Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Anne Lamott, bestselling novelist behind Bird by Bird, joins Neal Allen, former journalist turned spiritual coach. They dig into how a writing guide became a creative duet. Expect lively talk on bad drafts, sharp sentences, strong verbs, cliches, editing, compassion on the page, and following intuition instead of outlines.

Adam Neumann, WeWork co-founder and Flow founder, traces his path from kibbutz life to building companies around belonging. He gets into spirituality and Kabbalah, the late-night naming of WeWork, hypergrowth with SoftBank, the 2019 collapse, media backlash, and why Flow is built around community, technology, and Shabbat as a weekly reset.

Kelly Wearstler, acclaimed Los Angeles designer and creative director, blends materiality, place, and collaboration in bold hospitality and residential projects. She discusses large-scale coordination, reviving vintage materials, cross-disciplinary artist collaborations, balancing maximalism with restraint, acoustic and lighting strategies, and designing site-specific programs like casinos and hotels.

Eric Roth, Academy Award-winning screenwriter behind Forrest Gump and many acclaimed adaptations. He talks about storytelling craft, structure versus freedom, psychedelic and near-death experiences shaping creativity, adapting books into screenplays, collaborations with directors like Scorsese, and the shifting landscape of filmmaking and writers’ roles.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI cofounder and president who helped build ChatGPT and Codex, walks through AI milestones and the switch from rule-based NLP to deep learning. He recounts founding OpenAI, scaling research into products, agentic AI that connects models to tools, and the engineering and safety trade-offs of deploying powerful models.

Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI who led engineering and product strategy. He talks about personal uses of ChatGPT, how new models and infrastructure drive progress, the board crisis that reshaped the company, fundraising and Microsoft’s compute support, scaling teams and culture, and surprising breakthroughs from language models to biology.

Chris Pavlovski, founder and CEO of Rumble, built a creator-first video and cloud platform. He talks about Rumble’s rise from a small creator site to tens of millions of users. He covers building independent infrastructure and cloud services, handling takedowns and international legal fights, scaling monetization and crypto features, and plans for AI and global expansion.

David Whyte, Irish poet and philosopher known for lyric, meditative work, performs poems and reflects on love’s transforming charge. He explores falling for ideals, vulnerability as invitation, unrequited longing as rehearsal, and stepping beyond the self into courage and belonging. Intimate readings and stories about risking everything for a fuller life.

Bill Gurley, veteran venture capitalist known for Uber and Zillow bets, and author of Runnin’ Down a Dream. He traces a shift from Wall Street analysis to VC, explains how investors add value beyond capital, and recounts big misses like passing on Google. Conversation covers decision frameworks, the AI wave, writing a career book, and how founders signal future success.

George Saunders, acclaimed author and teacher known for inventive short stories and the Booker Prize–winning Lincoln in the Bardo. He talks about discovering ideas through writing, using small seed images to let stories grow, treating editing as ongoing creation, improvisation and rhythm in prose, spiritual practice influencing empathy, and teaching craft through close listening.