📞 The Magic Hotline: Talk to Substack Sam!

🗓️ 📌You're invited: Ask your questions about Substack and get the answers from the source.

By popular request, I’ve invited Substack’s Sam Sudar to join us for a webinar on MONDAY FEBRUARY 16, AT 11:30 AM PACIFIC TIME (the day and time the plurality of you preferred). That means:

• 8:30 pm if you live in Paris

• 2:30 pm if you live in New York

• 1:00 am (sorry!) if you live in Delhi.

Here’s a time zone calculator for people who live somewhere else.

The day after tomorrow is President’s day, as it happens, so it should be convenient to join if you’re in the US.

So come join us and tell Sam which features of Substack you like, which ones you could do without, what makes sense about the design and user interface and what doesn’t, what could be even better, and what weird thing happens when you use the app on an Android. Ask him what to do if you get too many emails, don’t want to be notified every time there’s a new podcast, the audio player doesn’t work on your iPad, or you can’t figure out how to find an old post. Ask him why emails you signed up for aren’t arriving, why you were charged for a newsletter you thought you’d cancelled, and why you can’t upload photos to the comments. He’ll be exhilarated, I’m sure, by these questions.

Whatever you want to know—about the platform, the tech, the business, or anything else about Substack—this is your chance.

More about Sam, from Bing:

Sam Sudar is a software engineer at Substack, where he has been working since 2021. He is responsible for writer-facing surfaces and leading Substack’s podcasting product. Sam holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington and has previously contributed to projects at Google, focusing on Chrome for Emerging Markets and the Dataflow team within Google Cloud. You can find more about his work on his Substack publication.

Oh, wow—on LinkedIn, it says that while he was getting his master’s degree, he worked with Raj Rao on brain-computer interfaces. I bet it would be interesting to talk to him about Elon Musk and Neuralink.

If you can’t make it but you have a question for Sam, put it in the comments and I’ll ask on your behalf. I’ll send everyone a reminder beforehand.

The Zoom link is below the paywall (and if you’re not a subscriber already, doesn’t this rare opportunity to complain directly to one of Substack’s developers make you want to be?)

📌 🔜 Also, remember: Our inaugural symposium, with special guest Terry Glavin, is tomorrow, at 4:30 pm Paris time. If you haven’t managed to finish the reading but you’d still like to come, that’s fine—just let me know beforehand that I shouldn’t call on you. The Zoom link is also below the paywall.

If you’ll be joining, you might want to watch some of the speeches and panels from the Munich Security Conference. Journalists keep asking the attendees exactly the question we’ll be discussing: Is the postwar order over? Does Mark Carney have the right idea?

If you watch the conference and you hear a reply that strikes you as especially relevant, drop the link into the CG chat (with a timestamp) so we can all watch it before tomorrow.

Looking forward to seeing you!