What's the best way to describe what Emily Sundberg does?
Substacker? Influencer? Journalist? Brand-builder?
Let's go with "yes". And she does a much better job of describing herself in our conversation, where we talk about how she went from being a laid-off marketer at Meta to a one-woman business with a devoted following and a revenue line that’s up and to the right.
A very quick primer for those of you haven't heard of Sundberg and her Feed Me newsletter - she’s building a very interesting publishing company that revolves around her reporting, insights and taste, aimed at people who make good money and spend some of it on very nice restaurants, shops and hotels in places like London, LA and New York. My assumption is that a slice of her audience doesn’t do any of that at all — but wants to read about people who do.
In olden times, Sundberg might have a column in a glossy magazine - and in fact she spent some time working at places like New York magazine on her way up. Today what's left of the glossy magazine world would love to attach itself to her. It’s a very 2025 proposition.
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51:07
Why did Apple ice out the most famous Apple blogger?
If you want smart, nuanced insight into Apple’s products and would-be products, you turn to John Gruber, who’s been blogging about this stuff for more than two decades at his Daring Fireball site.
So in March, when Gruber announced that Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino — focusing on Apple’s botched plans to imbue its ailing Siri service with state-of-the-art AI — lots of people paid attention. Including, apparently, folks at the very top of the Apple org chart.
I talked to Gruber about the fallout from that post. Which is pretty interesting! But there’s a lot more going on in this conversation. It’s partly about the friction Apple has been generating lately — not just about its AI efforts, but the way it runs its App Store, and the way it interacts with developers — and why all of that does and doesn’t matter.
And it’s also about the delightfully retro practice of running an ad-supported blog in 2025. That works very well for Gruber, but it seems like the new Grubers of the world are doing their work on YouTube or Substack. He’s got some thoughts about that, too.
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1:08:48
On the hunt for media optimism, with Semafor’s Ben Smith and The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey
Here’s one where we try to do two things at once:
Have a convo about green shoots in media with two smart guys who know media really well — Semafor’s Ben Smith and The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey.
Try to find new audiences for our respective podcasts, by cutting up that conversation into 3 parts, and distributing those parts to our respective feeds.
Which is to say: You can hear more of the this conversation by heading to Semafor’s Mixed Signals pod, and you can hear a different slice of the chat by heading to Brian’s Rebooting pod. It’s an experiment, based on the thesis that the people who listen to one of our shows would be very interested in listening to the other shows. Did we get it right? What can we do to make it better? Please let us know.
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30:22
Scott Frank on Netflix, the future of Hollywood, and Dept. Q
Scott Frank used to write great movies, like “Out of Sight.” Now he’s a Netflix guy, and a super successful one: he made “Godless,” a horses-and-everything Western for the streamer, then had a pandemic-era phenomenon with “The Queen’s Gambit.” Now he’s back with “Dept. Q”, his take on the British mystery genre. You can find that one on Netflix’s top 10 lists in the U.S. and around the world.
I like talking to Scott on this show — something we started doing way back in 2017 — because he’s happy to talk about the mechanics of his work, and the economics of Hollywood, and how they intersect. And that’s what we’re doing during this chat too. We discuss the backstory behind his newest show, his take on the history of the streaming bubble, why he’s pretty sanguine about AI in Hollywood but very nervous about its new tech overlords — and the industry he’d get into if he was starting his career in 2025. (Hint: it’s also something that gets consumed on screens.)
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47:42
Bluesky Wasn’t Supposed to be a Twitter Rival. Now It Is.
I admit it: I most definitely rolled my eyes in 2019, when Twitter announced vague plans to build an "open and decentralized standard for social media".
At the time I didn't really understand what then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was trying to do — or why the head of a social media company with plenty of problems was messing around with plans to create more social media companies.
I get it now: Bluesky was a science project that aimed to let people build their own social networks. And that's still what it is at its core, says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber.
But in the meantime, Bluesky has also become an accidental Twitter rival, with some 36 million users. And most of them likely don't care about Bluesky's origins, or the fact that it's really supposed to be a technical framework for decentralized social media. Or what decentralized social media means, for that matter.
All of which means that talking to Graber about Bluesky means you're doing two things at once: Asking about how Bluesky, the app, works — and what Bluesky, the idea is. Which is what we did when we talked at Web Summit Vancouver in May.
Also discussed here: Why is Jack Dorsey mad about Bluesky? What’s up with ads and Bluesky? And who designs Jay Graber’s T-shirts?
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Media and tech aren’t just intersecting — they’re fully intertwined. And to understand how those worlds work, and what they mean for you, veteran journalist Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers - and gets them to spell it out in plain, BS-free English.
Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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