Processing my San Francisco trip.
I already want to go back.
Hello everyone. I’m back in New York after spending the last week in SF. If you have any tips for the newsletter this week, shoot me an email.
Yesterday, I was invited to speak to a group of students at Stanford Graduate School of Business by a student named Sarah Strober. Arinze Obiezue came up to me after the talk and I clocked his Claude hat. He writes on Substack about AI and late-stage capitalism. Tiggy Valen told me about her newsletter Paddock Project, which is dedicated to the business of Formula 1. Another student introduced me to the work of her mother, the baker Elizabeth Mayhew, who makes cakes that resemble woven tapestries or embroidered tea towels. One student said she was working on a robotics company. Another was ideating on a sunscreen company. As someone who spends most of my day alone, I was jealous that they all get to spend years in this lab called “business school” together, building and breaking things.
My talk was about Feed Me and Substack and the state of media. Mid-conversation I realized how much more time I spend making Feed Me than talking about it. I apologized to the room for my face turning red. It’s hard to explain how this thing comes together each day. It feels closer to hooking up an I.V. between myself and the Substack CMS than like… “a writing practice” one could adopt.
Afterwards, I visited the Substack office and went on a walk with Chris Best, who I really admire as a founder and CEO. As I was walking out, I met donald boat who was able to give me some artwork I commissioned from him last month.
I’m still distilling all my thoughts about the last few days, but I’m so happy that this is my job. Everyone kept asking me why I was in SF; it’s because I learned via my Substack analytics that 20% of people who read my newsletter live in California. I flew out to meet some of them. I want to write things they want to read. One of my readers DM’d me the morning after my party and said, “I made two new friends at your party and we were out till six in the morning having the most fun we’ve had in a min.” It reminded me of the party I threw in London last spring where two women who showed up together said they became friends in the Feed Me comment section. That connection is a big part of what drives me.
There was one warm morning I went for a walk in Pacific Heights with my friend and experienced a rare moment of awe. It’s not very often I have the feeling of complete discovery — I had no idea this neighborhood of monstrous homes and bright green vistas existed in America. “I feel like I’m in heaven,” my friend said and we both started laughing hysterically. It wasn’t that it was our version of heaven, but that it literally looked like a place people go after they die, like in The Good Place. Or the utopias shown in The Truman Show, or the “Nosedive” episode of Black Mirror. There were women working out in the hedges of the Lyon Street Steps, wearing pink sweatsuits and playing music from their phones. We walked past them and saw a white truck unloading what must’ve been thousands of dollars of orchid arrangements for one of the homes. Many of the houses looked empty, as private police drove in loops up and down the hills, protecting nobody from everyone else.
On the flight home, I thought about how peoples’ mouths frothed when they asked me about my meeting at Anthropic. I thought about the bot-only social network where AI agents interact while humans watch them interact. I actually spent a lot of time in SF thinking about my physical iPhone and all of the Apple products that have allowed me and so many other people to work everywhere, constantly. And then I thought about the beautiful sunny hills of the Bay Area, the seals I swam with, the mountains I hiked on, the Dungeness Crab legs my friend Gaby and I cracked open at dinner — how someone might be drawn to living in a city purely for those types of visceral experiences.
I feel myself on the edge of rambling because I’m tired from traveling, so I’m going to stop there. This trip was an awesome way to start the year and set up new ways of thinking about how I want 2026 to go.
Today’s letter includes: New York media’s obsession with wealth and power is becoming more explicit, a pop-up from two Wildair alumni, Peter Attia is stepping down from David Protein, and A24’s new Safdie brothers-produced Chinatown show is casting.
Wall Street tailor Michael Andrews has been working hard for all the newly skinny finance guys who recently discovered Ozempic. There’s a fantastic chart in this Business Insider story that shows the spike in the amount of suits and pants he’s taken “two inches or more” off.
