Substack audience at his newsletter, KK: taking a prototyping approach to life, why optimism is a daily practice, and some guesses for where we’re headed next.
Hanne: There was no web at the very launch of Wired?
Kevin: The web happened within a year or so of Wired. The first couple of years we were working on it, it was going to be a paper magazine with an online presence. So we started Wired Digital, which was actually in a separate building, and we developed a whole bunch of editors and people, and they were inventing what the media would be like. One of the questions that was really unclear to everybody was frequency. How often do we have to update this? We’re doing a monthly magazine. Are we going to have to update this every month?
Hanne: Oh my gosh. Yes, and then some.
Kevin: The thing that a lot of people did not believe was that people would read online. And secondly, people don’t remember, but in the ’80s, there were a lot of people saying that writing was over. Nobody was going to write. What we learned from the web was: no. People are going to write. Almost any of us writes far, far more words per day than our grandparents ever did. We’re all writers, really.
Hanne: And there’s that optimism again. Part of your thinking about communities and audiences at Wired coalesced into an essay around 2008 called “1,000 True Fans”—an idea that in a lot of ways is very much connected to what Substack is today. Can you describe where it came from?
Kevin: The premise is that if you have direct contact with your audience or your customers, you don’t need millions of them to make a living. If you have a label or a publisher or a studio in between you, then you might need millions. But if you take those away and go directly to them, you just have a much more feasible number to get to. You get $100 per year from 1,000 true fans, you can make it. I defined a true fan as somebody who would purchase anything you made. When I introduced this idea, there weren’t any examples of anybody I could find who was doing that organically.
Hanne: Was your hypothesis at the time that there would be a lot more people doing this?
Kevin: Yeah, I thought the arithmetic made sense. Even the weirdest, wackiest, esoteric idea that only appeals to one in a million people, with 8 billion people in the world, there’s still a thousand people who are going to be into your weird thing. The challenge is going to be finding them and making that connection. I think that’s where the next technology is going to be useful—maybe AI—that would allow you to find your thousand true fans.
Kevin: I talk about inevitabilities in technology. A lot of what we have is inevitable given the whole system. AI is inevitable. Any civilization anywhere in the galaxy that invented electricity and steam engines and motors is going to make AI. But the character of the AI is not inevitable. Quadrupeds as an animal are inevitable on any kind of planet with our kind of gravity, but a zebra is not. The specificity is not inevitable. How it shows up, the particulars, are completely up to us. We have a choice in the particulars, and those choices make a big difference. Who owns AI? Is it public? Is it international? Is it closed? Is it open? How is it financed? All those choices are choices we have. But AI itself is inevitable. Those minds are going to keep coming.
Life is going to continue on. There’s almost nothing we humans could do to eradicate life on the planet. But we can still manage natural systems for our benefit. The same thing with technology. I think we do have to manage it and garden it and steer it. The way to steer technology is through use. You want to embrace technologies and use them, because that’s the only way you get to steer them. If you prohibit them or ban them or refuse them, you don’t get to steer.
Hanne: It’s also the only way you start impacting the particulars, the things you actually control.
Kevin: We cannot think our way to the particulars. I call it “thinkism”—this idea that just thinking about things will solve stuff, [that] thinking about technology, we can figure out what it’s good and bad for. We can’t. We have to actually use it.
Hanne: This systems-level thinking, where do you think it came from? Were you just born with it?
Kevin: I don’t think it began that way. I think it’s something I learned. The way I would describe it now is this prototype approach to the world. What we want to think about is our use of social media right now—we’re still prototyping it. And the idea of prototyping your life rather than deciding what you’re going to do for the rest of your life. You try it for a couple of years and you go on. You prototype everything out of cardboard first. You make one to throw away, as the makers say. The first one you’re just going to throw away anyway.
I’ve collapsed some of that into my idea of “protopia.” We aren’t headed to utopia, where everything’s fine. We’re going to come to a world where things are a little tiny bit better, and we’re just incrementally prototyping our way forward. No massive jumps. Just 1% better, 1% better. That means there could be 49% crap in the world, 49% harm, and everybody knows it. I can make a long list of all the things wrong. But there could be 51% good. That 2% difference is hardly even visible.
Hanne: But it is. We are inching incrementally, prototyping, learning, perhaps painfully. It’s a combination of the immediate now and the very long term. The only way to do anything forever is to do something now, concrete, over and over.
Kevin: You sail forward.
FOOTNOTES
The Interval at Long Now—Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, San Francisco.
The Clock of the Long Now—built inside a mountain in West Texas, designed to tick for 10,000 years.
Jeff Bezos—contributed $42 million towards the Clock of the Long Now. Kevin cites him on the competitive advantage of thinking in longer time horizons.
The Whole Earth Catalog—Iconic counterculture magazine and product catalog. Described by Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford commencement address as “sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.”
Woodstock—where Kevin first encountered the Whole Earth Catalog, in a bookstore, in 1969.
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855)—the book that sent Kevin wandering.
The WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link)—one of the earliest online communities, co-founded by Stephen Brand and Kevin. Among the first places humans encountered flame wars, trolling, and people living with completely different online personas.
The first Artificial Life conference (ALife I)— Held at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987, the scientific gathering launched Kevin’s first book. He attended as a journalist and posted live notes to the WELL, “live-blogging before blogging.”
Louis Rossetto—co-founder of Wired, who recruited Kevin with the pitch that the magazine should feel “like it’s been mailed back from the future.”
Wired—launched in March 1993. Kevin served as founding executive editor until 1999. His current title is Senior Maverick.
“1,000 True Fans”—Kevin’s 2008 essay. The math: 1,000 fans who each spend $100 a year = a living.
Kraig Adams—Kevin’s 1,000 true fans example in action. Adams embarks on silent hikes with a drone following him and now sells tickets for fans to walk alongside him in person.
What Technology Wants (2010)—Kevin’s book arguing that technology is not separate from nature but an extension of it. Home of the concept of “the technium,” the self-organizing seventh kingdom of life.
Thinkism—Kevin’s word for the mistaken belief that thinking hard about a technology is sufficient to understand it. He thinks you only get to steer a technology by using it.
Protopia—Kevin’s concept of incremental progress. Not utopia (everything is fine) or dystopia (everything is terrible), but a world that is 1% better, year over year, through persistent prototyping.
Finite and Infinite Games (James Carse, 1986)—A guide to choosing optimism. Finite games have winners and losers and fixed rules; infinite games exist only to keep being played, with as many players as possible. Kevin suggests choosing infinite games wherever you can.
Minority Report (2002)—the Steven Spielberg film for which Kevin served as a futurist adviser.
New episodes of Open Tab drop weekly through June. You can watch on YouTube, listen wherever you get your podcasts, and always find the full series here on Substack.



This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com