The Sunday Bunch of Tomorrow
Welcome to The Preview.
Just under a year ago, I sent the first issue of Sunday Bunch to a small, trusted inner circle of about 50 brave souls1.
As I told those of you there at the time, I didn’t have what my old boss (and noted Art Brut collector) Bob Greenberg would call a singular vision for what I was trying to accomplish as I got started2.
There was a lot going on across business and technology and culture and I needed a place to make sense of it like I used to when I was regularly in an office with hundreds of smart people. After months of paralysis by analysis, I decided to stop sniffing whiteboard markers3 and just sit down, write, and see where curiosity and expertise start to converge. I told myself (and my family) that I would give it a year4 and then see where we ended up.
We are now months and 85% of the way to that goal. If you’re reading this, it means:
You’re still here. 7 out of 10 of you are reading (or at least opening the email) every week5. I appreciate all of you more than I should say in public with other people watching.
You’ve been along for most, if not all of the ride. We’ve steadily grown to almost 500 subscribers, but the majority of you have been here for at least half of the ride so far.
I am sure you have your own take on how it’s going6 but from my perspective, the experiment accomplished everything I could have hoped for. It has been great to write; to get my brain working on ideas that fall outside of the scope of my day job; and perhaps what I am most grateful for, it has helped me reconnect with a lot of people.
As I considered where we are now, it started to feel like the time has come to open the aperture of possibilities just a bit. To expand beyond the confines of our weekly playdate and start going further down a few world-shaping rabbit holes than we have room to do with Sunday Bunch.
Introducing
The Preview expands on what you’ve seen from Sunday Bunch, going further to connect the dots between the stories and trends of today, both their immediate impact, and the potential second-order implications.
The aspirational core value is optimism, balanced by the pragmatism required by the relentless absurdity of modern society.
What does it mean for you, the subscriber? In short, not a ton. Sunday Bunch becomes part of The Preview, the website and URLs are different, but otherwise you might not notice if I didn’t say something.
You don’t have to do anything, Sunday Bunch should still arrive as scheduled7, straight to your inbox via email or Substack. (If you notice any issues, please let me know.)
In the coming weeks, you will see some additional articles—outside of Sunday Bunch—published under The Preview banner.
Later this year, expect new newsletters and feeds, applying the lens of The Preview to specific topics and industries. I also plan to explore new formats, looking for ways to connect and share information that aren’t always 2,000+ words sent over email.
(Don’t worry, I’m not going to blow up your inbox, you’ll be able to opt in for and opt out of new publications as you please.)
Most importantly, The Preview makes space for friends. I’m very deliberately evolving past an eponymous newsletter with the goal of welcoming additional contributors and host conversations with some awesome people. My goal was always about making sense of a rapidly-changing world, it only makes sense to add well-informed perspectives from our community and beyond. If you’re interested in being part of it, please reply or reach out.
I hope you’ll stay with me as I continue to roll out The Preview in the coming weeks. This whole thing is about making sense of increasingly unprecedented and fast-moving times, and that can’t be a solo endeavor.
LFG,
Bunch
And while we’re FGing, what better time to bring some friends along for the ride?
The emerging paradox of modern knowledge
A timely example of the threads I plan to follow further with The Preview, courtesy of my friend
:
I would encourage you to read the whole thread, but for a TL;DR thought exercise:
Picture in your head all of the publications you encounter each week, the ones that want you to login or pay before you can read the article or watch the video. Think about all of the good stuff contained behind the walls of those gardens, annoyingly requiring your email address or a credit card to unlock the door.
Now think of those sites you visit, the ones with 37 banner ads and Taboola recommended articles littered throughout whatever you are trying to read. They are everything from mid-market newspapers to AI slop farms to individuals saying whatever it will take to move memecoins, supplements, or Sunday parlays.
Imagine a world in which people are turning to AI for answers, and almost all of them come from #2, not #1.
As Noah says, the popularization of LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude create a potential shift in incentives. In the future, who will allow their information out there to be indexed and assimilated into the models? With every other innovation related to media and entertainment, there has been a growing caution about leaving any money on the table locking into deals too early or, god forbid, giving something away for free.
What might this mean as people turn to AI for what they trust to be credible answers, but they’re not informed by the companies who would have been at the top of those old Google searches?
How do media organizations fighting for their life to profitably produce high quality, well-researched and produced content get properly incentivized to share their knowledge into the collective?
How might we avoid the answers that AI blends together becoming an opaque mix of thinktanks, clickbait, branded content and #sponcon, and countless others who—free of the increasingly zero-sum media industry—can focus on societal impact and influence, for better or worse?
Much more to come here, there aren’t many issues bigger than this one.
People love to quote the third of Arthur C. Clarke’s laws—"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And almost always with a positive spin. The Disneyfied language makes it sound wondrous. But let’s reconsider the quote with a different word:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from witchcraft.
Sean Monahan,
on potions and spells and the new metaphysics of technology
The Future Childless Cat Guys
The difference between the childless cat ladies who defined the prior paradigm we’ve come to know and the childless cat men of the future is that the childless cat ladies often became such as an intentional shirking of expectations — avoiding the “what happens” that has long pushed women toward marriage and motherhood. The childless cat men will become such as a matter of ease. They are not defying expectations, but existing exactly according to the structural isolation and anomie society is bending toward.
(I encourage you to check out more of ’s work at Many Such Cases, as I said this week, her’s has quickly become one of my favorite Substacks.)
Elsewhere
The META Trending Trends: 02025 (ZINE / Matt Klein)
If you only read one trend report this year, make it this one. Shout-out to former R/GAer Matt Klein, the trendgod.
Returning to the umami theory of value (Nemesis)
Showtime! Why Every Brand Needs a Show (NESS)
The Starbucks reboot (One Thing)
Related: Starbucks CEO Tells Us His Plan to Turn Around the Company (WSJ)
The Ketamine-Fueled ‘Psychedelic Slumber Parties’ That Get Tech Execs Back on Track (Wired)
Meet Helix, our in-house AI that reasons like a human (Figure on X)
Workers in Japan Can’t Quit Their Jobs. They Use Resignation Agencies to Help. (CNN)
This is How We Fall Out of Love with the World (Culture Study)
America’s “First Car-Free Neighborhood” Is Going Pretty Good, Actually? (dwell)
Egg Prices Are Soaring. Are Backyard Chickens the Answer? (Civil Eats)
The Case for Posting Less8 (Link in Bio)
50 Years of Travel Tips (Kevin Kelly 🐐)
🤖 The NBA Just Tricked Millions of Fans, and No One Seemed to Notice (Bottom of the Ninth)
Sport and swearing: It’s ****ing complicated (The Athletic)
Exclusive: Amazon's new James Bond script (Read Max)
Prophet, playboy, and provocateur: How meeting Peter Beard changed my life (Country Life)
The hardest working font in Manhattan (Aresluna)
SNL 50 Reminded Us Why Saturday Night Live Still Matters (Chris Black / GQ)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
/ / Chris Black / (🎂) / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / Billy ChuckThey didn’t come willingly, to be clear. These were people whom I gave no choice and began spamming with the first iteration of this newsletter.
Shout-out to my friend Steve Gera, who was the first to cut to the chase and challenge me to figure it out like a former Marine.
While mapping out editorial strategies, to be clear. If I am just huffing, I am more of a model airplane glue kind of guy.
50 issues to be exact, I was a chill boss who gave myself two weeks of vacation.
Somewhere around 30% is the average for Substack. Nice performance against the benchmark.
Every time I hit send there’s a voice that tells me you are all still subscribed b/c you fear I can see you unsubscribe and you feel like, “oh boy, would that be awkward.”Just do it. It is ok. But it’d be a lot cooler if you didn’t.
Fine Print: There are no immediate plans to disrupt Sunday Bunch’s weekly cadence. However, with the benefit of six added days of the week to potentially post at The Preview, we might explore some alternative schedules/volume for our flagship.
Yes, I am aware of the irony of not only posting this, but posting it in an issue where I talk about writing more.