Read Max

Max Read
  • 4.6 (22)
  • TECHNOLOGY

Explaining the weird new future, one podcast at a time. Subscribe for internet culture, mega-platform grotesquerie, crypto conspiracies, deep forum lore, fringe politics, and other artifacts of what's to come. maxread.substack.com

  1. Talking Trump's Reiner comments, Brown shooting misinformation, and white men in media with John Ganz and Jay Kang

    12/18/2025

    Talking Trump's Reiner comments, Brown shooting misinformation, and white men in media with John Ganz and Jay Kang

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit maxread.substack.com In this conversation--joined by Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker and Time To Say Goodbye, and about 7,000 confused viewers expecting discussion of Venezuela--we talked: Trump’s comments on Rob Reiner (covered by Ganz here) The fever-dream of rumor and conspiracy emerging on Twitter/X in the wake of the mass shooting at Brown University (and what’s changed from the panic that set in after the Boston Marathon bombing) Jacob Savage’s Compact magazine piece about white men in Hollywood and the media Charlotte Klein’s New York magazine piece about Bari Weiss. We also fought with a number of commenters on the livestream who arrived via a misleading Substack app push notification. Enjoy!

    20 min
  2. Talking A.I. bubbles and Trump's racist rant with John Ganz

    12/12/2025

    Talking A.I. bubbles and Trump's racist rant with John Ganz

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit maxread.substack.com Greetings from Read Max HQ! Every other Wednesday at 2 p.m., John Ganz (author of The Year the Clock Broke and proprietor of the Unpopular Front Substack) and I host a Substack Live chat about politics, tech, culture, and the pieces we’ve been working on. While the chat is free when live, and a short preview is available above, only paying subscribers ca…

    15 min
  3. Talking 'American Canto' and Jeffrey Epstein with John Ganz

    11/20/2025

    Talking 'American Canto' and Jeffrey Epstein with John Ganz

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit maxread.substack.com This week, John and I talked about the journalist Olivia Nuzzi, an excerpt from whose new memoir American Canto ran this week in Vanity Fair; her ex Ryan Lizza’s follow-up; Ganz’s annoyed response; the publication of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails; why Epstein would have loved the A.I. age; and what this all has to do with Machiavelli.While the chat is free when live, and a short preview is available above, only paying subscribers can access the archive of these chats as video and podcast audio!

    5 min
  4. Talking Zohran and Kalshi with John Ganz and Jay Kang

    11/06/2025

    Talking Zohran and Kalshi with John Ganz and Jay Kang

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit maxread.substack.com Greetings from Read Max HQ! Every other Wednesday at 2 p.m., John Ganz (author of The Year the Clock Broke and proprietor of the Unpopular Front Substack) and I host a Substack Live chat about politics, tech, culture, and the pieces we’ve been working on. Paying subscribers can access the archive of these chats as video and podcast audio. This week, we w…

    2 min
  5. The Silicon Valley-Trump bet

    09/10/2025

    The Silicon Valley-Trump bet

    Greetings from Read Max HQ! This week’s newsletter is a video-slash-podcast-slash-Substack Live with my friend John Ganz. Among the topics discussed: * The Epstein birthday book and the unbelievably creepy tone of the messages * The “tech summit” between Silicon Valley executives and the Trump administration last week * The “A.I. Bubble”: What it is, whether it might be bursting * Why A.I. slop is bad for the soul and not art * Why old Sony electronics from when we were adolescents are good for the soul in the same way that art is You can watch above, or listen to the audio version on any of your favorite podcast platforms. A reminder: Read Max is a reader-funded endeavor. Practically speaking, what that means is that producing Read Max newsletters and associated audiovisual products is my job, and in order to do my job well, I need to make money from it, so that I can exchange it for essential goods and services such as food and housing and vintage Sony electronics. If you like the job I do--if you find my writing (and recording) enlightening or entertaining, or even if it just helps you numbly pass the time such that you can put off the anxiety that accompanies awareness of mortality--please consider becoming a paying subscriber, for the bargain price of $5, or about a beer a month. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit maxread.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 7m
  6. Steelmanning Peter Thiel

    07/02/2025

    Steelmanning Peter Thiel

    My friend John Ganz and I reformed our intermittent podcast this week to talk about New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s interview with PayPal founder Peter Thiel. Among the topics covered: * Why Thiel is obsessed with Greta Thunberg, who he seems to think is the Antichrist; * What “steelmanning” is, and why it’s damaged Thiel’s ability to answer questions from even friendly interviews; * The Zohran Mamdani campaign as anti-Thiel politics. You can listen to the podcast here, or on whatever platforms you get your podcasts from. A reminder! Read Max, whether in text or audio form, is the product of an extensive amount of work--research, reporting, deliberation, writing, editing, recording, staring at the wall, etc. Nearly all of my compensation for that work comes from paying subscribers, whose generosity represents about 90 percent of my total income. If you find Read Max rewarding to you at all: If it makes you laugh, smile, think, sigh, whatever: Please consider upgrading your subscription. Not only will you help ensure its continued existence, you’ll also get access to a second, paywalled newsletter every week featuring recommendations for books, movies, and music that you might not otherwise know about. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit maxread.substack.com/subscribe

    54 min

  7. 06/04/2025

    Two deeply upsetting photographs

    Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today’s post is a Read Max audiovisual product featuring cohost Sam Biddle, senior technology reporter at The Intercept. A quick interstitial reminder: Read Max is a subscription business! In order to devote the time I do every week to reading, writing, reporting, thinking, procrastinating, and all other activities essential to the production of this twice-and-sometimes-thrice-weekly newsletter, I need to “convert” readers into “paid subscribers,” a task I attempt to accomplish with these touts. If you find what I do valuable to you--if you think you learn something, or are entertained, or get mad in a productive way--please consider compensating me for that value for the unbelievably low price of $5 a month. Think of it like buying me a beer once a month in exchange for something like 20,000 almost entirely properly spelled and punctuated words of insight, argument, criticism, good sci-fi recommendations, and sometimes even humor. Yesterday Sam and I “went live” to talk about a set of new stories on tech’s ever-increasing ties to the defense industry: * A recent white paper from OpenAI outlining the company’s vision of A.I.’s geopolitical future, about which Sam wrote more here; * Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey burying the hatchet and partnering on a V.R. headset for the military; and * Palantir's controversial new role counting human beings for the U.S. government. What do these partnerships tell us about the present and future of the tech industry, A.I., and geopolitics? Also up for discussion: What’s going on at Apple? And two distinctly unsettling photographs, the first of Luckey and Zuckerberg breaking bread… …and the second, a sort of wedding-announcement pic of former Apple designer Jony Ive and OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman: Please enjoy, here on Substack, or, without video, on any of your preferred podcast platforms! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit maxread.substack.com/subscribe

    55 min
  8. Escape from Slopworld

    04/22/2025

    Escape from Slopworld

    Greetings from Read Max HQ! On Tuesday afternoon John Ganz of Unpopular Front joined me for an experimental “Substack Live” with only two brief interruptions (one when I fat-fingered an end to the stream and two when John’s internet cut out). Our chat started with a discussion of two expansive essays on the modern internet coincidentally published this weekend: Ross Douthat’s “An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive,” in The New York Times, and Jacob Silverman’s “Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy,” in the Financial Times. But, as is often the case, we also ended up talking about many other things, among them the imaginary of the tariffs, Parental Advisory stickers, a Canadian guy on Instagram who claims to have re-grown his foreskin, and much more. Check out the full video (stitched together) above, or listen to the audio on the podcast platform of your choice. A reminder, as always! Read Max exists thanks to generosity of paying subscribers, whose support lets me devote a full-time job’s worth of hours to all the research, reporting, thinking, and procrastinating necessary to put the newsletter together week in and week out. Paying subscribers not only receive an extra paywalled newsletter of (unbelievably good) recommendations of books, movies, links, and music, but also help subsidize the free stuff for the freeloaders, which is the kind of thing that gets you into heaven and further along on the karmic wheel. If you feel like you get roughly one beer’s worth of entertainment, information, distraction, or other kind of satisfaction from Read Max, please consider paying to subscribe. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit maxread.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 1m
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4.6
out of 5
22 Ratings

About

Explaining the weird new future, one podcast at a time. Subscribe for internet culture, mega-platform grotesquerie, crypto conspiracies, deep forum lore, fringe politics, and other artifacts of what's to come. maxread.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Max Read
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2025
  • Episodes
    22
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Max Read
  • Show Website
    Read Max

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