Afleveringen
-
Hunter Harris is the creator of Hung Up, the twice-weekly Substack newsletter where she takes a forensic lens to our cultureâs obsessions and her own. She says she and her audience of nearly 200,000 subscribers share the same âdiseaseââinsatiabilityâand that theyâre 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 Swiftâs publicist, if thatâs 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 Substackâs 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 magazineâs Vulture, and launching Hung Up on Substack in 2020. They met at Trees Lounge inside the Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, one of Harrisâs 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 itâs the most disrespectful thing in the world to be like, âOkay, maybe itâll come out, maybe it wonât.â Before I owe anyone else work, I owe them workâthe readers. And then the brand stuff is just kind of fun. Sometimes itâs like working a different muscle. Like Iâll 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 Iâm talking about the same thing again and again. But there are people who read the newsletter but donât 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 Iâm like, âI love a girlâs emotional support inner wrist tattoo,â and I need a place to say that.
Hanne: Youâve 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 thatâs 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, âYou have really bad tunnel vision.â
Hanne: Was it a compliment or an insult?
Hunter: No, it was an insult. She meant it. But then I was like, âOh, yeah, I totally do.â In every part of my life.
Hanne: Whatâs the most embarrassing obsession that youâve 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 itâs not about me. Whenever I read a profile that feels like too much about the writer, Iâm like, okay, but what did George Clooney have to say?
And then thereâs a real romance when youâre preparing for one, where you read everything about this person, everything theyâve ever said, and then you go into the interview and they are disappointing, just because youâve built them up in your head. But that disappointment should not show up in the piece. Thereâs a real moment where you have to become very dispassionate. Itâs 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 youâve added something into the picture? Or is it always the same, that theyâre more human than you thought?
Hunter: I think itâs just that they are human in general. Itâs hard to get to know someone like Julia Roberts and be like, âOh my god, sheâs real. Sheâs a real person.â Itâs honestly like when you go out on a date with someone. A little bit of air has just left, because now youâre real in front of me. You know when someone exists on a page for so long and then it happens, and itâs like: okay, weâre just two people talking.
Hanne: A lot of your writing in Hung Up weaves in your personal experience and relationships. Whatâs 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. Iâm just such a perfectionist, I have to have my eyes on every single thing. Iâve grown to love that about the newsletter. Iâm a star student, star employee, but a terrible boss. And Iâm the only person deciding everything, which is nice.
Hanne: Whatâs your writing process actually like? Youâve 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, Iâm 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 Iâll have a little lunch break, and in the afternoon when I canât write anymore, Iâll 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 Iâll move locations, sit at the coffee table, and write there.
Hanne: Youâre 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 hadnât really considered before is that when I write something, everyone knows itâs coming from Hunter, whoâs a Black woman, whoâs 31, who lives in Brooklyn, who has a dog thatâs a schnoodle but she wonât 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 donât always have that context. Thereâd be times where Iâd make a joke about SZA and someone would be like, âOh my god, this white man is talking down to this Black woman.â It plays differently. With The Pitt podcast, itâs the first time in a while Iâve felt some of that, where people who listen donât know anything else about me. I am myself, but Iâm 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 LoungeâUnexpected bar within Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.
The Other Boleyn GirlâPanned by the Tulsa World critic. Defended by a 12-year-old Hunter.
Vultureâs Gossip Girl recapsâintroduced a Hunter to writing about pop culture on the internet.
The Zendaya cover story for GQ
Charlie PuthâUnderrecognized âpop princeâ and subject of Hunterâs most âembarrassingâ tunnel vision.
The PittâHunter co-hosts the official companion podcast to the hit show.
OuroborosâAncient symbol of a snake eating its own tail. Hunter says her newsletter, podcast, and brand work exist in a loop.
Ask PollyâWritten by Heather Havrilesky. Hunterâs North Star on Substack. âI could never be so raw, vulnerable, and also kind of moody and mischievous on the page.â
Friends with MoneyâNicole Holofcener film in which all the characters are, in Hunterâs words, âabsolutely rancid.â
Incredible movie about eating in bedâMeryl 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 weekâs Open Tab, Australian-born, New Yorkâbased muckraker Lachlan Cartwright sat down with Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie to walk through two decades covering media, money, and powerâfrom 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 ownâitâs tabloid flair paired with the standards of the broadsheets and, as he puts it, a healthy appetite for fun.
Hamish: Youâre 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 thatâs kind of special in todayâs world, because lots of people are just random opinionators and mouthers-off.
Lachlan: Iâm 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 Iâm only as good as my sources, and thatâs how I get scoopsâbeing 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: Thatâs 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 Iâve ever had to write, and it wasnât fun to write it. Itâs 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 didnât know him. I said, âGâday, mate. I think Iâve got a cracking yarn.â And he said, âWell, letâs follow up, and weâll meet about it.â I sit down to write it and I thought, âI canât do this.â 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 canât go over this stuff again. Itâs just too much for me. And for months, I just couldnât get anything on the page. It actually took me a year to write. Willy Staley [story editor at the New York Times] said, âWhy donât we do this in chapters? Youâre good at writing your column, your newsletter. Why donât we write this in chapters?â And I finally had the confidence knowing that I didnât 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, âOkay, I might be able to do this.â 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 itâs easily one of the proudest moments Iâve 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 wasnât 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 Prizeâwinning 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, âWeinstein is being questioned over a groping allegation in Tribeca, and I can get you the girl.â I immediately called [National Enquirer editor in chief] Dylan Howard and I said, âIâve got a cracking one here.â And Dylan just immediately said, âWhoâs the source?â Something tweaked in meâWhy are you just immediately going to that question, as opposed to how do we get this story across the line?â And it was the next day that the Daily News broke it.
After that, Dylan came into my office and said, âWe need to offer her a five-figure amount for her story.â And I was like, âWe had the scoop yesterday and we didnât need to pay her. And now you want to give her money to get her story.â And I just remember thinking, âSomethingâs off with this whole thing.â She doesnât 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, âWhat are you doing at legacy?â And you were the bloke who kept sayingâbecause youâve got to remember, The Daily Beast had a newsletter called Confider, which turned out to be an industry must-readââWhy are you doing this for these people? Strike out on your own.â 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, âF**k it. Iâm entrepreneurial. Here is this opportunity to go off and do it.â Whatâs 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 doesnât work out. You are actually improving your career prospects by being entrepreneurial in the first place, by showing youâre 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 itâs 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. Itâs easily the best thing Iâve ever done. Iâm working harder than Iâve ever doneâ16-, 18-hour days, seven days a week. But Iâm creating something that, from the readers I speak to and the subscribers I interact with, is special. Itâs something that if itâs not out by 8:30 p.m. on a Tuesday and Thursday, theyâre texting me, âWhere is it? Whatâs going on with Breaker?â
Hamish: You were starting this company with a partner. It didnât work out for whatever reasons. What was that aspect of it like for you?
Lachlan: We had a business that wasnât growing, so that was problematic for obvious reasons. Iâm in a runway situation. I have a certain runway of money, and if this business isnât growing, Iâm 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, âI have to resurrect this, and I have the fall to do it. The clock is ticking.â 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 donât, 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 storyâthe 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, âWeâre good. Weâre going to hit profitability by year one.â And we were able to announce just the other week that Breaker is profitable. And mate, there was a time I didnât think we were gonna make it. There was a time Iâd 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, âI have a profitable business.â
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. Iâm starting off small, and I have high hopes. And mate, Iâve had a ripper run. Itâs not time to go at all, itâs f*****g far from it. Itâs inspiring to me to think back to those last words that he gave me, which were âDo something you love. Just go off and f*****g do something you love.â And I love what I do every day. I meet the most amazing people. I get to tell the most amazing stories, and Iâm very lucky.
FOOTNOTES
Tom & JerryâsâLachlanâs longtime haunt. 288 Elizabeth St., New York City
BreakerâLachlanâs twice-weekly media newsletter and podcast covering whatâs happening in media, power, and culture in downtown Manhattan and beyond.
Sulzberger barbecueâexclusive annual gathering hosted by the New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger in upstate New York. Where the Breaker fedora made its debut.
Yarnâa story, a scoop, a tale worth telling.
The National EnquirerâLachlan was executive editor under Dylan Howard. Owned by American Media Inc. (AMI).
Dino the doormanâThe 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 Modelâs Affair AllegationâWall Street Journal story for which Lachlan was a key anonymous source. He fed the reporters the term âcatch and killâ as cover. It ran four days before the election.
What I Saw Working at the National InquirerâNYT Magazine exposĂ© published in April 2024. Lachlan was under a 13-page NDA while he wrote it.
Jake SilversteinâEditor 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 Farrowâreporters 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 Carterâs Air Mailâits acquisition by Puck was one of Lachlanâs Breaker scoops.
Royal Melbourne Institute of TechnologyâWhere 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 -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
-
Joanna Coles has spent her formidable career at the center of media: Londonâs Fleet Street in the â80s, New York magazine, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and eventually the chief content officer role overseeing Hearstâs entire global magazine portfolio. She knows intimately what legacy media organizations have looked like at every stage of their life cycle and spent years âmanaging declineâ 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 Substackâs 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, âWell, Iâm not going to use a computer. Thatâs ridiculous. Thereâs nothing wrong with a typewriter.â 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, weâre inundated with individual voices coming at us, which you donât really have a sense of their tribe necessarily. Of course, you know, there are lots of newspapers still going, but itâs 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. Paulâs [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 wasâand this was in the â80sâthat women werenât allowed to order or pay for drinks.
Hanne: Thatâs unbelievable.
Joanna: Isnât 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, âWell, this is great.â
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 Brownâs days, which were âHow do I have an orgasm?â and âHow do I ask for a raise?â 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 wasnât changing the direction, actually. You were listening to what was already being asked for and leaning more into that.
Joanna: Well, Iâm assuming those questions came in before I was there. And it wasnât âHow do I give my husband or my boyfriend an orgasm?â It was like, âHow do I have one?â And then it was like, âHow do I make more money?â Because there was a sense in which women understood they were probably being underpaidâwhich they wereâand they wanted to have the power to ask for something, and be successful at it.
Hanne: When you left Hearst you said, âMy route is being recalculated.â 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, thereâs 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, thereâs a gap in the clouds here where I can sort of take off. My kids were older, and Iâd had an absolute blast, but it wasnât 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 youâve worked hard at a professional career you always have moments where something is changing direction in a way you didnât expect, or perhaps you did but you werenât ready for. And I love that idea of leaning into it instead of just accepting it.
Joanna: Itâs very easy to get stuck. You see people get stuck all the time, and then you see itâs too late for them to change, and you canât 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 canât build the railroad fast enough to keep the train from mowing you down. Or at least thatâs what it felt like in the moment.
And now these magazines donât exist, you know? They just donâtâthe physical product, for the most part, doesnât exist anymore, and itâs not as luxurious, and itâs not needed as much because itâs impossible to compete with the phone. The phone is a fabulous device. These people that say, âOh my god, the phones.â Iâm like, âWhat are you talking about?â The phone keeps us connected. Itâs fantastic. Thereâs so many ideas in there. I can do everything on my phone. Itâs incredible. And so to keep sort of running after the phone with an old magazine, sort of saying, âIt used to be better in my dayââitâs 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 donât normally hear from, because theyâre 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 werenât these places for individual voices to go, and so they were trapped within an old media ecosystem that couldnât pay them enough, that wouldnât 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 youâre 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 itâs on Substack, that youâre 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 Muskâs taken over, itâs just completely changed. You get this kind of endless negativity coming in, which doesnât even feel real. Itâs not relevant to me. It doesnât feel real or useful. Whereas Substack, actually, you feel like, âOh, I can have a conversation with this person. I love the way this person writes. Oh, I can reach out directly to them.â So you have this sense of a real directness of content, which is kind of high.
FOOTNOTES
Tea & Sympathy, 108 Greenwich Ave., New YorkâCozy British tearoom and shop owned by Nicola Perry and her daughter, Audrey Kavanagh-Dowsett who produces and publishes the shopâs interview series on Substack.
Ginger cakeâserved warm with custard.
The Junior Yorkshire Postâwhere Joanna published her first piece at age 10, for which she was paid ÂŁ2.
The Spectatorâwhere Joanna began her journalism career in 1984.
Fleet StreetâLondonâs 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 StreetâStoried wine bar, still open.
Emma Tuckerâeditor in chief of the Wall Street Journal. She and Joanna covered the same IRA bombing in their early 20s.
Helen Gurley BrownâCosmoâs transformative longtime editor. Joanna: âShe really re-created the modern template for a magazine. Vanity Fair wouldnât have existed without Helen Gurley Brown, I donât think.â
E. Jean Carrollâlongtime Elle magazine advice columnist. Writes Ask E. Jean.
Michael Wolffâauthor 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 Borowitzâlongtime New Yorker satirist, later let go. Now writes The Borowitz Report on Substack.
The Bold Typeâscripted TV series on that was loosely inspired by Joannaâs 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 Franciscoâs 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 Foundationâs 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 â1,000 true fansâ theoryâthe idea that a creator with direct access to their audience needs only 1,000 people willing to buy anything they make to sustain a livingâone of the most practically influential ideas in independent media. In his conversation with Substackâs 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 weâre 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? Weâre 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 donât remember, but in the â80s, 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. Weâre all writers, really.
Hanne: And thereâs that optimism again. Part of your thinking about communities and audiences at Wired coalesced into an essay around 2008 called â1,000 True Fansââan 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 donât 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 werenât 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, thereâs 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 thatâs where the next technology is going to be usefulâmaybe AIâthat 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. Thereâs 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 thatâs the only way you get to steer them. If you prohibit them or ban them or refuse them, you donât get to steer.
Hanne: Itâs 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 âthinkismââthis idea that just thinking about things will solve stuff, [that] thinking about technology, we can figure out what itâs good and bad for. We canât. 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 donât think it began that way. I think itâs 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 nowâweâre still prototyping it. And the idea of prototyping your life rather than deciding what youâre 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 youâre just going to throw away anyway.
Iâve collapsed some of that into my idea of âprotopia.â We arenât headed to utopia, where everythingâs fine. Weâre going to come to a world where things are a little tiny bit better, and weâre 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. Itâs 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 NowâFort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, San Francisco.
The Clock of the Long Nowâbuilt inside a mountain in West Texas, designed to tick for 10,000 years.
Jeff Bezosâcontributed $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 CatalogâIconic counterculture magazine and product catalog. Described by Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford commencement address as âsort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.â
Woodstockâwhere Kevin first encountered the Whole Earth Catalog, in a bookstore, in 1969.
Walt Whitmanâs Leaves of Grass (1855)âthe book that sent Kevin wandering.
The WELL (Whole Earth âLectronic Link)âone 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)â Held at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987, the scientific gathering launched Kevinâs first book. He attended as a journalist and posted live notes to the WELL, âlive-blogging before blogging.â
Louis Rossettoâco-founder of Wired, who recruited Kevin with the pitch that the magazine should feel âlike itâs been mailed back from the future.â
Wiredâlaunched in March 1993. Kevin served as founding executive editor until 1999. His current title is Senior Maverick.
â1,000 True FansââKevinâs 2008 essay. The math: 1,000 fans who each spend $100 a year = a living.
Kraig AdamsâKevinâs 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)âKevinâs book arguing that technology is not separate from nature but an extension of it. Home of the concept of âthe technium,â the self-organizing seventh kingdom of life.
ThinkismâKevinâs 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.
ProtopiaâKevinâs 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)âA 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)âthe 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 -
In episode 3 of Open Tab, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie shared a few rounds with filmmaker and tech journalist Ashlee Vance at Fredâs Place, a longtime neighborhood dive in Mountain View just minutes from where the technology that gave Silicon Valley its name was born. After two decades covering tech for major publications, Ashlee circled the globe for Hello World, Bloombergâs travel-tech documentary series exploring âthe freshest, weirdest tech creationsâ and introducing viewers to âthe beautiful freaks behind them.â That same pull toward techâs biggest risk-takers also led him to write a bestselling biography of Elon Musk, based on months of interviews and unusually direct accessâa profile Musk first praised as â95% accurateâ before turning on it at publication.
With Core Memory , the media company he founded and now runs on Substack, Ashlee is still writing, reporting, and making films, but with his own shop and team. He says his work gives audiences a window into where the world is going six or seven years before the rest of the culture catches up. In his conversation with Hamish, he talks about what it actually takes to get close to a subject, why he walked away from what he called the best job in media, and the stories and formats heâs building as the bet seems to be paying off.
CORE MEMORY
Started: 2025
Subscribers: Thousands of paid (orange checkmark bestseller)
Format: Newsletter, podcast, video series, documentary films
Team: A crew of writers, producers, editors, and a social media team, led by Ashlee alongside a COO, a chief creative officer, and an operations lead
Extensions and verticals: Multiple writers producing regular newsletter sends across beats; podcast; merch; feature documentary projects in production, including an upcoming Neuralink documentary produced and self-funded through the company
Hamish: Why are we here at Fredâs Place in Mountain View?
Ashlee: I spent most of my early 20s in the Tenderloin [in San Francisco] bonding with dive bars. It was part of my lifestyle. Fredâs has been here for about 60 years. They go back to the â50s. And down the road, probably about a mile from here, is where Fairchild Semiconductor wasâwhich was like the first real semiconductor company. Thereâs always been this part of Silicon Valley culture that I like, which is they were boozers. As the chip industry was starting to explode, they were pushing the limits of physics, they were pushing the limits of chemistry, they were all super-competitive at their companies. But as engineers are wont to do, they couldnât help themselves but come to the bar and reveal how theyâd just gotten past something that was challenging the whole industry. They would all share this knowledge, and then the whole industry would move forward. Even today, you have AI companies in this multi-trillion-dollar life-and-death struggle. And those guys donât go to bars, but they meet up and share their takeaways. They do hot yoga and then share how they figured something out. The same thing, though. So I thought, this bar will be symbolic of those roots and traditions.
Hamish: Ten years ago, you published the first good biography of Elon Musk, which became a massive bestseller and a phenomenon in its own right. You got a lot of access to Elon through the writing of that book. It must have been hard to convince him to give you that time in the first place. Can you tell me about what that experience was like, working on a book like that while giving access to the principalâand this particular kind of principal, whoâs prickly?
Ashlee: It was really strange. Iâd done a big magazine story on himâthat was the first time Iâd met himâand weâd got along okay. There was some kind of rapport, and thatâs what made me a little bit confident about doing the book. But when I told him what I was doing, he said, âNo, Iâm not going to participate. Iâm not going to help you.â So I spent two years interviewing hundreds of people. Huge chunks of them would report back to Elon. I always thought it was going to work out okay, because he wasnât actively telling people not to talk to me. He wasnât making it miserable, which wouldâve made life a lot harder. Back then, he was already really litigious. People were afraid of him. Nobody had ever written anything truly revealing. He was kind of the weirdo, almost like a circus freak. Iâd come into all these meetings and everyone was like, âHeâs going to sue me. I donât want to talk.â It was really hard for a couple of years.
Then one day I was actually ready to start writing, done with all my interviews. He must have some sixth sense, because it was almost in that moment he called. Elon Musk on my caller ID. I had a landline back then. He said, âYouâve been way more persistent than I ever imagined. Iâll do interviews with you if I can read the book before it comes out and make changes.â I said, âWell, Iâm not going to do that. Letâs have dinner and hash it out.â It was one of those moments where heâd either say yes or no. Right there on the spot, he said, âOkay, fine. Weâll do one interview a month for as long as you feel like you need.â Which was incredibly fair.
So weâd meet for dinner once a month. Some dinners were an hour, some were four hoursâjust depended on his schedule and how things were going. It was totally different days. Weâd show up to restaurants in Mountain View, Palo Alto. Heâd walk in by himself, sit down at the table. No security, nothing. He had a driver, but the driver didnât even come in. And nobody in the restaurant seemed to notice who he was.
Hamish: So you got a good book out of it, sold 6 or 7 million copies. What was his response like when it came out?
Ashlee: It was funny. I made sure all the books were on boats heading to storesâabout five or six days before it was going to be in stores. I just wanted everything to be where he couldnât undo it, file a lawsuit and block it or something. But he had spent so much time and been really fair, and it felt like he should read it first. So I sent him a PDF the week before it came out, went to bed, and woke up to this stream of emails. He was basically live-blogging the book as he went through it. Heâs always been hung up on the Tesla founding question. Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard, the original founders, would say they founded Tesla. Elon would say, âNo, I founded Tesla.â When you look at it, they had filed the paperwork, they were working on it. Would Tesla exist without Elon? Definitely not.
Hamish: Especially not in the way that it currently exists.
Ashlee: No way. In the fact-checking process I told him, âElon, I am going to say that Marc and Martin founded the company. There is no way around this.â He said, âI understand.â And then in the emails, heâs going off about it again. But otherwise he was okayâreally just two things upset him. Iâd written about when he and his brother Kimbal were coming out here to start Zip2 and had gotten a used BMW. Kimbal told me he bought it with money from painting houses. Elon said he bought it. I told them they could fight about that. The other thing was a quote from an engineer saying Elon takes too much credit for the engineering at SpaceX. [Elon] said, âYou wrote that I take too much credit.â I said, âI didnât write that, Elon. Thatâs a quote from an engineer. Heâs allowed to have his opinion.â Those were the things he was upset about. Otherwise, fine. He actually sent me an emailâwhich I saved in case things got litigiousâsaying the book was 95% accurate. For Elon, who already hated journalists, that was incredible.
Hamish: I remember you telling me that at the time. I was like, âWell, thatâs an amazing result.â
Ashlee: And it was mostly okay. Then about a week later, the Washington Post did a story: the 27 most outrageous things from the book. A big chunk of it was about what a pain in the ass he was to work for. Funny thing is, when heâd read the book, none of that had really fazed him. Heâs actually kind of proud of being a tough boss. But then I think when he saw how the world was reacting to itâTesla was just starting to get a little competition, hiring was a big thingâI think he worried people werenât going to want to come work for him. And he just flipped the switch.
Hamish: So a week after he gave you the 95% mark, thereâs a press reaction, and then he reacts in the press.
Ashlee: Yeah. He starts saying thingsâthereâs the Google acquisition thing. Heâs like, âWho told you that?â I said, âElon, you know who told me that.â And that was the first time I really experienced firsthand some of what Iâd heard about. Emails saying things like, âYouâre an a*****e. Iâm going to destroy your life.â I figured he needed to vent. But then a friend inside Tesla told me, âHeâs just asked me to find the worldâs best libel lawyer.â And I thinkâIâve never confirmed this with Elonâbut I think he did ask somebody whether it was physically possible to buy every copy of the book worldwide and make it disappear.
Hamish: Did he know publishers can print new copies?
Ashlee: He knew. He was sending me all this stuff, but he knew. And it was frightening. He wasnât the richest person in the world, but he had about $4 billion. Part of me thought, âAny of this is good. If he sues me, itâs fantastic, Iâll just sell more copies.â But then you think, âHe might actually bankrupt me. I donât know if the publishers will have my back.â I think he was going through the same calculusâlike, âIâm going to bash him, but how much do I want to go? Itâs only going to get him more publicity.â We didnât speak at all for about three yearsâ2015 to 2018. Total incommunicado. Every now and then Iâd drop him a note, or SpaceX would do a launch and Iâd say congratulations. Nothing really came back.
Then around 2018, I was in New Zealand. I was staying at an Airbnb, and same thingâElon Musk calling on my phone. The last thing he had said to me was something like, âI want you to die.â And heâs like, âHey, youâre in New Zealand. Iâve never been. I always wanted to reenact the FBI raid on Kim Dotcom.â That was the first thing out of his mouth. I was like, âOkay, weâre not going to talk about what has transpired.â Tesla was just getting out of the worst of its production hell, and he said, âLook, youâre one of the few people on earth who actually knows the history of this company and what it would take to get through this. Do you want to come speak to all the people who worked on it?â Iâd basically stopped reporting on anything SpaceX, Tesla, ElonâPTSD, I just didnât want to do it. But I said, âOkay, this is pretty good.â And then we just shot the s**t for a bit, totally as if nothing had ever happened. That started to open things back up. We just started dropping notes every now and thenâTwitter DMs, I think. And then he sent something to the effect of âI understand now what this book did.â Basically: you did a good job. Whatever had happened, he seemed to have gotten over it.
Hamish: You started Core Memory: itâs video, itâs shows, itâs documentary, itâs podcasts on video, interviews, scoops, feature writingâwhich is a lot. Youâve started hiring people, youâre building up a new kind of institution. What is that institution youâre trying to build?
Ashlee: I think what weâre giving the audience is [a window into] six or seven years out of where the world is going. Because Iâve done this for so long and know so many people, you get to ride along on this journey and have this window into that.
Hamish: Youâre six or seven years ahead of what mainstream culture is going to catch up on?
Ashlee: Yeah, especially where tech is going. We get to transport you into where the future is heading. I enjoy eccentric, weird people and Iâm not terribly judgmental of them. I like people to hear what those kinds of people think, and then you can make up your own mind about whether thatâs horrible or good or interesting. I still have this conversationâand itâs like, âWe would really like to see this with the New York Times or the Bloomberg masthead on it.â And Iâm like, âOkay, thatâs not going to happen. Do you understand that Iâve collected all the worldâs people that you actually care about into one spot?â Even from the first month I started on SubstackâI know how many readers I had, I had all the Bloomberg stats, [and] people grossly overestimate how many views stories on some of those platforms are gettingâfrom the first month, we were doing like six, seven, eight times as many on Core Memory on Substack.
Hamish: People who donât know the media as well over-optimize for brands that were prestigious in the last century, not knowing those outlets are not reaching a wide audienceânot reaching the right audience.
Ashlee: Iâve got a story Iâve been haggling about with someone right now, and they want the Times or Bloomberg on it because theyâre like, âWe want SEO for jobs, for new hires.â Iâm like, âDo you know how the internet works? Everyone on earth is going to read this story.â Sometimes I feel like the PR people are still in that old world. Because what theyâre saying just makes no objective sense.
Hamish: To their defense, the world has changed fast. YouTube taking over televisions, taking over the living roomâwhich is now a true, undeniable thingâhappened pretty quickly. At most you could say itâs been 10 years, but even 10 years is a short time given the whole life of media. And people who are in the industries that still write about themselves are so invested in that way of being. I subscribe to all the media newsletters. The degree to which they freak out over whoâs running a terrestrial television station is absurd relative to its actual influence and relevance.
Ashlee: Yeah. When we first started our YouTube channel and I saw that 65% were watching on TV, that blew me away.
Hamish: What has changed for you, going from being an employed journalist at institutions to being an owner?
Ashlee: [Itâs] super-weird. Exhilarating. Itâs been an incredible amount of work. Just to get this off the ground, I had to be the face of thingsâpeople were coming for my writing voice, my video voice. Iâd spent all these years building some kind of reputation. Iâm hiring writers, weâre having other people doing video and podcasts. Thatâs the way it should go, because I want to build a bigger thing. So this first year has been exhilarating and a lot of work.
I had what I think was the best job in media. Bloomberg paid me really well to do whatever I wanted. I got to talk to the worldâs most fascinating people in depth. I had the last cushy magazine writer job. I could go to UkraineâI didnât even have to clear it with anyone. I could hang out there for two weeks, take a year to file the story. No one said anything. That used to be the norm for a lot of people. I probably might literally be the last person to do that. So it was a hard job to walk away from. But from day one [on Substack], you write a story and you see people read it, you get feedback, you see money come in for your effort. Itâs totally different to a paycheck. And then weâve been building this team. I wish Iâd done this a lot sooner, because I think this was always kind of in me. You do have to be a little bit of an entrepreneur. I was always that wayâalways doing books on the side, documentaries on the side. In literally four days itâll be a year since we started. Weâve launched so much, and I wouldnât go back.
Hamish: Itâs impressive to see you here with such energy on a Tuesday morning in a bar in Mountain View, given how much you take on. You are writing a lot, reporting a lot, making videos, making documentaries, running a company. I salute that. Thanks for showing the way for other people.
Ashlee: Weâre not even at noon yet. We still have time to do more shots. Cheers, man. Cheers.
FOOTNOTES
Fredâs Place, Mountain View, CaliforniaâSilicon Valley watering hole where the early chip industryâs best-kept secrets had a way of coming out after the second round.
Fredâs Specialâa PBR and a shot of Old Crow
Fairchild SemiconductorâThe birthplace of Silicon Valley, just a few minutes down the road.
Robert Noyce and Gordon MooreâWorked at Fairchild before leaving to found Intel.
Geek Silicon ValleyâAshleeâs first book.
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015)âAshleeâs biography. The first serious account of Muskâs life and companies.
The Simpsons, âThe Musk Who Fell to Earthâ
Zip2âElon and Kimbal Muskâs first company. Also the source of an unresolved dispute about who paid for a used BMW.
Kim DotcomâInternet entrepreneur, subject of a dramatic 2012 FBI raid on his New Zealand mansion. The first thing Elon said when he called Ashlee out of the blue in 2018, after three years of silence, was that heâd always wanted to reenact it.
Rocket Lab/Peter BeckâNew Zealand rocket company and its founder, from Invercargill. Ashlee did a full road trip following Beckâs life, which became When the Heavens Went on Sale and Wild Wild Space for HBO.
NeuralinkâElonâs brain-computer interface company. Ashlee has had exclusive access for years and is now making a documentary through Core Memory.
Hello World (Bloomberg)âAshleeâs travel-tech documentary series. Emmy-nominated in its first year. By far Bloombergâs most-watched show, by a factor Ashlee describes as roughly 10,000x.
EVE OnlineâA cultish, ruleless, multi-player space battle game that started in Iceland.
Bryan JohnsonâLongevity entrepreneur. Subject of Ashleeâs documentary Donât Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever (Netflix).
KamboâA purgative ritual using secretions from the giant monkey frog. Ashlee underwent a ceremony while filming (âthe best nap of [his] lifeâ).
George HotzâHacker who built a DIY self-driving car in his garage. Ashlee broke the story, then rode in the car on what turned out to be its first freeway run.
ZooxâAutonomous vehicle company. Ashlee did an early ride from Palo Alto to San Francisco.
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 -
The psychotherapy room is, by design, one of the most private spaces in human life, but Esther Perel has devoted much of her career to opening the door. Addressing relationships, cross-cultural psychology, and the contours of belonging, she brought therapeutic ideas out into the world through a body of work that spans talks, books, and her hit podcast Where Should We Begin?, which has reached millions of listeners across nearly a decade. In her Substack publication Entre Nous with Esther Perel, she says sheâs found a gathering place for it all: âI always talk about how I wanted to bring the therapeutic ideas into the public square,â she told us. âNow I want to create a public square.â
On the day of the 20th anniversary re-release of her book Mating in Captivity, a cultural touchstone on the topic of desire, weâre sharing a conversation between Esther and Hanne Winarsky, Substackâs head of new media, recorded at Temple Bar in SoHo, New York. In this second episode of Open Tab, Esther discusses how she hires and has built her businesses, how work has replaced religion as a source of meaning, whether AI can give good therapy, and how sheâs made it her lifeâs work to re-create the proverbial village online.
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 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 -
For our inaugural episode of Open Tab, we knew we wanted to speak with Emily Sundberg. Emilyâs the founder and daily writer of Feed Me, a business, tech, and culture newsletter thatâs been described as âmust-read (and much-read).â She publishes almost every weekdayâ something like 250 sends a yearâcovering everything from DTC darlings and media industry churn to New York hospitality and new world etiquette. In the process, she has been profiled by the New York Times and Air Mail, becoming known as a âmedia it girlâ and âone of the most talked-about writers in business and culture journalism.â
Emily has worked in media and tech but built her current audience of over 10,000 subscribers natively on Substack, post by post. She told us she sees Feed Me as a studio, with extensions like a podcast, job board, and thriving subscriber comments section where sheâs ânever scared that anything bad is happening.â
Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie sat down with Emily at Old Town Bar in Manhattanâs Flatiron district to talk about building her independent media business from scratch and the glimmers of hope she sees for media on Substack and beyond.
Location: Old Town Bar, Flatiron, NYC. Order: 1 Guinness each
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 -
Most of what we hear from media insiders is a story of decline: collapsing economics, algorithmic chaos, layoffs, and LLMs nipping at journalistsâ heels. But a new class of independent media founders is creating powerful businesses around their own work and direct relationships with readers, listeners, and viewersâhighly-profitable, multi-format, and built without first raising millions of dollars or a complex infrastructure stack. Theyâre finding ways to make creative livelihoods that donât depend on the goodwill of a platform or a print masthead.
Open Tab is a new interview series hosted by Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie and Head of New Media Hanne Winarsky, who sit down with a different independent media founder each week to ask them how they did it. Every episode of the show is filmed at a neighborhood bar, restaurant, or cafĂ© where the guest likes to spend their time. And in each conversation, Hamish or Hanne joins with, âIâll have what youâre having.â Episode one comes out tomorrow, May 7.
The guests are writers, editors, and creators who have built thriving media businesses and communities from the ground up. Among them: a techno-optimist with a thousand-year view, and a relationship therapist with a warning about AIâs impacts tomorrow. A journalist who wrote the definitive book on Elon Muskâbefore, he says, Elon tried to buy up every copy. A tabloid insider who spent years protecting a secret source and then became a whistleblower himself. Internet natives and legacy media icons who have reported on power and celebrity from up close. Some built their audience entirely from scratch; others arrived with a careerâs body of work and found a home for it here.
We kept returning to the unvarnished reality of building something on your own: the appetite for risk, the rewards of independence, and what it means to do this in a time when a single person with a point of view can rivalâand often exceedâthe reach of the most storied media institutions.
New episodes of the show will drop weekly through June. You can watch on YouTube, listen wherever you get your podcasts, and find the full series here on Substack.
The most ambitious media founders in the world are building 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
