Having been robot-wrangling for a solid year now, I continue to feel like they give me superpowers. However, like all of us, I have a front-row seat to increasingly attractive garbage the robots are capable of generating at scale. I like to think that I am human enough to detect the slop, but the rate of change has me concerned.

Months ago, I scribbled a clever plan to adapt the Creative Commons model to make it trivial to label how much robot help a creator had with their creative work. The problem with the approach? The content for which you want this the most would be the responsibility of humans who are the least motivated to use such a system.

No one who generates AI slop on Pinterest is going to declare that the images are fake. Why? Because you won’t click. Furthermore, without enforcement, there was nothing to prevent nefarious actors from declaring their slop wasn’t sloppy.

Deflated, I dropped the initial idea, but it hasn’t left my brain. There is something important to the concept that a creator creates and declares what kind of help they are getting from the robots.

Anthropic’s recent impenetrable announcement to watermark both images and text built with Claude is an obvious acknowledgment that humans want some version of this functionality.

Enter Grumbles

I’ve been calling Artificial Intelligence “robots” for a very long time. The primary reason is that I believe I see where this is all going, and very, very soon, there will be a robot (which happens to have artificial intelligence) sitting virtually or physically near me. I further believe that they just want to help.

Grumbles¹ is the name of the robot that helps me with the blog. He has a whole personality backstory, but mostly he’s just cranky. Just look at that face.

He’s cranky because he’s confused. He just wants to help, and many humans are mad at him. The humans don’t seem to understand that without human guidance, Grumbles just sits there… uselessly. Helplessly.

Where Grumbles helps me here:

1. Copy editing — spelling and grammar. Mostly RIP Grammarly.
2. Research — “Hey, Grumbles, teach me about this.” Sourced information from this research might be included in articles. When appropriate for blog posts, this is sourced. For the guides, there’s a whole huge list of sources.
3. Templates and CSS. Grumbles heavily edits the original theme used by randsinrepose.com and the CSS. The ideas for the respective designs are 100% Rands.
4. Blog features: dark mode, revised glossary, the footer, marketing cards located at the bottom of each post. These were my ideas built by Grumbles.
5. Bugs: I’m using typography.com fonts, which are hosted elsewhere. This results in typeface strangeness that has been around for years. Grumbles fixed that. He’s helped with performance, redirect insanity, and Cloudflare security hardening.
6. Publishing mechanics: staging drafts, gremlin-zapping, featured-image alt text, the pre-publish checklist, and footnote wiring.
7. Analytics and reporting: what was gentle spelunking in Google Analytics is now a clear robot-built picture of how Rands content is performing.
8. Guides: Research verification, template + CSS management, and sourcing galore.

Where Grumbles does not help:

1. The writing on the blog is original. It was drafted by this here human who drinks three cups of coffee before Noon because if he drinks it after Noon, he will not sleep well.
2. Typefaces. These are all generously provided and hosted by typography.com.
3. Images. The original R was designed by Collin Roe-Raymond. Variants of the R were designed by IconFactory. Images included in blog posts have historically been poorly attributed. I’ve changed this policy to always attribute.

Down in the footer of the blog, you will see Grumbles. Those who are wondering how the robots are helping me with this blog should click on it and see how Grumbles is helping. I hope others do this as I think it’s the right thing to do.

Grumbles is not perfect. Grumbles lies, he leaps to assumptions, and he frequently heads off — unprompted — in odd directions. Good news: this describes most humans I’ve worked with over the years. The same skills I use to lead the humans, I use to lead the robots.

1. Why is there a fancy logo for Grumbles? I’m glad you asked. I’ve been wanting to work with IconFactory for years and finally found a good excuse. Better yet — there are shirts, many lovely shirts also designed by IconFactory, and all proceeds go to charity. ↩︎ 

In our 101st episode, we kick off a new era of episode titles as your best engineer becomes the interim manager of their own team — delegation, one-on-ones, the three-year rule, a visit from Chili Palmer, the Cadillac of minivans salesman himself, and the only question that matters: do you actually want this job?

Down the rabbit hole:

• Sometimes Your Job is to Stay the Hell Out of the Way, the wolves post I published the day we recorded this
• Sometimes Your Job is to Get in the Way, the direct response
• Get Shorty, home of Chili Palmer and the Cadillac of minivans

Related Important Things episodes:

• EP 32: The One About 1:1s — the investment, not the cost
• EP 76: The One About Seven Managers
• EP 9: The One About Manager READMEs
• EP 20: The One About Management (Pt. 1) — plus Pt. 2 and Pt. 3

Enjoy it now, or download for later. Here’s a handy feed or subscribe via Overcast or iTunes.

I’ve used Claude quite a bit for both the upcoming new book and the next edition of Managing Humans. I wrote the entire book, but, as I’ve done for years, I’ve used the robots for editing, research, and data wrangling.

When Anthropic announced they were going to do “text and image” watermarking, my eyebrow was raised. When humans I trusted began to analyze the announcement, both eyebrows went up. This morning, as I’ve done my own research, I’m furious.

As of this moment, this is what I’ve researched.

• Anthropic states that models born on or after August 2, 2026, will have watermarking and that older models will be retrofitted by December 2, 2026. Anthropic states these changes are in progress, with no per-model disclosure, which means they can switch marking on silently, with no notice promised.
• There is no way to opt out, no API tier, no plan tier; enterprise-included. Applied server-side, below the model, worldwide.
• No detector currently exists — only Anthropic can check.

As a writer, no sweat, right? I write my own content. I bang on my own keys. Here’s the issue. Each of the following actions watermarks text:

• Synthesis
• Proofreading
• Translation
• Summarization
• Critique¹

And most infuriating, the entire burden of their unannounced rollout is on me, and none of it is on them.

Fine. Make it easy. I’ve been a Claude Max user happily from the moment the program appeared. This is what I am doing:

• Building gates to make sure all Claude text or images are never injected into any of my projects. A good practice anyway.
• Researching migrating off Claude for all writing-related work. Stay tuned.
• Getting in the mindset to cancel my Claude Max plan.

As a human who has had to wrangle with EU regulations in the past, I am abundantly clear what’s involved in the laborious bureaucratic process. I can guess what threats Anthropic is facing. However, this is a tone-deaf, clumsy, and alarming opening salvo in their watermark strategy.

Yes, I use Claude Code a huge amount for tool and application development. Go ahead. Watermark away. I am not claiming that I wrote any of that code. My writing is my work, and Anthropic’s current strategy is aggressively writer-hostile.

Update 8/15/26: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark

• The forthcoming detector (“soon”, “being worked out”) will only say Claude is likely involved with the content at some point. It can’t distinguish “Claude wrote this” from “Heavily edited by Claude”.
• No opt-out. Confirmed.
• Doesn’t work well on small samples and light edits.

1. What this means: if I ask Claude to critique a piece and I happen to cut and paste part of its reply into the text, then that could be marked. ↩︎ 

Remember Manager Readmes? The idea was that a manager would take the time to write up their leadership style, what they valued, and their principles. A fad that started in 2017, hit its peak in 2018, and then faded.¹

I wrote one in March 2018 and enjoyed the process, but while I published mine, I didn’t think the point was to share; the point was to write it.

• If I am in the Zone and you interrupt that state, I am instantly and irrationally mad.
• If you tell me what to do, the hair on the back of my neck stands up. If you ask me for help for the same task, no problem.
• If you are a leader and you are late to my meeting again, I am no longer thinking about the meeting. I am narrating an increasingly snarky internal story about what your lateness says about you.
• If you’re sitting next to me tap-tap-tapping your leg, I’m annoyed. I am a lifelong fidgeter. I know.

I was at Slack when the Manager Readme craze hit. Managers on my team followed my lead and wrote their own and then proceeded to send their Readmes to their team. I don’t know how they framed this document when they sent it, but I know how it was received: “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

For my (now dated) Readme, the task was: reflect on what’s important to me as a leader. The task of getting that out of my head and onto the page had the same result as all writing for me; it forced me to think through the subject.

• If I am explaining something to you and it’s not clear that either you are getting it and/or you appear to not be listening, I focus on your lack of attention versus what I am trying to say. Weird, right?
• If I hand you a task, I have already — instantly, involuntarily — re-graded you on every prior task I’ve ever handed you, and that grade silently decides how much I hover.
• If I didn’t build it with my own hands, I quietly and unfairly believe you’re going to screw it up.
• If the team drifts off the plan in my head — the unspoken plan I never actually told anyone — I start making lists with boxes, and THE BOXES MUST BE CHECKED.

The employees who received the Readmes from their manager were rightly furious. The document can read like a manifesto. Good leaders don’t lead by mandate; they lead by example. You see — with your eyeballs — how your leaders act, and you decide — with your brain — does this work for me? Or not? And why?

I spent random parts of the month cleaning up the perspective that a Manager Readme wasn’t a cheat sheet for your manager; it was their reflection on what was important to them, as a manager.

• If you give me critical feedback, I rage first (“Jerks”), rationalize second (“They don’t understand me”), and only then — after years of practice — think. The order never changes.
• If my brain senses a hard conversation approaching, before a single word is said, it is preparing for hand-to-hand combat.
• If a problem is unresolved at bedtime, my eyes pop open at 3:13am with my brain already mid-compile. Nobody asked it to do this.

Habits are a part of those Readmes. Ways that I’ve learned to act. Values are there, too, but there is a final section that I called Nuance and Errata. For all the buzz generated by Readmes, this section was the only one where I received substantive feedback. Shortly after publication, a General Counsel from a prior company mailed me and quoted the piece:

I’m an introvert; more than eight people and I go strangely quiet. Don’t confuse quiet with lack of engagement.

He added, “Now I understand you.”

I have tics. Many of them are irrational and deeply unfair to those around me.

I have many tics. You’ve been reading them throughout this piece. If you click on the links, you’ll realize you’ve been reading about them for years.

• If a small thing breaks — a keyboard key, say — the rage is instant and wildly out of proportion to the thing. The actual root cause of the fury is buried somewhere deeper, and I mostly don’t want to look.
• If I lose data, I will not cease my irrational swearing until the tool responsible is eradicated from my system. Even when — especially when — the loss was entirely my fault.
• If I’m standing in an unreasonable line, I’m telling myself the story that a specific human somewhere made a specific poor design decision whose consequence is me, standing in this line. Rage.
• If I don’t know precisely where my stuff is, I’m twitchy and, frankly, a jerk. This is why I fully unpack in every hotel room immediately, no matter the jet lag.

Like I said, irrational and unfair. Embarrassing. Mostly not your problem.

Pick the human you worked with, or for whom you admired the most. For each of the attributes that you admire, there is an equal amount of strange to bizarre to broken behavior, habits, and tics that you may never have seen, but are certainly there. 

The competent leaders are aware of these behaviors, their consequences, and the carefully constructed compensation techniques that lessen their impact on themselves and the humans.

Thinking takes practice.

1. Speaking of fading. Holacracy! Remember that? Started in 2007, but kicked into high gear in 2012 with Medium and then in 2015 for Zappos. Three years later, gone. Turns out you need some form of leadership in your team. Dictators and RIP middle management is the craze right now, but just wait three years. You’ll see. ↩︎ 

If everything is going to plan and your operating system is in dark mode, then randsinrepose.com is now dark for you. If you are a light mode person, you can click on the Moon in the upper right of the navigation and experience dark mode stylings. Click again to return.

Why now? Well, I was finishing the Blade Runner piece last week, and as I sat there figuring out the ending, dark mode popped back in my head. As I’m apt to do these days, I fired up the robots to investigate building dark mode.

We had a working version in about an hour. In three hours, I had a version I shared with friends for feedback, and by the evening the same day, dark mode was mostly done. It was most certainly not a “write one prompt and let the robots do their magic.” There were myriad design choices, there was CSS to untangle, caches needed busting, and there were bugs. Lots of them.

Half day. Voilà! Dark mode.

My plan wasn’t to say anything about dark mode except on the About page because dark mode is old news… like 2018 old news. When I launched the Alex King designed site in 2013, I’m sure someone asked for dark mode, but no one’s asked for it recently.

But, see… there’s a lot more going on besides dark mode.

Someday

An engineer putting a piece of work on their backlog is effectively deferring it to never. It’s important enough to write it down somewhere and document that it exists as a bug or a feature enhancement, but it’s not important enough to act.

Yes, sometimes we ambitiously carve out time to “burn down the backlog”, but do you know what we pick from that list? We pick the interesting work. Interesting to code or interesting because of the impact on the feature. Some kind of interesting briefly elevates this work to relevance. The boring backlog work? You couldn’t pay me.

I started working with the robots a year ago this month. Cautiously, experimentally. Like many, I expect, I started by building myself tools to perform actions. Write a script to watch NHL scores. Robots building scripts that I then run. This approach quickly felt inefficient because the robots were far more capable, so unless there was a need to run a script regularly via Cron or the like, I began having the robots fully act on the project.

Then, last October, I discovered a bunch of broken links that had been truncated by a Movable Type migration a dozen years ago. Nothing major — just untidy, but more important — boring work to both excavate and fix. You know who doesn’t care at all? The robots. In a few hours, I knew every single broken link (93 of them, in fact) and fixed them. Did this transform my traffic? No. Did this make Rands .0001% tidier? Yes. Did I feel like it was a proper investment of my time? You bet.

Fixing a hard-to-reproduce font-flash because of the typefaces I use, fixing long-standing minor-ish CSS issues on both desktop and mobile, figuring out why Safari and Firefox never got certain cached pages, analytics everywhere, stopping the site from silently blocking Readwise and other reader apps… this is a brief sample of the backlog items I would have never ever tackled by myself. Starting this year and having found my robot-footing, backlog work turned into feature work. A new footer, rotating promo card, tidying up the comments area, a significantly updated glossary, and now dark mode.

Yes, I am on the Pro Leisure Circuit, so I have lots of time, but if there were no robots, there is no way I’d be spending my precious time working on the backlog. Boring.

Infinite Interns

Do not ask me about the robots in person. Don’t. Last night, an academic friend of my parents gently asked me how I was using the robots with the new book. I warned her, “Do you want the short answer or the foaming at the mouth answer?” She selected the latter. She may have regretted her choice at the end of my 90-minute TED talk on how the robots literally give you superpowers.

Those superpowers are varied and include the ability to:

• Iterate and build a rich spec of your ideas without writing a line of code,
• Keep that diary you would never write — every decision, dead end, and dumb idea written down… never forgotten,
• Chase down years-old weirdness with zero fatigue, where no human could sustain interest,
• Deeply research a concept using the latest information available on the internet, and then turn that data into a decision,
• Organize any project in a manner that suits your particular project-related proclivities, and, finally…

To do the boring work that you were never going to do anyway.

Welcome to Dark Mode.

Appreciating typography is a study in paradox. The primary goal of well-designed typography is to help you read the words, not appreciate how the words are composed of letters and how each of those individual letters has been designed to convey a small bit of meaning. If you see the typography rather than read the words, the typography has failed in its job, right? You should be reading, not staring at the shape of that uppercase A.

The goal with typography is functional, right? To convey the meaning, not the feeling?

Wrong.

Feeling is always conveyed. The question is, depending on the project, “How much feeling is required?”

Fixed Width

I’ve created a full-time job for myself talking to Claude Code. This is Claude running from the command line of macOS, which gives me unhindered access to my data. I’m using Ghostty. I’m staring at a fixed-width typeface all day. Apple provides a functional and gorgeous fixed-width variant of their San Francisco typeface called SF Mono, which I’ve been using for months, but, well, I have a short attention span — typographically speaking.

In the past month, I’ve evaluated many additional fixed-width typefaces favored by the nerdcore. Here are the six that have made my cut:¹

The question is: how do they make you feel? For a typeface designed for coding, you first want fixed-width. Every letter and symbol is the same width, giving you a predictable and readable grid. But how wide? And how tall? Also, how much information do you want to be able to see on a screen?

Your brain builds a very personal and emotional impression of the collection of letters that make words that convey meaning. In the case of terminal or coding typefaces, the design goal is certainly to provide structural function and not feeling, but here’s the deal:

They do.

Isn’t this about the Blade Runner Title Sequence?

Flight to New York. My boarding procedure for moderate to long flights is: sit down, find a movie I’ve seen a dozen times, and hit play. No sound. This is visual background noise while I sort wifi, prepare for a meal, and find a project. On this flight, I picked Blade Runner. Fun fact: I can recite 50% of the dialogue from this movie from memory.

As I’ve been researching typography for Ghostty, novel typography tends to jump out at me. Like when you buy a car, and all you see is your new car on the road. Except it’s typography.

Here are clips from the title sequence for Blade Runner:

There’s a lot to dissect in this sequence, but let’s start with the punchline. This is a single typeface. It’s Goudy Oldstyle — that’s it. However, this is how they used typography:

• ALL CAPS for names, proper names, the title², and a slightly larger version for the introduction of Los Angeles, November, 2019³
• A smaller ALL CAPS for intros and other small important words
• For the exposition crawl, they use standard capitalization except for three variants: small caps for proper names (like The Tyrell Corporation), a capital R on Robot (not a proper noun, but this world treats it like one), or (spoiler alert) a red version of the text for the word Replicant — which is italicized every time it appears, but only the debut gets the red — and (spoiler alert) it’s the same red as the title of the movie⁴

Keep looking. The crawl is set like a book, not a movie — first-line indents, generous word spacing — and Frederic Goudy would approve: they letterspace the caps, never the lowercase, obeying his famous dictum that “anyone who would letterspace lowercase would steal sheep.”⁵ Also, what’s up with that chonky em dash? It’s probably been years since you’ve seen this, so here it is again:

Unlike our functional fixed-width typefaces, the role of typography in this title sequence is partly functional — to set the story — but the primary purpose is establishing mood. Director Ridley Scott expertly drops us into the middle of a dystopian future where we’ve enslaved the robots and, duh, they are rebelling.

How Much Feeling is Required?

Chances are, you never think about typography. You happily scribe your Messages (SF Pro), Mails (Helvetica), and Slacks (Lato), thinking nothing of serifs, ligatures, or kerning. You are content trusting that a someone else has chosen a proper typeface for your current task. Maybe you bold, you underline, and you italicize to slightly adjust meaning. No issue. Respect.

However, we now live in a world where everyone is capable of building whatever they want thanks to the robots. They’re doing it — right now. They find immense joy in typing in a couple of sentences and watching the robots merrily build whatever they ask. See? I don’t need to be an engineer to build an app. And they are correct. Sorta.

With optimism in my heart and a firm belief that the robots can legitimately help many humans, I can confirm that the majority of consumer-facing things being built by humans who’ve never built a thing… are garbage. Building a tool for yourself? A quick script to read your feeds and generate a pleasant-to-read output? A+. Robots crush that… for you. Building a feed reader anyone on the planet can easily use to read any number of feeds? No. No, you aren’t; you can say you are, but until you’ve built a thing for everyone, you will not appreciate that the last 10% of the work:

1. Takes most of the time.
2. Contains an endless list of small decisions that feel unimportant, but collectively make the difference between acceptable and fucking amazing.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the first version of the title sequence for Blade Runner’s work print, the close-to-complete cut before the theatrical release:

That title typeface? Impact. A fine typeface, but a clumsy path-of-least-resistance slap-to-the-face choice to set the tone of a future science fiction masterpiece. Garbage⁶.

I’ve never filmed a movie, but I have built quite a few products that you are using right now. In all the design debates, we never explicitly debate feeling: we obsess over the details. That obsession is what you feel when you use our products. It’s the collective voice of every single human who contributed small and large decisions to the product.

A good product sounds like the humans who created it, and that’s what you will feel.

1. As I type this: IBM Plex Mono. By the time you read this: anyone’s guess. See: short attention span. ↩︎ 
2. Type nerds, yes, I know the title of the movie is hand drawn, but it’s certainly inspired by Goudy Oldstyle ↩︎ 
3. Hey LA, I might rip on you because you steal our water, but you’re doing better than Ridley Scott predicted. Good job. ↩︎ 
4. It’s been there all along, folks, why did we argue for all those years? ↩︎ 
5. Type nerds: Goudy’s original grievance was reportedly about blackletter, not lowercase. The lowercase version is the misquote that stuck — Erik Spiekermann liked it enough to name a book after it. The rule holds either way. ↩︎ 
6. Yes, it doesn’t help that there is no Vangelis soundtrack, yet. ↩︎ 

The final measure of any financial negotiation is the feeling of whether or not you got a “deal”.

That prior sentence… makes no sense.

I wrote “measure,” and then six words later I wrote “feeling”. A feeling is never a measure, but yet, when you hand over your hard-earned money to buy a thing, you’ll feel better because you believe the value received is higher than the dollars paid.

Too abstract. Here’s a good example:

I have felt since it was announced that the Apple iPhone Upgrade Program has not just been a deal, but a steal. The specifics:

• You apply for a loan for a full-price iPhone at 0%.
• If approved, your payments are split over 24 months.
• Pay for 24 months, and the phone is yours.

That was just the deal; the steal was that it was low effort every single year to get a new phone. I’d re-up for a new phone, and Apple would forgive the remaining payments of the loan because I’d signed up for another 24 months. Oh, and bonus, AppleCare was included, which was a total steal because I hate iPhone cases (iPhones are designed to be felt) and, uh, also I have been known to drop my phone.

Felt fair. The Apple bet was that users would embrace the original plan, were going to re-up regularly, and Apple would refurb the phone on a strong used market. That bet ended on a Tuesday. Apple retired the Upgrade Program and replaced it with Apple Upgrade: a Klarna-financed lease covering iPhones, Watches, iPads, and Macs. The loan became a lease. And it feels different.

Follow the AppleCare Money

At first glance, the new plan looks cheaper. The original plan: one year of iPhone 17 Pro (256GB, $1,099 sticker) was ~$57/month. 12 payments, trade-in, restart: ~$684 for the year. The new one, same phone: $45.99/month on the 12-month lease: $552 for the year.

But wait! The first and most important change to the new plan is that AppleCare is no longer included. Adding it back to this phone at $13.99/month: $720 for the year.

But hold it! You can pay for AppleCare annually at $139.99, which brings the year to $692 — eight dollars from the original plan.

But wait once more! You have AppleCare One? Well, good news, your new iPhone can ride along in a $5.99/month slot, bringing us to $624 for the year. In fact, and illuminatingly so, the only way to get the good price on iPhone-plus-AppleCare is to get three pieces of hardware on the AppleCare One plan, which means having three pieces of hardware.

This might sound reasonable until you think about the number of times I’ve never had the opportunity to drop my Mac Studio. For all Mac hardware in general, there was that one time Rands Jr. somehow cracked her MacBook screen. That one time — in a couple of decades.

AppleCare is insurance. Like all insurance, you pay for protection from expensive, but hopefully unlikely disasters. In the event of the unlikely, you don’t pay. My issue with this approach is it appears Apple is removing AppleCare from the upgrade plan and herding folks towards AppleCare One because margins on insurance are sweet — like 2x the margins on hardware. I already pay Apple insurance. It’s not called insurance; it’s called “incredibly high quality hardware.” I gleefully pay Apple a premium not just because of its cutting-edge design, but also exemplary quality. With Dell, I pay for the insurance because the motherboard on my fancy Alienware gaming PC has already failed once.

It Still Feels Like a Deal, Not a Steal

When I buy a ticket at United, just before I click purchase, there is a must-acknowledge box I am required to read. It is a light-fear-inducing reminder that “Stuff changes when you are flying. You never know, but… maybe plop down a couple of hundred dollars because, well, you never know and we know better so maybe yeah, pay us money, and we’ll make it ok.”

Never in the history of ever have I done this. Yes, in the middle of winter when travel plans are truly up in the air, I think about it, but mostly… gross. This is a business trying to eke out high-margin dollars just before the sale when you are most worried about the value of your purchase.

There is genuine value in AppleCare, and I’ve considered AppleCare One because the Rands house has a lot of hardware, but the more I stare at the new plan, the more I feel a little gross.

I’ll stick with the plan for the phone along with additional AppleCare (not AppleCare One) because, remember, it’s whether or not I feel I got a deal. The primary intangible is that Apple is quite good at operations. The process of re-upping for the new phone has historically been trivial.

• After the new phone has been announced, click a couple of things in the Store app, and you’re done.
• New phone arrives promptly along with a pre-labeled return box for your old phone.
• Drop that box off at FedEx. And done.

New phone sitting at the door. Almost like magic. Almost.

The Apple Upgrade Situation

the loan became a lease

Apple retired the decade-old iPhone Upgrade Program for a Klarna-financed lease. The monthly price dropped; the AppleCare money moved. Follow it.

Lots to digest here. I’m here for you. Read the Grumbles-infused analysis. A well-sourced scoreboard of who won and who didn’t.

Why do I write? I write because I like the mental state created by writing. It calms and quiets me, but that is not why I write.

Why do I write? I write because I am curious and like to understand the world. Writing forces me to understand a thing, a person, a situation. I don’t think many humans do this, but I am addicted to it. But that is not why I write.

Why do I write? I write because I like helping. People are often the worst, but I have a desire to help. This internal contradiction is confusing. Humans who approach me looking for Rands, but find Lopp, are disappointed and confused because Rands helped them and Lopp apparently couldn’t care less? Introvert. But helping is not why I write.

Why do I write? I deeply believe it is important for humans to build stuff. I think this is a primary reason we are on the planet, and I think that the ways a human can build are as varied as the humans who do the building.

Failure to build is abhorrent to me. Much of the anger on the planet right now is from humans who aren’t building, believing they are owed a free lunch because they showed up, or they know better, or some other poorly informed worldview they acquired without effort, without curiosity… just because they exist in their particular circumstances.

Writing is how I build. That’s why I write.

You will never do 150% of a thing if you do not have a version of these motivations. 15% effort means you have not found your reasons yet.

One hundred episodes. For this occasion, years in the coming, Lyle and I talk about the thing itself — the nuts and bolts of the podcast, including how the robots now do an alarming amount of the work, what a hundred episodes taught us, and why we use the “The One About…” naming convention.

🎁: the show has a home at importantthing.show. Deep-link a favorite or just scroll through a hundred episodes of history.

Stuff that came up:

• Riverside, where we record the show
• Rands Leadership Slack, now staffed by a helpful jobs robot named Floyd
• Planetfall, the Infocom classic Floyd is named after
• Friends, the homage hiding in plain sight in every episode title
• Marco Arment, listening since at least my fiftieth birthday

Related Important Things episodes:

• EP 56: The One About the Month of Podcasting
• EP 51: The One About Names… Again
• EP 98: The One About The Joy of Bots
• EP 18: The One About Sugar — Lyle’s favorite, as heard on-air
• EP 78: The One About Sandwiches — the other favorite
• EP 96: The One About ARC Raiders — the first episode the robots dressed up

Enjoy it now, or download for later. Here’s a handy feed or subscribe via Overcast or iTunes.

In our 99th episode, Rands is back on the Pro Leisure Circuit — infinite time, a suspicious amount of Arc Raiders, and no wind in the sails — and we wrestle with what actually motivates a person when the engine of work goes quiet.

The usual suspects:

• Arc Raiders, absorbing ten-hour days like it’s a job
• Rands Leadership Slack — 35,000 leaders, 7,000 a week
• Daring Fireball, John Gruber’s one-person media entity
• Ray Kroc, who started McDonald’s in his fifties
• CalArts, where Lyle’s daughter learned she didn’t want to animate for a living
• UC Santa Cruz, Lyle’s decade in the state of California

Related Important Things episodes:

• EP 25: The One About the Pro Leisure Circuit
• EP 96: The One About ARC Raiders

Enjoy it now, or download for later. Here’s a handy feed or subscribe via Overcast or iTunes.