Cartoons, Obama, and India with Matt Damon: The Peter Moore Story

Peter Moore spent 30 years in magazines — 10 years as articles editor at Playboy, then two decades running Men’s Health, where he landed a rare 20-minute interview with President Obama in the Oval Office and traveled to rural India with Matt Damon for Water.org. When the magazine industry collapsed, he didn’t retire — he started drawing.

On this episode of The Sunday Draft, Raj talks with Peter about turning a lifelong journaling habit (one entry every night since October 12, 1978 — over 7 million words) into a Substack that’s grown from 200 subscribers to over 20,000, built almost entirely on hand-drawn cartoons and travel sketches. They dig into how a wildly speculative post about who really killed Van Gogh became his breakout piece, why he cut back to posting once a week to protect his reach, the discipline behind daily creative practice, and where AI fits (or doesn’t) into work that depends on being unmistakably human.

Also covered: growing up with a father obsessed with National Geographic, sketching as a way of remembering a place, the pressure of “creator niche,” and why community matters more than subscriber count.

Find Peter’s work at Peter Moore on Substack.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube.

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