Greetings from Read Max HQ! I’m very pleased to publish this “experimental Read Max audio product,” which is to say a podcast of me reading this week’s newsletter--with some of the classic off-the-cuff riffing you’ve come to associate with the Read Max brand identity 😎.

In addition to the embed above, the podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts here, or Overcast. It can also technically be found on Spotify but I recommend you do not find it there. On the podcast, as well as in this newsletter, I am discussing two items:

* The current crisis in Hollywood, the danger posed to the time-wasting industry, and the 2001 baseball romance Summer Catch.

* The secret origins of Twitter power user and political candidate Will Stancil.

A reminder: Read Max is my main source of income and producing it every week is a full-time job. If you find it informative, entertaining, or even just a halfway decent way to kill time, please consider becoming a paying subscriber, at the astonishingly cheap rate of $5/month or $50/year (roughly the cost of buying me a couple Snickers bars every month). Paying subscribers not only improve their karmic standing and transmit goodwill throughout the world, they also get access to the popular weekly reading roundup and recommendations email, where I spotlight overlooked books, movies, and music that are often but not always concerned with the ideas and themes of this newsletter (i.e., the future, the internet, samurais, etc.)

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